variety

 I dragged this piano out of storage a while back and the kids love playing/pounding on it =)  You don't have a song until the volume is cranked UP!

 This is Tom Turkey.  He's quite large, scary, yet exciting for the kids.  We were looking after a friend's house for a few weeks, and the kids got to know him quite well.  He reminds me of a guard dog.  He'll puff out his feathers, make some noise and keep you in line!

 Joe working under the truck one spring day.  Mud, and grease, dive right in little boy...oh, he already did ;-)

 Cousins a seesawing =)

A walk up "Rock Mountain"

 Waiting for mom

 King of the mountain

OH! the view!! We had climbed pretty high!

Jake, Emily & I enjoyed a break from maple syrup a few weeks back and took a nice hike up "Rock Mountain"  It was pretty steep climbing, but we made it!  And the view was beautiful. 

A few things...

Well, it's about time I do an update!

We've been busy on our new experiment this year...Maple SYRUP!  It has definitely been a good year for learning, as most years there's way more sap I've heard.

As it is, we had PLENTY, over 150 gallons to work with!  Some of it went bad with the unseasonably warm weather, so it never got boiled down.  STILL, we ended up with 24 12-oz bottles and a few quart jars of syrup.

Joe tapped over 200 trees this spring, using a tubing system that runs from tree to tree and collects in a barrel.  This works great if there is a clump of trees fairly close together.  That way you don't have to hang individual buckets.

Then we spent each day boiling it down, and just waiting for it to change to syrup.  We have a hydrometer (it's similar to a thermometer) that tests the hot syrup/sap.  You fill the holder with hot syrup and when it gets close to being done, it will float up in the holder.  Then into jars it goes!
The syrup is really good, and we love the fact that it's REAL, no additives, etc.
We've sure been eating a lot of pancakes lately =)

Little Boy

These are a few of his FAVORITE things!!
Seriously, any tool he can find, and the more the better, he'll just be content sitting there playing with them =)
 Well, either that or he'll go around the house "fixing" things ;-)

Erika

Happy 18th Birthday ERIKA!
Have a great day =)

Nice try, Meri

Meri's latest:

The other day I had a couple of kids who really wanted to play the computer.  Our rule is to get their chores and schoolwork done first.  They still needed to do a bit of handwriting.  So I sent them off to the table to work on that.
A minute later Meri comes over and says she's done.  She's holding out this paper PROUDLY!

I couldn't help it, I just had to laugh!!  I mean, her craftiness at age 5 never ceases to amaze me!  If you enlarge this picture you can see there's a name half erased/scribbled out.  And I just love the contrast of her writing her name, all capitals, in crayon, to the nice, neat cursive =) 

What can you do with a girl like her?? 

Me, 33

I like this family pic =)  We celebrated mine & Linda's birthdays with Joe's side with Pizza Hut, breadsticks and a yummy mocha torte cake!

This was in between our bouts with the stomach flu.  I actually came down with it the next day.  So not fun, especially when little James caught it and got SO mad at me when I pushed the bucket under him.  Poor liitle guy, I think he thought I was causing him to throw up.  Ugh, at least it's over now.  I'm always amazed at how illnesses get so d-r-a-w-n out by the time it works its way through everyone.

 Grandma Linda & grandkids!

**Here's a camera/picture taking question--- I'm noticing my pictures have this weird fuzzy look to them lately....I know next to nothing about taking a good picture...I was thinking it might be something to do with the flash?  any ideas from anyone?  and how to fix it?  I'm really not doing anything different when I take pictures, so it's really strange to me.