Three Plus Two

Hummingbird Festival

 A few weeks ago we attended the Hummingbird Migration Celebration at the Strawberry Plains Audobon Center.  Considering the hype surrounding this festival, we had high hopes.  Unfortunately, we ended up disappointed and somewhat wiser: there were too many people at the festival to actually be able to see birds.  Next year, we'll avoid the festival and drive down on a weekday to watch the hummingbird migration sans hoopla.

It also rained -- poured -- which meant that people crowded into the few tents, with little respect for those who hadn't seen birds or for four year olds.  If we were disappointed by crowds and expense and the woman at the gate who refused to give us the 12 seater van discount because we weren't a "group"... Katydid was very, very frustrated.   She got to see exactly one hummingbird -- a male ruby-throated that was being banded.

Tiny birds -- the bands are so small I'm not sure how he was able to manuever them so well.

One surprise of the day: we got to see a Mississippi Kite up close.

But most of us felt like this by the end of the day.

Month in Review: August into September

What we did was mostly move 1000 miles. 

In a van that looked like this.

From this place...

To this place...

(Some of us are getting back to normal.  As you can see.)

Unpacking has taken up the bulk of the past few weeks.  But we've also been painting...

(When I say "we", I mean Andy, Katydid, Gareth, and Grandma.  My only contribution was to make friends at the Sherwin Williams store.)

Katydid also painted two small bookcases, all by herself.  One of them moved into the bay window in the dining area, otherwise known as "where we do school".  (Since we also eat there AND since it's part  of the kitchen, it really can't be called a school room.)

Here's a before picture:

(No Photoshop on this computer and the powercord to my laptop remains MIA, so I have to apologize for the lack of editing here.)

This space is considerably fuller now, but still not organized enough to merit an "after" picture.  More like a "middle" picture.  We've had to rethink our plans for several of the spaces in the house, actually.  First there was the problem of where to put everybody to sleep.  (Thought we had that one solved, but one of the kids who was upstairs has migrated downstairs again and is sleeping on a sleeping bag.)  Then we had to figure out what to do with the giant room upstairs in the finished attic.  Should we make it a school room or a play room?  Since it was off the beaten path and the twins need somewhere to run and around like lunatics roughly thirty seconds after they open their eyes in the morning, we opted for play room.  Thus, the school/dining area you see in the "before" picture.

Really, what I had wanted to do was make our front room (the room being painted yellow in the picture toward the top) into a school room.  But several people gave me odd looks when I voiced this opinion, as it is supposed to be our living room.  But then we discovered that we couldn't hook up satellite to a TV downstairs because whoever the drunk insane handy person was who designed my kitchen also put all the wires upstairs underneath the floor, so the old cable wires (of which we must 500, considering the number of cable outlets in EVERY SINGLE ROOM) could not be changed for new ones without tearing up the floor.  Therefore, the TV went upstairs in the playroom, and the front room was (or is being) turned into a "library".

This still leaves me with the problem that all the Legos are upstairs to get them away from the baby, but now so is the TV, so where do we put the Legos? 

(If you have many boys, you will recognize this as a SERIOUS problem.)

Anyway, it looks like a box factory exploded downstairs and I still haven't figured out my email address or memorized my phone number, but we have started school again after a fashion (mostly in self-defense, as the twins were driving me nutty), and I will be doing a wrap-up of our first two weeks the next time I am allowed 15 minutes on the computer.  For now I just want to post some of Katydid's bird pictures, as figuring out our bird population was a major part of our first weeks here.

We had a pair of Mississippi kites, but I think they have migrated away now.

We have had many hummingbirds migrate through, too, including one Katydid couldn't identify.  But I don't think I've downloaded that picture yet.

And we had a pair of bluebirds nesting in our mailbox.  Their three babies have fledged now.

(We couldn't get a good picture of the babies because we didn't want to scare them with the flash.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week in Review: May 24-31... More Nature Study

Officially, this week was our last week of school.  What this really means is, this is the last week I'm going to make anyone do math or Latin until sometime in July. 

I imagine that the nature study, building, etc. will only continue.

Katydid giving the boys an impromptu class on caterpillars.

We seem to have more butterflies and moths than usual this year, and a really large variety of caterpillars.  Of course, there are the ever present Eastern tent caterpillars:

 

(Katydid took both photos.  She especially liked this close-up.)

We also found two moths we can't identify.

 

This moth is large -- maybe 3 inches long? 

 

A much smaller moth, which we think probably belongs in the tiger moth family given its coloring... but we haven't been able to figure out the actual species. 

(Katydid took both these pictures, too.)

 

Another Katydid picture of a caterpillar... a Black Swallowtail.  We found this one on a parsley plant at the farm where we buy our vegetable plants and flowers every spring.  Since we're moving this year, I resisted the urge to buy any tomato plants, but I did rationalize the parsley by saying I could put it in a pot and take it with me.  The caterpillar was just a bonus science project.

 

Katydid planted all the flowers for me when we got home.

We had a brief incident with the chickadee nest, so no pictures this week... Katydid opened the nest box and two of the fledglings fell out.  She had to pick them up and put them back in the nest box.  "They're the lightest things in the world!" she said.  We do hope they're all right. 

The tree swallow nest also has eggs in it, but the tree swallows are a little more anxious about intruders than the chickadees are.

However, Katydid made an exciting sighting of a pileated woodpecker right outside her window.  Maybe that will make up for the lack of nest pictures.

 

In addition to all the hands-on nature study, we did manage to wrap up our history for the year by reading the John Lackland chapters in Our Island Story, watching Becket (the 1964 movie about Henry II and Thomas Becket starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton), and using some of the Story of the World vol. 2 activity sheets I found when I was packing boxes.

 

Farmerboy started working on a coat of arms, which he drew on a shield template included in the activity sheets.

Gareth and Farmerboy both colored a panel from the Bayeux Tapestry, also included in the activity sheets.  This panel is Farmerboy's, which he worked very hard on.

Gareth marched with the Boy Scouts in the Memorial Day parade, Chipmunk came down with a stomach virus, and Farmerboy worked more on his stone wall, especially after we discovered a pamphlet at Agway describing how to build stone walls.  We stood in the store and examined all the diagrams for building a dry stack wall (which is what Farmerboy is building.)  Since we're trying to save money right now (more on that shortly), I didn't buy the pamphlet, which meant that the next day Farmerboy was rather disgusted with me because he wanted to refer to those diagrams, especially after he knocked his wall down so he could dig the foundation V-shaped trench.

The reason we're saving money?

We just bought a house.  In northern Mississippi.  

Now we're taking deep breaths and packing A LOT of boxes.

Week in Review: May 17-23, Stone walls and Birds

Spring has arrived in upstate New York.  Beautiful temperatures and only one day of rain, so we took most of our learning outside.

 

Maybe it doesn't count as "learning", but the little boys are a lot happier that they can spend most of the day outside!

Farmerboy did a lot of practical work this week.  He informed his father that he wanted to practice driving nails, so Andy gave him a hammer and told him to pound all the loose nails popping up in the deck.  (Katydid joined him.)  He also helped Andy weed flower beds and edge one of them with a bunch of big rocks.

Rocks and fossils, in fact, have made a comeback in terms of interest -- largely because Farmerboy decided that he needed a stone wall to hide behind when he and Gareth play war.

 

Katydid was taken with the idea of a stone wall, too, so she helped.

 

They cleaned the rocks out of the asparagus bed.  (Completely off the subject here, but my asparagus is dying and I don't know why.  Even though we are moving away, this bugs me.)

After they got to a certain point on the wall, Katydid decided she wanted to build her own house, so she went up on top of the field and raided the rubble pile the former owners built to block snowmobiles from coming across their (our) land.  This pile is full of bricks, which she used to build the foundation of a little house.  When told of this project, I said, "Oh, like Roxaboxen." 

Then they decided to build a village.

Except that took too long (apparently).  And Farmerboy wasn't satisfied with the state of his stone wall, which wasn't very stable due to the irregularities of the rocks they'd use.  He and Katydid decided to use some more of the bricks they'd found in the woods instead of rocks.

 

 

(The sticks set in the slits in the wall are guns, I think.  This wall is meant to be defensive.)

The current problem (as told me by Farmerboy) is that the wall is too low, so I'm curious to see how much interest Farmerboy will have in working on that problem this week. 

Why do I consider stone wall-building "school" for my 1st grader?  Well... in addition to providing experience in team work, perseverance, problem solving, and spatial skills... I think of something that Maria Montessori said.  I'll have to paraphrase since I don't have the quote right in front of me, but the general idea is this: "Why do we call it 'work' when we see a man building a brick wall, but 'play' when it is a little man building a wall with tiny bricks?"

In moving all those rocks, Farmerboy revived his interest in fossils as well.  He got out his rock hammer and safety goggles and spent a few afternoons in the garden, breaking up rocks.

 

We also read a few rock-related picture books:

• The Pebble in my Pocket: A History of Our Earth 
• The Big Rock (Aladdin Picture Books)
• How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World

And we talked about erosion.  Often.  Farmerboy kept encountering odd holes in rocks and making theories about what caused them.  (Maybe water.  Or maybe sea worms.)

I picked up a few stone wall-related books to use next week (mostly on the basis of those Publisher's Weekly blurbs on amazon):

• Stone Wall Secrets
• Matthew Wheelock's Wall
• Talking Walls

But in retrospect, I think that maybe I should have picked up more books on erosion. 

The little boys sometimes helped with the stone wall, but they were mostly more interested in collecting tent caterpillars and stag beetles and observing all the ants underneath the rocks Katydid and Farmerboy flipped over and climbing trees.

 

And also building "huts".

But birds remained somewhat interesting to the rest of the boys, mostly because...

We have baby birds!  The chickadee's eggs hatched.

And the elusive Baltimore Oriole ran Katydid a merry chase trying to get a picture.

She did finally confirm a sighting, though. 

But she forgot the camera (and her binoculars) when she and Andy went on the annual Early Morning Bird Walk at the arboretum.  When they came home, they immediately downloaded iBird, which one of the other birders on the walk had apparently demonstrated.  Katydid has been fooling around with it all weekend. 

Where was Gareth during all of this?

Reading Sword of Clontarf mostly.  But he did spend quite a while with his new Ancient Greek textbooks on Friday afternoon, as soon as they arrived.  He couldn't wait until next school year.

We finished up the week with a May Procession at the Little Sisters of the Poor, where Katydid was made an official Marian Aide volunteer.  I have pictures... I think... but since the camera is still out in the car, it will have to be a separate post.  Katydid was very happy to receive her apron and T-shirt, and the boys were glad to get refreshments.  The nuns forced them to cake, brownies, AND ice cream, so a good time was had by all.

Week in Review: May 2- May 9, or All About Birds

Bird Week!

The chickadee nest in our bluebird box, with eggs (photo by Katydid)

I had nothing to do with the "theme" of this week.  It was a force of nature.  Farmerboy, Pip, and Pop all suddenly decided that birds were fascinating and wanted to tag along on all Katydid's nature walks, keep their own nature journals, listen to bird call CDs, and color bird notebook pages.

Pip's cardinal page

So of course I was happy to oblige.

A chipping sparrow that the kids saw on one of their walks (photo by Katydid)

The kids also took a "night" nature walk (really, dusk) along the edge of the treeline in the field to listen for night birds.  Pip and Pop started out with Katydid and Farmerboy, but soon decided that it was "too scary" and came home for ice cream.  Katydid and Farmerboy came in later and reported that the only night bird they'd heard was a screech owl, but that was apparently exciting enough.

Other birds Katydid listed as "heard but not seen" this week: ovenbird and American woodcock (very exciting).

One morning a bird hit the dining room window while I was eating breakfast.  This in itself is not an odd occurrence -- even though I put things up in the window to make it look less like a fly-through.  But when I got up to see if the bird was all right, I saw a bird I'd never seen before.

A common yellowthroat.  And for a size comparison:

Yes, that's a Duplo brick someone left outside on the patio.  Tiny, tiny little bird.  The little boys all drew it for their nature journals, then colored a coloring page of the bird. 

The same day we read the section about Baltimore Orioles from The Handbook of Nature Study because...

... the crabapples and wild apple trees are blooming.  (Photo by Katydid)  The orioles always come back when the apple trees bloom.  Katydid informs me that she has heard an oriole, but we haven't seen one yet.

My personal favorite part about the crabapple in bloom (apart from the fragrance, which is phenomenal) is standing beneath it and listening to the steady hum of honeybees working the blossoms overhead.

Wild apple blossoms in the woods (Photo by Katydid)

We did a little math this week, and we read more of Our Island Story, and Gareth continued to read 1066: The Year of the Conquest instead of being interested in birds, and Katydid worked on about three different books that she's writing, and I sorted through all my writing and was pleasantly surprised to find that even though I have produced very little over the past five years, some of it is Not Too Bad, and by the weekend, all the kids had developed another cold with a wicked cough, and Sunday morning we woke up to find a dusting of snow on the ground when we had spent all our time before thinking about birds and eggs and flowers. 

But mostly this week was about spring time.  And our spring time girl...

... turned 11!  Happy Birthday, Katydid!

A Week in the Life: Saturday 5/1

All photos in this post by Katydid.

This Saturday was a little different because Andy was still out of town and didn't get home until late that night.  But on the other hand it was fairly typical in that the line between "school" and "life" gets blurred even on the weekend.

This is my third attempt to write this post (my first two attempts were eaten by Typepad), so it's going to be a little less detailed than some of the other posts.

Basically:

With swim lessons done for the season, our Saturdays are a lot less hectic.  This morning we did our normal chores and then headed outside to enjoy the beautiful WARM weather for a while before we left for Katydid's violin lesson.  We noted that the crabapple trees had burst into bloom overnight:

 

And that the yard was now full of dandelions, which the boys enjoyed decapitating (way too much):

 

Then we brought Katydid to her violin lesson.  She's practicing for her recital at the beginning of June, and has chosen to play two hymns from her traditional Catholic hymnal.  While she is at her lesson, the boys and I run a couple of quick errands and then we go through the McDonald's drive-thru for lunch.

Back home, we pile out of the van and spend a couple more hours outside.  Katydid immediately grabs her nature journal, binoculars, and the camera.  The little boys alternately climb around in the woods looking for fortresses and follow Katydid on her nature observations.

One of the first things she does is to check out the bluebird boxes, because the boys and I discovered nesting materials in both of them the other day.  It turns out that a chickadee is using at least one of them.

(Note: as of a few days later, she counted six tiny eggs in this nest.)

Later on she takes the camera out to the outer garage and manages an extreme close-up of the Eastern Phoebe nest in the rafters:

 

Because the camera was so close, the eggs look more like our bantam chicken eggs, so at first we were all a little confused.  But then Katydid explained how close this shot was, and we realized that the eggs look a lot larger in the photo than they are in real life.

Considering that we started the week off with rain and sleet, we are more than happy to spend as much time outside as we possibly can.  I make an easy puff pancake for a late dinner, and we somehow escape Andy's trip without our own trip to the ER... although the evening did not pass by without a big wagon accident, in which a 13 year old learned that he is capable of pulling a kid's wagon far faster than is probably good for 4 year olds, even if they really like it. 

We finish up the day by all crowding onto the couch to watch Doctor Who, because well -- daleks!  Winston Churchill!  Spitfires attacking space ships! What could be cooler, I ask you?

And now that you know we are a family of TOTAL geeks, our week in the life is done.

Busy, but there are always birds

Writing quarterly reports.  Thinking about junior high/high school.  Entering a whole lot of data into Homeschool Tracker Plus, which I missed when I was sick.  Dressing small people up in enormous amounts of clothing so they can play outside in the snow.  (This needs its own time slot in the schedule each day.) Wrestling a certain two year old to sleep every night.  Finally stealing some time to read Wuthering Heights, which my husband calls "that book with the moors". Gearing up for a busier February.

I'll just leave you with a Katydid picture from our feeders.  Because there is always time to watch birds.

 

A Visitor

I was wrapping a present on the dining room table today when I looked up and saw this in our birch tree:

A red-tailed hawk.  We lost a chicken yesterday in  broad daylight.  Now maybe we know what did it.

Our winter birds are back

Well, I guess technically except for the juncos they never left.  But for some reason they all seemed to be out in the yard today at the same time.

Sitting here trying to get Chipmunk back to sleep I saw...

• 2 tufted titmice
• 1 hairy woodpecker
• 2 downy woodpeckers, male and female
• 1 red-breasted nuthatch
• 1 blue jay
• 2 cardinals, male and female

All kind of hanging around together. Earlier today, Katydid saw a pileated woodpecker in the woods behind the house and nearly broke her leg and my laptop in her haste to get the camera and get outside for a picture.  She tripped over the power cord, and both she and the laptop went sailing to the floor.  Neither were damaged, thank goodness.

I suppose this is a sign that we're late in stocking our feeders.  Project Feederwatch starts next month; Katydid has cleaned the feeders and we have a 20 lb. bag of black oil sunflower seeds sitting in the back of the van, awaiting a squirrel proof container.  A little red squirrel who lives in our woodpile gnawed a hole in the plastic can we used to keep it in, and had herself a very well-fed summer.  Every time we walked into the little sheltered area on the outside of our garage where we keep wood, straw for the chickens, and chicken feed in big metal trash cans, we got a good scolding.  Funny how the animals think they own the place after a while.  Whenever I walk into my garden a chorus of crows starts squawking at me as I'm the trespasser. Not to mention Tom Turkey, who does not approve of little boys who run around yelling at the top of their lungs and waving sticks.

Country Diary: Poultry Farmers

Weather: A front is approaching and it's supposed to rain for the next three or four days.  Temperatures will remain in the low to mid 60's because of the rain, but will hopefully rise into the 70's this weekend.   In spite of the fact that we've had a lot of rain recently, the ground seems bone dry.  The little boys come in every night covered in a layer of dust that builds up in the bottom of the bathtub. 

In bloom: Those darn peonies are STILL not blooming.  Pip and Pop have been picking the buds to give to me.  If they take any longer to become flowers, there just aren't going to be flowers, period. Our cinquefoil bush erupted into flower today, though, and the rose bush's buds are swelling.  The irises are in full bloom, and I am thinking that I might need to divide them this year.

Oh, and the wild strawberries that dot the lawn are just about ripe!

Birds: I left a cardboard box from a plant delivery on the outside table, and a wren has been filling it with sticks.  I had seen (and heard) the wren perched on the chair next to the table, but Katydid (of course) was the one who had seen it bringing sticks.  I peeked in the box today and sure enough, the corner of the box is full of twigs.  I was confused because it wasn't a nest, per se, and Katydid told me that wrens often fill a spot they want to use next nesting season with sticks to prevent other birds from nesting in it. Considering the fact that the wrens also destroy the young of other species so they can take over their nests, I find that rather uppity.  But I still like to hear the wrens sing.

 

A phoebe is nesting in the eaves of the outer garage and every time we open the door to check on the chicks and turkeys, it buzzes us.  Scares me half to death, even when I'm expecting it.

Wildlife: None to report but mice in the house. I caught one of them last week, but another has already taken its place.  Ah, the joys of life in the country.  Usually we don't see any this time of year, though, so I wonder what's going on. 

In the garden:  None of the corn we planted came up.  Zero.  We think the crows got it.  This weekend we scrambled out to buy new corn seed to replant.  Replanting is a big deal in this climate; we went ahead and planted Kandy Korn again (our favorite), but with 89 days to harvest... we're pushing first frost here.

On the positive side: the little boys pulled the rest of the radishes for me, and I was able to positively ID which radishes Pip had actually planted.  French Breakfast.  So we can plant them again.  The spinach and lettuce are now big enough that we can make salad from the thinnings, and my tiny little tomato plants are just getting blossoms.

In the barnyard: Otherwise known as "the outer garage". Last Wednesday, the kids and I were called to the post office to pick up 50+ chicks.  One of the Ameracaunas died en route -- it was in the corner and looked as if it had probably been suffocated -- and two of the Delawares (which we will be raising for meat and eggs) died in the first few days.  But overall, chickens are definitely hardier than turkeys. (We lost yet another turkey last week, bringing our count down to 9, and one of those has a leg problem.)  All 10 of Katydid's bantams made it through all right, though.  She took pictures on the first day:

We ordered 30 meat chickens (Delaware, White Rock -- the little yellow fuzzballs) and 12 layers (Speckled Sussex, Ameracauna -- the "Easter Egg" chicken, and Black Jersey Giant).

Black and Barred Old English bantams.

A closer look at the bantams, which were really teeny-tiny a week ago.

Speckled Sussex...

Black Jersey Giant...

Ameracauna...

One of the few remaining Blue Slate turkeys...

This is a Naragansett turkey, which seem to be far hardier than the Blue Slates and Bourbon Reds. We've only lost one of them, but we've lost three of each of the other kinds.

Here are the turkeys all together.  They've still got a few weeks left in the brooder.

Of course, I'm not telling the whole story.  Andy was out of town when the chicks arrived,  and we couldn't get the heat lamps set up right (they were the clamp-on kind, but kept falling off... not exactly fire-safe... so we had to hang them), and it got cold that night, and that was the reason another turkey died.  Fortunately, there is Katydid.  She has really been doing most of the chicken care.  Andy and I check to make sure everything is okay, and we fiddle with the heat lamps, but Katydid does most of the work.  (And those first couple days, it was a lot of work!)

Around the house:

So much cleaning needs to be done, especially since our Little Flowers/Blue Knights group is gathering here this coming weekend to help work in a garden we're growing for the Little Sisters of the Poor. I did manage to put my file crate back together, though, so at least we can eat on the dining room table now.

What I'm Reading: Lots of rural-related magazines: Hobby Farm Home, Hobby Farm, Backyard Poultry, Acres USA.  We went to Tractor Supply this weekend.  That's my only explanation.