Birds and Elk and Husbands Oh my!

The bird feeder is an amazing success. The kids are LOVING it, the birds are loving it and the husband is engaged. We printed out the pdf book from Seattle Audobon and the children are using the field guide to (correctly) identify what they're seeing. Black capped chicadee, Steller's Jay, Spotted Towhee and Song sparrow are the most frequent visitors. They've gone through 2 pounds of sunflower seed in 24 hours.

G has been inspired to pull out the zoobooks library and has now found the ornithology magazine and is absorbing that. In the meantime, P and N were looking through the rest of them. P brought me a picture and said, "are these the deer you saw on nikirj's street?" and indeed they were...I'd seen a herd of ELK.

I am so not in SC anymore!

Yesterday I installed some natural light bulbs. It helped with my mood a bit, but the glaring sunshine today has gone a LONG way towards lifting me up.

Yesterday while we were at Home Depot buying the bulbs, we spied some birdfeeders. They were very inexpensive so we snagged two and Voila! instant homeschool project for today.

We got a feed sock like this one http://www.bestnest.com/bestnest/img_p/WLA-S-10015-APP2_200x400.jpg and a tube feeder. We're going to discuss which bird feed we bought (thistle, sunflower seeds) attract which kinds of birds, placement of the feeders, and the anatomy of a bird. I am using zoobooks as source material and coloring pages from enchanted learning as action materials.

Homeschool budgeting just doesn't get any finer than that. For less than ten dollars, we have lessons for the day and enrichment for home and education for the rest of the YEAR.

Looks like this may be the week we get it allll unpacked. We have both been focused on purging the useless, cumbersome and out dated. I have joined an online challenge to rid the home of 500 items in January (post taking down Christmas decorations) and we've been slogging it out. I think husband gets frustrated seeing the garage but if we got the stuff out that's scheduled to get OUT, then he would be a m a z e d.

Overall, we had a sunny day yesterday after 26 days of straight all day rain. I felt like I was in the movie Groundhog day. From dawn to dusk, it remained the same 46-degree, blue-gray cloudy light, raining day. The only difference came at dark when it was the same 46-degree, DARK raining night. So yesterday we spent a great amount of time OUTSIDE.

We also found a church we may enjoy. Choir rehearsal is tonight, so I will see how that goes.

I didn't do it to YOU!

"Nicholas...do NOT pull the baby's hair!!!!" said I.

---

"I didn't do it to YOU!" he replied, surprised.

Dirty Boy

ok so tonight, N passed out at his usual bedtime. ~G~, who had gotten weirded out by Harry Potter, lay down with D-babyin our bed, who has a hard time falling asleep without P-Daddy (who is out of town).

I go in there after a while to check on them. Since ~G~ has magic D-baby powers, I assume I will see sleeping angels. She is under the covers, fast asleep while D-baby is nodding off, standing up at the side of the bed..... covered in dirt he'd been eating from my potted plant.

He outlasted her.

Le sigh.

My boxes

WOOOOOOOOOT

For years, it was just get it labelled. I was satisfied because I had a ginormous garage. But now it's consolidate. woot woot. Keep it neat, keep it clean, minimize.

We bought two large sterilite tubs from Target on their day-after Christmas sale, and from Michael's we purchase a gift-wrap holder and an ornament holder.

Because of these purchases, we got rid of NINE smaller cardboard boxes and a LOT of ornament-holding boxes.

It fee;s good to get rid of that stuff and have only four, contained holiday boxes. It's all green and red so we know without even thinking where it is. I am so happy.

HAAAAAPPPYYYY



BUH BYE BOXES.