Confession:

Not a lot of formal schoolish things have been going on here. The kids have had an overnight at Grandmas, the public schools are on vacation so yesterday we visited Grammy, and today we hope to get together with some little homeschooling friends whose mom is a PS teacher and also has this week off. What has been going on, is lots and lots of playing outside. Which is just fantastic, because I have really seen L & L's relationship grow closer when they can play off by themselves a bit with Isaiah out of the picture. The novelty of having a new baby brother is wearing off a bit for Lydia. She no longer feels the need to be near or with him every waking moment. So, I'm letting a little relationship repairing happen. Levi was having a pretty hard time adjusting, and was VERY out of sorts for the first month. I'm more than happy to let the two of them go off and play by themselves, and it seems to me that they are playing together even better than they did before we added a third child. Part of that is Levi getting older and a little less destructive (just a little). Just this week the book Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends arrived, and I'm eager to crack it open. My hope is to give them the foundation they need to build a lifelong friendship.

 Above are flowers that come up each spring in one of the flower beds. I've always thought they were a cultivated flower, but a post over at Sage Parnassus has me wondering if they're some sort of wild Squill. Our house was built in the mid to late 1800's by the Patten family. We're the first non-Pattens to live in it. When we moved in the flowers were mostly overgrown, and most of what was here was native wildflowers, ferns, lilacs. But I've never seen this plant growing wild, so I'd always assumed it was purchased.

The daffodils below are actually double daffodils, and were here when we moved in, but there was a row of cedar trees directly behind this bed that we ripped out, and it was terribly overgrown. The daffs never bloomed until we started yanking things out. Now they've spread and multiplied like crazy and I need to dig some up and move them back out of the lawn.

Below is a photo of our house in 1889. I love this picture!

And finally, I visited my favorite used bookstore this week and scored a pile of gems, all for $35.