Christmas 2014

This Christmas time we had a mix of busy days, quiet days, the trip to Moms on the day itself and sometimes work days for mom or dad. The kids had a wonderful three weeks off from most activities and homeschool work. One thing I'm finding hard about big kids is that all those fun little kid things no longer apply, like visits to Santa, build a bear, kids Christmas parties and activity days...yet they're not adults doing some of the planning, thinking of ideas, or having kids, grandkids for me to do these things with! Teens and young adults don't want toys and don't yet need household stuff. There is not as much to do with them or to give them. Mostly they got money, gift cards or gadgets. Still love them to bits and glad they're all still under our roof for now. I know there will be different challenges when they're all adults, off on their own, with their own lives!

There are so grown up and serious:

Here are my big, nearly grown up kids on Christmas:

 

 As I was saying, young people CAN be fun at Christmas, if you catch them in the right mood, and they are bored and Grammy gives them toys and many packages of plastic bubbles!

The animals certainly had fun too. We gave them some gifts on Christmas eve since we'd be travelling to my Mom's on Christmas day.

 

They had more fun after everything was open and it was tree taking down time.

 

It was a good couple weeks with big kids and pets young and old. Now back to everyday life.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanksgiving storm

Two days before Thanksgiving I was harvesting some last things in the vegetable gardens, get the outdoors ready for winter and we were all trying to gather and stack more firewood. The day before Thanksgiving 15" of snow fell and the power went out. Thanksgiving day we shoveled out before we could go over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house. Also some of us had a heavy cold that week.

It was a long week!

My final garden haul, kale, carrots and onions, enough for a soup.

Colin digging out while wearing shorts!

The snow was heavy and caused a lot of power outages.

Wild turkey visitors. they like the garden remnants.

cozy kittens

They don't mind if it's snowing out!

New little ones

After Flurry passed away the kids really wanted for us to try again and get another kitten to be friends with Felix. It was always the plan to raise two kittens together. I was not so sure about this. It was very time consuming and yes, expensive to get Felix and Flurry started and tend to Flurry's illness and need for extra vet visit and a very limited and expensive diet. Plus I was emotionally drained. Well Hayley in particular was very persistent and a couple weeks later we found ourselves adopting not one but two little barn kittens. They couldn't be more different than Felix and Flurry. These babies were born outdoors and their owner did not even know where the mama cat had hidden the kittens for the first couple weeks. They were about 6 weeks old when we adopted them and their names are Stormy and Rufus. At first Felix did not like these little invaders at all. Now they are best of friends and constant companions, also quite a team of mischief makers!

Field trip to The Fort at No 4

I set up this field trip to coincide with my co-op class and our study of the book Calico Captive and the history or the French and Indian War. It was a fun and educational day. Plan to go back to the Fort for one of their special events or reenactments at some point.

Life Scout

Tristan's been busy with Boy scouting over the summer. There was summer camp, fundraising, a parade and some merit badge work. he also acted as senior patrol leader for camp and a few meetings after the former SPL aged out and went off to college. Tonight was a court of honor where the boys were awarded badges they'd earned at camp and over the summer as well as any new earned ranks. Tristan received 4 merit badges and his life scout rank. The scouts did some skits at the court of honor, watched a slideshow, received awards and the had some refreshments.