"E" is for......

Easter!

We are slowly learning our letters and last week we did activities, songs and read books about "E". We learned about etiquette and electricity. We made eggs to eat, and glued egg shells to a letter "E" made of cardboard (and this did not work so well). We went on an Egg hunt with eggs full of pictures that begin with "E"s and then glued them in little books. Unfortunately my camera battery charger was still MIA, but thankfully it was found by my wonderful husband a day before I was going to order a new one! I am so naked without my lil' camera.

I also made this Easter sensory box with little chocolate eggs hidden in it... like a little, mini Easter Egg hunt. I was able to shoot pictures before it was destroyed after I charged my battery. I included paper Easter grass, egg shakers, little bunnies and chicks, lemon balm and dandelions and even some lettuce leaves from the garden! I covered the bottom in shredded carrots. What fun!

"E" is also for Extraordinarily Cute Baby. Oh. My. Word. He is my cuddle pie (but don't tell him, because it makes him mad when I call him that). Anyway. I was able to get in my garden today, and plant a few things and now we are on to learning the letter "D". Happy Monday!

Happy Easter!!!

Happy Easter everyone! What a joyful time of year this is! Christ has risen and Spring is here! The sad thing is, my camera battery is as dead as dead can be, and I have lost the charger so there is no hope in that rising again anytime soon. Thankfully I took a couple of pictures before church on Easter and somehow there was a tiny inkling of juice left in the battery to load them on the computer. So, we had dresses and Easter bonnets with frills and bows and pretty white sandals and......

....a new kitten! I am so happy to FINALLY have another cat!! His name is "Pumpkin Pie Puff" at the moment. Anastasia named him "Pumpkin Pie", and Nick and I call him "Puff". He might just be one confused kitty for a while but he sure is a cute little purr ball and seems to love being cuddled, snuggled and loved. My girls just adore this little fuzzy puff. He never gets a break from being adored!

I did not have time to make dresses this year, and gave myself a free pass to go buy some. Not only that, but the girls fell in love with the "princess dresses" at Burlington Coat Factory and I felt that anything I made would not compare to the poofy, ruffly pink dresses they had hanging in all their glory, like bluebells on the dress racks. They were in love. We went to church and then spent the day feasting at my parents house. We had an egg hunt and enjoyed a good bit of time outdoors soaking up the sunshine. And while Easter crafting was not a huge priority this year, we did boil our chicken eggs (poking a hole with a pin in the bottom, does in fact make them easier to peel!!!) and pulled them out of the pot and into mini-muffin tins for the girls to paint with crayons. It was so much fun and much easier (and less messy) than dyeing them. And they turned out more vibrant too!

And last week I made an Easter discovery tray for each of the girls: There were things in the tray to engage all of the senses, including carrots, arugula and dandilion greens to taste, eggs to shake, lavender, mint and lemon balm tea, flowers in a babyfood jar vase, glass pebbles, wooden eggs and small smooth stones. They enjoyed arranging items and sipping their tea and garden veggies. :) I might make a new one this week! What fun.

I hope you all had a lovely Easter with eggs, candy, and most of all celebrating new life and the hope and peace that it brings to your soul. :)

Spring is here!!!

The diapers hang in the breeze, the forsythia is on fire, the hens peck around looking for worms and other goodies in the fresh green grass. Is there a single season as lovely as Spring? We had terrible storms and flash floods on Saturday. Thankfully nothing here was damaged, but the River is super high. The ground is nice and squishy and muddy. We are inside playing with homemade lavender playdough and it smells so calming. I love Spring. And baby goats:

This is Hyacinth's baby, Petunia at a couple days old (that was over 2 weeks ago!) Can you even stand how cute she is?

And this is Tigerlily and her baby, Daisy. She has the cutest stripe going down each side of her. They are so squishably cute.

But I have my own bundle of squishable cuteness:

This romper is HUGE on him but I picked it up brand new at Goodwill last week for $3. Only downside was the BULLDOZER on the front. Really? A bulldozer on a sweet, plaid baby romper. Ok, honestly Kieran is wearing 18month clothes now (at 5 MONTHS!!!) and the romper was 24 months so maybe a 2-year-old would be in love with the bulldozer on his romper. Kieran? Not so much. So I appliqued a chipmunk onto it. Now it has the cute forest child feel, not the industrial, mow-down-the-forest feel. :) haha.

I just added a new icon for Heartsy. If you haven't signed up yet... DO IT. I am in love with these silly deal sites now, and hope to do all of my Christmas shopping through them. And Heartsy features all handmade/Etsy shops, so you can get a great deal on handmade goodies. I bought a voucher for some cute, cute soaps. Did I ever mention that Isabel's favorite Christmas present was a lollipop soap I found in a $ bin at Michaels? She carried it everywhere for days and they begged to take baths for weeks to play with the lolly soaps. Sooo I hope that cupcake and petit four soaps will also be a big hit! :) AND if you sign up through my link and buy a deal, you and I get a $5 credit for future voucher purchases! Yay! Many of the items featured are for jewelry, which I don't wear much of, but I have seen a pretty vast variety of items and hope to see some nice artwork to add some life to my house. The walls are kind of boring around here. :P

Oh well, off to work on the nature table...

Pickin' Marshmallows

See this tree? It is an ever-so-rare Marshmallow Tree! :) Nick went out to the hills on Saturday (aka, west virginia) and after a long week, I had another day with the 3 little ones all to myself. I was bummed about missing a ballet because I forgot about Nick's trek to the Mountains of no return... so instead I took my littles to Great Country Farms for their Marshmallow Harvest and Egg hunt!

The kids were elated to say the least. They could care less about the Easter Egg hunt, but happily plucked the plump mallows and Peeps off of the trees:

Is that not the cutest idea ever? I really think that it would be fun to turn our blossoming cherry tree into a marshmallow tree too someday. WARNING: Below is another superfluous picture of my cute, cute pie boy (I figured I would warn you in case you are sick of seeing him posted every post... but how could you? He is DARLING).

Little baby Kieran enjoyed the harvesting from the coziness of his stroller. The day was cool and overcast, but made for less crowds and A LOT of mud. Isabel was layered in mud. But the great thing about harvesting marshmallows, was the warm fire with roasting sticks. I could have sat there all day roasting fluffy sugar puffs. But the girls had were busy stomping in puddles and jumping on jumping pillows, and feeding animals. IMPORTANT stuff like that. But after the fun, and mud, and damp, cool, Virginia weather we needed to go. And because our poor bushel of marshmallows were wet, we stopped to get a few baby peeps...

And made little hot chocolate ponds for them to swim in... where they met their demise in a slow, melty kind of way. It was truly a melty-mallowy kind-of day. I hope my girls remember picking marshmallows and sipping peep hot cocoa when they are teenagers and think I am lame. Because "once upon a time" I was a pretty cool mom.

*Apparently "melty" and "mallowy" are not real words. Who woulda thought?

A New Life.

Last week we had our hardwood floors in our kitchen and living room, and connecting hallway re-finished. It has been long overdue, but I must say, I couldn't be happier right now!!! We have lived in our little house almost 3 years, and one great thing about our house (and a major selling point) was that it has hard wood floors. Unfortunately they looked like this:

And the hallway was stripped but looked like this:

And our living room was covered in carpet when we bought the house, so we had no idea what to expect until AFTER we signed our life over to the mortgage company. It was pretty beat up and stained, and just really, really gross:

But we are optimists. We saw the beauty even though we looked at the yuckiness for years. YEARS. How did I live like that? All that HGTV we watched could have never prepared me though, for what we came home to last Friday:

The hallway: And the beginning of the kitchen. Oh the kitchen.

Look at that old heart pine! I nearly cried to see such a pretty room that had been so abused and ugly for so long. We had been going back and forth about doing them ourselves, or paying to have them finished professionally. We finally chose the latter and I couldn't be more grateful to H&H Hardwood for making our blah house, into a beautiful home. Our house feels clean and less overwhelming and I am so happy about that. I love sweeping these pretty floors. Like all the time. I am OBSESSED about sweeping every crumb. Its sad really. And I am really excited about mopping! I bought a new mop for the occasion. I don't remember the last time I mopped our floors. I am being serious. It has been MONTHS. And the worst part is, my children eat off the floor sometimes.

And see that rickety table? It is from Ikea, but we bought it off Craigslist when we bought the house. It wobbled a lot. When we moved the high chair, it could barely stand on its own. The highchair was holding it together! So Nick has been talking about building a table, and for the past few weeks he has been busy making one. He brought it home on Sunday and it is just stunning:

This was his first furniture project and I think it is the prettiest table I have ever seen! He made it out of re-claimed barnwood but you can get all the details here on his blog. It compliments our floors and adds a whole new level of life and permenance to our home. I just LOVE it. And more-so, I love the man who made it, and all the heart he put into it.

And, now that it is no longer a secret, I can say Nick is now a partner with Mike of the Strong Oaks Woodshop (barnwoodfurniture on Etsy). So now all of you can buy an awesome table like mine! ;) I must say, that all of these changes really make me feel like we have a new house and a new life. Things feel like they are finally coming along for us and our life in our little house in the country. And speaking of changes, this little guy is getting bigger, and cuter every second: I mean, how can I make a blog post about anything without posting a picture of my cuddlekins? Oh my is he cute. And he just woke up... so I better get him back to bed. So that is the newest news here! Hope all is well in your corner of the world too.

Free Shipping....

We are finally re-finishing our wood floors this week! We will be gone for a few days, so for this week only through Saturday April 2nd, I am offering FREE SHIPPING on EVERYTHING in my shop!!! Everything should ship before Monday April 4th... for free! This includes custom orders so place them now! (Does not include stackers though, sorry!) Hurry, hurry!

Wow....

Did you think I fell off a cliff or something?? Its been a couple weeks! I am still here! We have been busy (when am I not?) and we got sacked with the tummy bug of doom the past few days. Its been bad. Real bad. As in worst. diaper. ever. bad. And "Isabel throwed-up on my alphabet book" bad. But a little gingerale and pepto and lots of snuggling and naps and we seem to be getting over it. And isn't my baby ADORABLE? He really got extra cute this week. Or maybe he seems like it after the very UNCUTE things I have been dealing with. Oh, and speaking of cuteness...... I can hardly begin to describe how cute baby goats are!!! We sold the sweet goats to our neighbor, and visited the fresh babies today. I could have died. Nick is glad they made it to their new home before the kids came, or you can bet I would have never parted with them. Good thing I have a baby to squish and cuddle, because I really want to sneak over to Sharon's house and squish her baby goats. And I don't thing ANYONE would really appreciate that. *Pictures to come!* I promise. (I hope).

And it is almost April. Almost Easter. And my gnomey eggs are getting snatched up pretty quickly!!! So go get yours now! I am saving up the money from my sales for a new camera!!! My old one is fine. I love it. But I want to venture into the world of digital SLRs. Scary, and EXCITING!!! I also want to announce secretly... that I am going to have my FIRST EVER GIVEAWAY (Besides that jar of jam a while back...)... so stay tuned. :) All these promises. We just started our garden this week with lettuce, peas, herbs, beans, swiss chard, spinach, chives and some tomatoes and peppers indoors. So I need a compost pail!

I will say this is shameless advertising at its best, but I thought I should share some sweet deals. I just signed up for Mamapedia and bought a couple of their daily deals for EcoMom and Klutz. At Eco Mom you can get a $40 gift card for $18 (if you type "Spring10" at checkout) and score this stainless steel composting pail for $20 out of pocket. (ETA: Shipping is pretty high, but is free for orders of $50 or more.) Among other items like natural, wooden toys and cloth diapers and yummy looking soaps. :) I bought 2 gift cards. And for Anastasia I am getting this from Klutz:

Can you imagine how she will love it? I am stocking up on items for our trip to the midwest in May, and I think this will be a nice "toy" to play with when we get there. Not sure it will work well in the car, but there are plenty of other neat things to choose from. :)

Well enough about that, I better get to bed, but here is my grateful list today (I am aiming for 200 by Easter now... I sort of fell out of habit. shame. shame.)

31. Good health. (Especially after bad health.)

32. Good friends.

33. Fuzzy baby goat babies. (I kind of really want a goat again.)

34. Kitties (Pretty Please Sweet husband of mine?)

35. Spring

36. Snow (but not now. Not in March. NOT after the FIRST DAY OF SPRING. Boo.)

37. Little baby plants. And how green and happy they are.

38. Time. Every last bit of it. I wish I had a little more.

39. Folded, put away laundry. (even though there seems to be a shortage of it. but isn't it so lovely?)

40. Shamrocks. I wanted a shamrock today and I found one for .99c at the grocery store. It was providential indeed.

41. Corned Beef and cabbage. It was so yummy. I love St. Patrick's Day!!!

42. A toasty wood stove (especially when Spring decides not to be Spring anymore.)

Did I mention snow is in tonight's forecast?

43. Facebook. Blogs. INTERNET! WINDOWS TO THE WORLD. when my babies are sick. I cheated a little this week.

44. Kieran just woke up... better get him back to sleep... before he gets mad.

---TO BE CONTINUED---

44. (For real) he fell asleep before I left my chair. I love that he does that because the girls never did.

45. My new bed. (And the future bunk bed of my little ones because Anastasia has claimed the couch.)

46. My husband's new side project!!! (Its a secret right now!!!!) So now we can afford a kitty.

47. Lent. (absence makes the heart grow fonder......)

48. Spellcheck. (I was Homescooled... Thanks mom! :) (TOTALLY kidding.)

49. The roof over my head and the ones I love, especially in light of all those that lost their homes, families, friends and children in Japan.

50. Prayer.