Redundant Combustibles

Good thing we didn't buy any of the other firewood that was for sale in this town. It didn't come with Steve's guarantee.

Northwest Bounty

Today we picked the season's first cherries at an orchard only about a mile from our house. The raspberries and blueberries are ripening in our yard. (We've already eaten most of the strawberries.) The wild blackberries will be ripe in about a month. Apples and pears will follow in the fall.

I love living here.

Entymology 101: Study in Butterflies

After receiving a Butterfly Pavilion from some of our friends who are clearly interested in the entymological education of our children, we took the first step towards obtaining butterflies of our very own: we sent away for caterpillars.

A few weeks later they arrived in two cups. There were five caterpillars in each cup, which had "caterpillar food" on the bottom of the cups. After a week or two, the caterpillars made their way to the top of the cups, hung upside-down from the lids, and spun cocoons.

Once the chrysalids, or cocoons, were safely established, we took the lids off the cups and pinned them to the inside top of the Butterfly Pavilion. (You can see the two white round lids at the top of the photo below.) One new thing we learned is that the caterpillars will actually wiggle inside the cocoon, to make it appear to tremble, as a way to ward off predators while in their vulnerable state. When they were first moved from the cups to the Pavilion, they were shaking like crazy!
After about one week in the cocoons, the butterflies began to emerge. On Friday night, just as the girls were going to bed, I looked up at the Pavilion on the top of their dresser and said, "We have a butterfly!" The first Painted Lady had emerged. Saturday morning we all gathered around the Pavilion to watch the cocoons, anxious to see another butterfly come out. We watched for 10-15 minutes and then went to the kitchen to eat breakfast. An hour or two later, I was back in their room and discovered four more butterflies! We had missed them all, and would miss every other one emerging...until Sunday morning.

As we were getting ready for church, I went into the girls' room and saw the final butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, which was actually sitting on the floor of the Pavilion. (It had come off the lid and, as per the directions, we had carefully placed it on a paper towel.) I hollered and the whole family came running down the hall. We lifted up the girls and watched the butterfly wiggle it's way out of the cocoon, using its legs to push it off. Its wings were tiny and eventually unfolded a little bit more as it sat opening and closing them. AMAZING!

The whole family was fascinated with the butterflies. Below you can see Damon and Gunnar peering into the Pavilion as Maggie reaches inside. Even now, Gunnar's ears perk up when he hears someone say "butterfly."

Hanging outside for some fresh air, one butterfly perches on Maggie's fingers. Adah named several of the butterflies. Among them were, Crazy, Silent, Quiet, B-B, and Butter on Bread. (I think that last one sounds like a racehorse, don't you?)

After about a week, we decided to release the butterflies. Their life span is about 1-2 weeks and I wasn't prepared to deal with dead butterflies in our Pavilion. I wanted them to have some time to fly in the wild before the end of their short lives. (Plus I was a little nervous that we weren't feeding them correctly and didn't want to feel guilty about an early demise.)

It was a fascinating learning experience for our family. We shared some of it with Adah's kindergarten class. They kept a cup of caterpillars until they reached the vulnerable chrysalis stage. Then we took the hatched butterflies one morning to show the class. Adah's teacher and classmates were delighted.

We will definitely order more caterpillars and go through the process again.

Demolition Days

We just can't seem to get enough of home remodeling projects. Our focus this spring has been on exterior projects.

Since we moved into our house 3 years ago, we've had a garage that wasn't really a garage. The previous owners put insulation and paneling on the walls and built cabinets that prevented the garage door from opening. We have used it for laundry and storage. Last spring we shortened our driveway and put in sod, completely wiping out the possibility of ever using the garage for actually parking a car. So, now we've finally gotten around to taking out the garage door, framing in a wall, and installing a new window. Of course, that means we need new siding so everything matches. We've also installed new front and back doors to replace the older doors that--between the two of them--shared every possible door idiosyncrasy.

In case you've forgotten (or never seen) what our house looked like before we began all our projects, here is a photo taken when we first bought the house.

And here is a photo with the new window in place of the garage door.

Here is Damon installing the new back door. It exits from the garage (which I'm trying desperately to now call the laundry room or utility room or something other than garage) onto our back patio (another one of our home improvement projects).

Gunnar likes to help.

Here is Damon ripping out the frame of the old front door. As you can see, when I say "we" installed a new wall, window, and doors, I really mean Damon installed them. (A photo of the new front door will accompany photos of the new exterior, when it's actually finished.)

Here is more of the front door installation. You can see that the siding has been removed from the house, making it a lovely styrofoam color. On that project (siding removal) it was actually we that did it. Even the kids helped by putting the old siding in the pick-up truck. I even ended up on the roof pulling the siding off from under the roof overhang.

Last Monday our friend Justin began installing the new siding. Now, if we can only decide what color to paint it....

Sprinklers!

It's been nearly a month since the hot day when the kids ran through the sprinklers when Adah got home from school. I'm finally catching up!

We put in this lawn just one year ago and it has been a wonderful addition to our yard. We spend more time on the nice grass (so wonderfully shady in the afternoon) than we do on the swingset in the backyard!

Adah bravely runs through the water as Maggie and Gunnar come around for another go.

Maggie poses in between leaps over the sprinkler.

Our own waterslide

I think this photo was taken just before Gunnar flipped head over heels off the seesaw. He got right back up!

Our Little Entymologist

Adah's impulse purchase of a bug house and butterfly net at the dollar store awhile back has turned into a real interest in BUGS! She began prowling our yard for any insect find, prying up rocks and peeking under leaves. Her first "pet" was Beegle the Beetle, of whom no photos were taken before his humane release into the wild.

In the photo above, Adah is holding a larger and expanded habitat that she created for her second beetle, Sparkles. While Beegle was just your ordinary black beetle, Sparkles was quite dazzling.

Even though Adah paid Sparkles the utmost attention and tried feeding him different things (apple cores, strawberry hulls, leaves, grass), we weren't really sure of the proper way to take care of such an insect. We eventually persuaded Adah that the best thing for Sparkles was to release him so he could make his own way in the world. She was sad, but agreed and was able to bid Sparkles a heartfelt goodbye before putting him in the front yard.

You can do it. We can help.

This morning we took our girls to the free "Kids Clinic" at our local Home Depot. (Local being a relative term when you live where we do. Our Home Depot is 30 miles away.) The store holds these monthly. All three kids got their own orange aprons, complete with Sharpie-inscribed names, and the girls each made a project.

The project was a hardware sorter. It's a wooden box with dividers and a sliding plastic lid. The girls had to glue and nail all the pieces together. Then they decorated it with stickers.

When we came home, the girls wanted to play "Home Depot." They each got walkie talkies to clip on their aprons and set up a little store.