Weekly Wrap-up

Most of what we did this week involved enjoying the absolutely BEAUTIFUL Spring weather. 

We did finish up a Pets unit with our 4-H Cloverbud group that can be seen here.

We took a walk down to the river at the bottom of our property for the first time since last fall.  We don’t do this often since the kids still need a lot of help getting down the steep, over-grown slope.   A lot of the smaller brush still hasn’t started growing after the winter but there were a lot of limbs down from Hurricane Irene.   Once we made it down to the river, the cleared area was actually larger than normal since much of the brush washed away with the flooding after Irene.

The long walk back up.   
 

Georgie spent some time reading in my hammock.

And we did some bird watching.  I started putting out seed for the birds again.  We stopped when a bear bent our metal shepherds hook in order to get to our old bird feeder.   Instead of a feeder, we are just scattering seed along the top of the old stone fireplace in our backyard, in the hope that it won’t attract the bear again.  The kids love using my binoculars to get a closer look at the birds.

 

My father and my grandparents were always avid bird watchers so I can identify some of the most common birds.  We have blue jays, a pair of cardinals, sparrows, a titmouse and lots of mourning doves.  Mourning doves are the only birds I can recognize by sound.  Georgie is a big fan of cardinals.

I’ve been trying to find inexpensive ways to encourage the kids to spend more time outside.  We have a small trampoline, a small slide/climber that the kids use as a fort, sidewalk chalk, Nerf guns and bubbles but no swings and no sandbox.  After seeing a picture on Pinterest of a toddler garden, I decided to set up something similar for the kids.

We don’t exactly have a lawn so there was no concern for preserving grass.  When Spring gets here for real, our lawn will consist mostly of ground cover and wild flowers.  There was an area that Vicki had already spent some time digging in so I decided to put the “garden” there.

First we dug up and raked the dirt to loosen it up.   It was fairly rocky and had a lot of roots throughout so we didn’t dig down very far.  Basically just loosened up the top few inches.  

We used some large rocks to build a border around the outside edges and Vicki added some old fish tank gravel to the inside.

We finished it up with some wind spinners, fake flowers, a decorative rock and some small flower pots from the dollar store.  Vicki enjoyed “planting” her flowers and arranging her garden.

It looks like our Spring weather may be here to stay so we will be spending a lot of time outside.  I’ve preparing materials to start doing the Outdoor Hour Challenges to bring more purpose and learning to our time spent outdoors.