Maine's Maple Weekend

One of the cool things about living in Maine is that they have a weekend dedicated to celebrating maple!  :)  Loving maple syrup and farms as we do, we packed ourselves up and headed to the nearest sugarhouse to have ourselves a maple syrup sample, among other goodies involving maple.

Visiting the cows that haven't yet delivered their babies.  It's incredible how all the animals really do deliver in the spring…the farm was teaming with baby animals.

Some of the baby piglets.

Can't get a regular smile out of this crazy boy…just a pirate looking "argh" smile.  :)

Playing outside. 

Each boy got their face painted and are showing off their choices.  Will apparently thought he needed to kind of stretch his cheek to show his painting.  :)

Creating A "Stomach"!

We have been "building our bodies" in our homeschool science time.  Each week we explore a different organ or area of our body, color the part and attach it to our paper body outlines (I'll share pictures of those later, once they're completed).  This week we learned about our digestive system and did a couple of hands-on activities to simulate different organs of our digestive system.  This is when we created our simulated stomach.  It's such an easy and great simulation, and the children love it because it's fun and gross (especially beautiful words to young boys!).  ;)

Here's some pictures…

Take a ziploc bag and add a cracker and a half piece of bread (our bags were sandwich size).

It's nearly impossible to get this boy to make a good smiling face and they were already preparing themselves for the gross part of the experiment.  :)

Jadon's gross face.

Add 1/2 cup vinegar to simulate stomach acid.  I liked using an acidic substitute, but water would work, just not as fast.

Mash the food around with the vinegar with your fingers to simulate the stomach muscle action.

Within minutes our food is mixed and mashed into bits and ready to go into our small intestines!  ;)

Another Winter Beach trip

Another cold beach trip, only this time we had Daddy and Missy, so the whole family was there.

This was just too adorable.  You can see Carl up there with Hannah on his back and Missy.  Back with me was Will and Jadon.  They are so good at always holding hands when asked.

Jadon is my best "smiler" for pictures at the moment.  Will is in that funny face stage and Hanny moves to quickly to get her smiling at me most of the time.  

Daddy explaining to the boys about sea glass.

This is a particularly rocky beach that we don't frequent, but it's the closest to walk to.

So precious!!

Winter Day at the Beach

We decided to go on a trip to the beach not to long ago on a crisp, bright, clear winter day.  It was lovely, but I will say that we are really about ready for some bright, clear, WARM beach days now.  :)

Yet another reason to love galoshes.  :)

The seagulls never fail to litter the beach with interesting finds.  ;)

Snow, snow, snow!

As you may know, we've received a bit of snow recently.  Funny thing is that we hadn't gotten really any snow the whole winter and I foolishly thought we actually just might not get a big dumping of snow this year.  Ha!  :)  One of the many wonderful things about living up here in the northeast…plenty of snow for playing during the winter!  We have a 4 foot storage container that is now completely under the snow outside, and our fence area looks like a big sandbox, only with snow.  The level of the snow in our yard is just about at the 6 foot level in places.

Our most recent snow amount from last night into the early morning.

"King of the Snow Hill".  He's saying "Ahoy Daddy!".  This was from the previous snows without the most recent fall.

Our current walking tunnel from the house to the vehicles and yard.

Fun on top of the snow.  :)

Will getting ready to slide down the snow bank on the side of our driveway.

Drifts upon drifts in the side yard.

This boy enjoys playing in the snow!

You can see the snow line among our roughly 6 foot fence.

Morning, Noon, and Night

Will has recently really started loving Legos.  He has had some for a few months now, but just got a set with wheels from a garage sale, which has added a whole other dimension to his building.  ;)  So, morning (usually first thing), noon, and night you will find him at some point sitting at the table with his Legos, building whatever his imagination leads him to make.  :)

 Building is usually accompanied by a song and/or Lego's talking to one another, etc.  Hence the many funny faces he makes. :)

He loves to make this face for pictures. Silly boy.