growing, growing...

They are getting so big! Every day they look so different. It has been wonderful to watch them - and we even love being yelled at by the parents whenever we try to walk into our, I mean 'their' yard.

Fun facts::

• A female robin builds a nest out of grass and small twigs held together with mud
• The eyes of nestlings open when they are about five days old
• Robins usually live for six years, but can live up to 14 years
• Earthworms are a favorite food
• Other soft-bodied invertebrates they eat include caterpillars, beetles and grasshoppers
• Fruits and berries account for 60 percent of robins’ diet (I can verify that they love our strawberries)
• Parents feed their young in the nest until they are ready to leave it at 14 to 16 days of age
• Baby robins cannot fly for the first few days after they jump from the nest
• Within a day or two their wings grow stronger and they begin to take short flights
• Their parents feed them (even on the ground) until they have learned to feed themselves

We have been reading about the life cycle of Robins. Here are a few books we are reading now:




A Nest Full of Eggs












The Robins in Your Backyard

sunshine.

Ahhh, the sun returned today, if only for a bit before the big snow tomorrow. This week we have happily eased back into our rhythm and routine after the boys had their dad home (but constantly working) last week. We have started many ongoing projects this week ... paint, clay, plant, food, books, 'experiments' ... Here are a few!

The boys started grass gardens using the local wheat berries we get for our bread making. We started on Tuesday and have been spritzing with water and tracking the progress for a few days now. We should have long green wheat grass soon!


We made some hollow 'mountains' (in progress above) of clay and are drying them to paint and use for our baking soda/vinegar lava eruptions the boys love doing so much. That goes with this book that A has been reading - he is loving Hawaii lately, and so is interested in volcanoes, history, and culture. Besides, words like Kilauea, Halema‘uma‘u, and Puʻu ʻŌʻō are just cool!


We started a tray of micro greens. We are comparing our previous batch where we grew in cells before transplanting to open trays with very dense seeding - to see which method has the best results. The boys love watching the progress, I like eating fresh greens in January! ; )


We had a bowling 'field trip' with a friend today. Three spirited boys competing at bumper bowling! What a fun time. It is so nice when school is back in session after the holidays and we can get out to places without worrying so much about G (little asthma guy) getting sick.

Tomorrow the snow will come. We are all excited to see some fresh snow and get outside again after the ice storm last weekend left everything dirty brown and rock hard and crazy slippery all week - fresh powdery white snow is very welcome!

apple picking!

We have been getting apples every week or so, so that we can slowly continue to make applesauce, apple butter, dried apple rings, pie filling and so much more. This weekend we had perfect weather and stopped at an apple u-pick farm on our way home from getting new fall/winter shoes for the boys.


This farm was nice in that the orchard was up and over a hill and through the woods. A nice walk on a nice day.


We walked down the aisles of fruit and selected which types would make the best all around apple for what we were making. A and G took turns on dads shoulders to get the ripest, most perfect apples. The view was spectacular - farms and hills and trees.


The boys actually let me take a photo of them together, standing still, by the pumpkins! Happy boys.


We have had a few favorite books in our pile this week about apples and apple trees. Perfect for this time of year!







Apples, by Jacqueline Farmer














The Life Cycle of an Apple Tree, by Linda Tagliaferro












How Do Apples Grow? by Betsy & Giulio Maestro













Our Apple Tree, by Naslund & Digman

Birds.

We have really been enjoying watching the birds at our feeder this winter. This week we checked out Common Birds and Their Songs from the library. It is a book featuring 50 common birds with photos and info about each bird. The fun part is the audio CD that goes with it. The CD has about a minute of song from each bird in order. Several of the birds in the book visit our bird feeder, and many others we see out and about (wild turkey!). The boys love to sit and flip through the pages and listen to each bird, and chat about it.

And for those of you with cats? Our cats love the CD too, and will sit all puffed up and twitchy staring at the speakers!

Colorful Pages.

All of the color thoughts over the past week has me looking in our home for those bolts of vivid hues. Today as I was cleaning I noticed some of the old books I have out. Many I have had my entire life, and many I picked up as I searched through those great old bookstores wherever I was living on whatever rainy day I tucked myself inside to explore.

I have always loved the bold color on the cover of this book-I have had this book since childhood.


I remember loving the artwork in this book as a child. Somehow it is in great condition (some of my vintage children's books are not) after all these years.


There are so many books I have collected stashed away until we have enough bookshelves for them - I like keeping some out though, to enjoy and remember. And what wonderful color.

Winter Birds.

Snow and cold weather means more cozy days at home (well, that + having a car in the shop all week) - and more time for birdwatching! Both boys have loved learning about and watching birds all summer, so once the cold came, we cleaned and filled our bird feeder, expanded our setup, and moved some feeding spots closer to our back porch. We made pine cone bird feeders and hung them all over our tree. We have had a LOT of winged visitors since we started getting all of this snow. The boys love seeing the birds (many of them now have nicknames). We have several bird identification books in our home library, but we found a few books from the library just about winter birds.




Feeding Wild Birds in Winter by Clive Dobson









Backyard Birds of Winter by Carol Lerner







Since we are in a residential neighborhood, we mostly get Juncos, Mourning Doves, and American Goldfinches. We have been reading a few books (and looking up online) and learning more about the birds. We plan to make some other feeders which are in the books - suet and rice cake types. It will be fun to see who else visits us this winter! We might even keep track.

"Dover" checking us out.

NOTE: I realized that some images were broken in IE and Safari while they showed in Firefox. Bizarre--I had a hard time with blogger last night so something must have been funky. I have reposted images so hopefully everyone can see them now!

autumn leaves.

Today was a beautiful fall day. Sunny, breezy, and cool but not cold. Today was our autumn leaf day - and the boys had a great time. We did 3 simple crafts using leaves we collected from our teeny tree, and read a few books related to fall!

This morning we collected leaves from the ground in our yard. Several of them we put into the pages of a magazine and weighed down with books while we had breakfast and prepared our materials.
The rest of the leaves were placed on a baking pan and put into the oven on LOW heat (I warmed mine up to the lowest temp, then turned it off before adding leaves) for less than 10 minutes. I didn't want to cook them, just dry them. Once out of the oven we crumbled them easily into 2 bowls.

First we painted a tree base onto watercolor paper. I helped (obviously) since my boys are little. We used black watercolors. We also got the rest of our supplies ready. Glue, glue brushes, plates, blank cards, watercolor paper, and glitter glue. While the watercolors dried we read the first of our two fall books.

We came back to our base and the boys squeezed glue all over the tree. They then took the crumbled leaves and sprinkled them all over the glue. Very cool effect (oh, and I got the idea for the cool crumbled leaf craft here - I just modified it to our supplies and ages).



We took our pressed leaves out of the pages for our next craft. The boys painted glue on the back of the leaves, and then applied them to blank cards. They finished them with a light coating of glue (ModPodge would be fine too) on the top to seal it/keep them flat.


They of course wanted to keep gluing and gluing so I was ready with a piece of heavy paper for them to apply the bigger leaves to. They did the same process as for the cards, but also mixed glitter glue in with the regular glue so that when they coated the top there was a little rusty colored sparkle.

While everything dried we had a snack and read our second fall book. The crafts were easy and quick and the leaves were from our own yard. AND they now have a few cards to mail to family that they made, and a few artsy pieces to hang up!



The books we read today with our crafts were:



Why do leaves change color? by Betsy Maestro

It's Fall by Linda Glaser







We also got to play soccer in the yard, draw with sidewalk chalk, bake pumpkins, and work on the Halloween costumes! What a day!

Halloween.

Halloween
by Harry Behn
Illustrated by Greg Couch

I have loved every single book illustrated by Greg Couch. This book is just as beautifully illustrated - rich colors, tiny details, fantastical elements, textured, light and dark intertwining, the intensity of color on the dark. The boys just stare at the images, and want to read and re-read. They even touch the pages, as if to see if they can feel something of that texture coming off of the page. Very cool book!

Life on Earth - Another interesting book.

We picked up a big stack of books at the library which relate to caves, fossils, and prehistoric creatures. The visit to the cave has created many new fun conversations with A, who wants to repeatedly discuss how a living thing becomes a fossil. During our cave tour, the guide shone her flashlight to the ceiling of the cave, and jutting out was a large clear 2-3 foot long fossil of a squid like creature. I think that is what got him going. But the ideas of time, extinction, and just the history of life is a big subject.

One book we found was "Life On Earth: The Story of Evolution" by Steve Jenkins. It addresses in a pretty quick and fundamental way things like biodiversity, natural selection, and speciation. It has enough detail to interest my fact loving 4 year old, but not so much that he wanders off. The artwork is VERY cool too. The author creates amazing paper collages to illustrate his books. I think A could look at the one page of beetles for HOURS. We have read other books by Steve Jenkins - I am always inspired by his artwork.


We found a few other fun books - another favorite over the weekend was "Bugs Before Time: Prehistoric Insects and their Relatives". Very interesting!

Free Audio Stories for Kids.

We found a website which offers free audio stories for kids. They have a decent selection of many of the classic fairy tales, as well as some original stories. They are all read by the same person, and my boys enjoyed her pace and rhythm (and accent). We have only listened to a few thus far - but what I like is that they are all in podcast format and can be downloaded to an iPod, or you can subscribe to the feed and get updates that way. Of course you can also listen on your computer or burn to a cd.

The boys love hearing audio books while we are in the car, so I always am on the lookout for those which are ok for their age group and attention span, and with well over 100 stories in the archives, we can pick and choose. So far we have listened to The Frog Prince and The Three Little Pigs. We have also listened to a few poems, including The Spider and the Fly. They are at Storynory.

Another resource we found is LibriVox. You can search the catalog of public domain stories, which are all read by volunteers, and subscribe to the podcasts. They have a lot of chapters recorded of books for the older set. Visit LibriVox.

Pete's a Pizza & Pizza Night

Last night we had a pizza night. We picked up our books at the library, which included the book "Pete's a Pizza". I read the book to the boys in the car as we drove to the local Italian deli. The boys helped us select sauce, pizza crusts, mozzarella cheese, and everything else we needed for dinner. When we got home the boys made their own pizzas (which they always love to do). As the pizzas baked, dad "acted out" the book on the boys, which included kneading their bellies, smearing "sauce" on them, and sprinkling on the cheese. They shrieked and laughed and giggled and wanted to do it again and again...until the oven beeped. They then sat down and wolfed down their pizzas, and asked if we could have pizza night every night!

Being "kneaded".
It's done!
Mine too!

Old books.

One of my favorite things is collecting old books. Nothing like a first edition Henry Miller to make my day. I also love children's books. I have collected many great oldies over the years in my travels, but I also have a nice big bin of books from my own childhood. I keep many of them in plastic, to give to my kids when they are older (as we check them out from the library if we want to read them), but every once in awhile I get a craving to dig around and refresh my memory.

One book I dragged upstairs this week is "The Ice-Cream Cone Coot and Other Rare Birds" by Arnold Lobel.

I always loved the artwork and rhyme, and it has become A's favorite book this week. We have read it 100 times at the least, and he pores over every detail of each image over and over, to impress it into his memory. Although it is out of print, most libraries probably carry it - and it is worth looking for - the artwork is spectacular.

The Frog Prince.

The Frog Prince

The Brothers Grimm story re-told by Kathy-Jo Wargin, illustrated by Anne Yvonne Gilbert

This is another book that I got for "me", but that the boys both enjoy. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous. Lush, rich, detailed, flowing, intense - just the costume detail alone is - wow. The story follows a fairly traditional version of the story, and is detailed enough for the elementary age kids, but also quick enough for the younger set.

Just a note: It is the more traditional telling where she throws the frog at the wall which is when he turns into the prince ... but it is easy to work around that for those that are not comfortable with frog-thwacking in a story, as it is just 1 sentence of the book. :)

Trees, Trees.

Today is Arbor Day!

A few fun books to read today.

The Tree

The Lorax

Sky Tree

Luscious artwork - "Tree Ring Circus"

Tree Ring Circus, by Adam Rex.

I got this book for my 4 year old from the library this week and while yes, he loves the story, wow...I just love the artwork.

"2 tigers, 3 chipmunks, 5 poodles with capes, 1 lion, 3 squirrels, 2 key-stealing apes, 2 blue jays, 1 ostrich, 1 raven, a clown. A cat who climbed up and would love to get down. 2 sparrows, 1 chicken, a whopping big bee. 5 mice and a bear ...and a very full tree."

The paintings are gorgeous, the style includes vintage three ring circus signage/text and it is so interesting to look at. Definitely a great story and picture book for kids of all ages. I visited his website (illustration, blog, books) and found another book, titled "The Dirty Cowboy" - I put that one on hold and will hopefully have that from the library in a few days. Can't wait!