Cecropia Moth

Lydia went outside early this morning and promptly returned, urging me to come see what she had discovered. Only about a foot from our door, resting on the railing, was this beautiful Cecropia.

Moms should never, ever get mono.

It is just way unfair to be this wiped out and try to take care of 3 kids. We've been listening to audio books, and Lydia has really taken off with her desire to read. Maybe it has something to do with mom being way too tired and coughing too much to read aloud. At any rate, my mom had bought her the whole set of A-Z Mysteries a few months ago, and she never touched them, except for the first one. In the past week she's picked them up and is now on book 'R', The Runaway Racehorse. Some days she goes through 4 of them. I'm just really happy that she's finally doing it on her own, because I know it will help her fluency and confidence tremendously. They're no great literature, but they are fun, and I like that the main characters are boys and a girl who are just friends and they are kind to their siblings, polite to adults, and cooperative with each other. I have read all the books up through 'Q' and have found nothing objectionable. Just good clean fun. Lydia loves them. Now I need to think on what to introduce her to when she's through them. The author, Ron Roy, has a set of books called the Capital Mysteries, set in Washington, D.C. He wrote them after the A-Z Mysteries, so I'm hoping they might be a little harder reading level. I need to check them out.

The audio books we've listened to are Five Children And It, and Nine Unlikely Tales for Children, both by the wonderful E. Nesbit, and The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes. The first two are free on Librivox.

A little hike at the VIC

On April 23rd we met up with some friends at the VIC for a little hike and picnic lunch. That was the day I first noticed a pain in my left side, and I've been pretty much out of commission since then with Mono. Evidently the left side pain is due to the inflammation of the spleen. I thought I had better at least do a short blog entry about the hiking, before I forgot about it!

A beaver dam we saw:

The perspective in this photo cracks me up:

Isaiah didn't make it into any of the pics, since he was on my back most of the time.

That Friday was also the day our Teaching Textbooks Math 4 came, and I am so, so glad I ordered it! What a night and day difference in Lydia's attitude toward doing math. I actually think a lot of her resistance comes from doing the writing part of the math work. With TT she is completing the lessons so quickly. And she's been able to do it even though I've been sick. I'm really glad I didn't wait until Fall to order, as it seems like such a perfect fit for her.

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.

So you thought you could do it all...

Wow, this post from Kendra came at just the right time in my life!
No, I can't do it all. Not even close to what I'd like to be able to do. Parenting three kids is much, much harder than I thought it would be, and instead of a tiny newborn, one month ago we brought home a kid who is now an extremely active 12 month old. Something's gotta give! Trying to convince myself it's OKAY if I don't plant a vegetable garden this year. It's OKAY if the dirty dishes sit out, or if it takes a little longer to get the laundry done. It's not okay to let my relationships with my kids and husband take a back burner, so for now the house can be a sty and we can buy veggies at the farmer's market this summer. I keep reminding myself it's a season of my life that won't last forever... but my relationships with my family have eternity written all over them.

Spring Tree Observations

The first study in the Spring Nature Study from Harmony Arts Mom is Spring Tree Observations. We decided to keep studying the maple tree, since it is really going through some fascinating changes right now, and it is the dominant tree species in our yard. In just a few short days the tiny red buds have begun to open, the maple's own fireworks display! It seems perhaps that the tiny red 'seeds' we saw when we dissected the bud were actually the covering of the flower calyx, and that they drop off as the flower opens. Our trees leaves have not developed yet, so we did a bark rubbing instead.

The view up into the canopy of our maple:

Not only are they fun to climb, maples are especially good for hanging up a rope swing!

It was too cloudy to measure the height of our tree today, and it looks like we're in for a rainy, cloudy week, so we'll probably revisit the notebooking page sometime next week and complete the rest of the information on it then.

Under the canopy of this maple grow the sweet little Spring Beauty flowers, some of the first wildflowers we see in our northern NY yard. If you look closely perhaps you can see the mottled leaves of the Dogtooth Violet, which will bloom a little later in the same spot.

 

The Tamarack out by the chicken house is just beginning to put out needles.