A spring walk in the woods

Last week I took the kids for a walk up the Bald River Falls trail in the Cherokee National Forest. The weather was warm and perfect for a day in the woods. Four years ago Rodrigo and my Dad got a contract with the forest service to build the steps along the cliff at the beginning of the trail. The kids are always thrilled to cross those steps, informing anyone nearby that their "Daddy built these steps" People are usually suitably impressed! ;-) The wildflowers are just hitting their peak around here and we had to stop every few feet to identify new (to us) varieties. Matthew spotted a water snake sunning on a rock, but when we tried to get a little closer for a better picture it slid off and disappeared between the rocks under the water. Violet got tired of walking a few miles in, so I used the sheet I had brought for our picnic blanket as a baby carrier, and tied her onto my back Guatemalan style for the trip back down the mountain. She rested and slept on my back for a bit over 2 hours. By the time we made it back to the car, everyone was ready for a nap! It was a very quiet trip home, as all of the kids fell asleep before we had even made it out of the park. I stopped as soon as we reached the first town for a cup of coffee and listened to an audio-book all the way home, without a single interruption! That's a rare thing in our home!!! After such a long wet winter it feels so good to be outside enjoying the warm sunshine and the beautiful green mountains! 

Psalm 96:12

Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;

    let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.

Camping on Citico Creek

Helloooooooo! Is anybody out there??? Well, hello again! Lots of life has been happening since I posted over a year ago. I may try to post some "catch-up" pictures on here another day...but then again, life hasn't gotten any less busy or demanding since then, so I may not. We'll see. But my biggest blog fan (aka~ husband) has told me repeatedly how much he misses reading my posts and seeing our pictures, so I am making an effort to post for him.

The kids are bigger now, of course. I took them camping this week by myself, since Rodrigo had to work and couldn't get away from that and someone needed to be at home to care for our animals. Violet turned 2 while we were camping. She's such a sweet, funny, little person; and noisy, very, very noisy!  

I bought the kids a couple of packages of glow necklaces and they put on a light show for me after dark. We had the campground completely to ourselves, which was really nice, since I didn't have to worry about our being too noisy or up too early for anyone else! We got up sometime just after 6 in the morning and while I made coffee on the camp stove Matthew and Ethan started the fire back up to help us thaw out! After breakfast we went for  a walk down by the creek. It was still very early with the sun just peaking over the edge of the mountain and the mist rising off of the water. We walked around for a few hours until everyone started to feel hungry again and we wandered back to camp for an early lunch. Later we packed up and headed home. It was a lot of fun, but I was very happy to back in my own warm bed last night! :-)

Rice play and mosaics

On Friday we had some friends over to play. I had just colored a bunch of rice, so as soon as it had cooled from drying in the oven I set it on the table in reach of the little ones. It was a matter of minutes before Emmett had run back to his bedroom and brought out a collection plastic and wooden animals and invited his little friend to play "Farm" with him. She thought that was a great idea! Claire wandered through after a while but didn't stay for too long. Elowen and Emmett however, played for about 45 minutes with the colored rice and the animals. When they finally wandered away to play something different I printed several simple coloring pages onto card stock and put out glue and lots of different colors of rice and beans and seeds to work with. Pretty soon the kids came back through the kitchen and saw everything set up differently. I explained what a mosaic was and showed them how to do put the seeds onto the glue to color their pictures. The bigger kids did everything themselves while I helped the little ones by applying the glue for them, and they did the rest on their own. They had a great time! The clean up really wasn't too bad. I just raked all of the spilled rice and seeds etc. off of the table onto the floor and swept it all up when they where done!