March 11-17

Some of this week's extra-curricular activities...

Samwise has been busy putting down the wood floor in the room above the garage.

He's been using scrap flooring leftover from when we did the the rest of the house.

He's using alternate sizes, a row of skinny and a row of wider. It looks pretty good. This area is for sewing, crafts and Aragorn's *stuff*.

Since we haven't wanted Pippin involved in the flooring project and into the mess that is up there (a before and after picture will follow... in 10 years when we finish!), we didn't finish putting on the last few stairs. However as usual Pippin had other ideas.

Nothing is safe with Pippin around!

Galadriel and Eowyn bake completely alone for the first time. Their Maternal Grandmother's Yankee Cornbread. It's so nice to have "older" children who can now truly be a help... a bit of training goes a long ways. What may seem to take 10 times longer during the training time, pays off abundantly later!

Signs of Spring! (though we think this is just an icky tent worm)

BIRDS! This is actually only a turkey the children scared out of the woods and they've been here all winter but Aragorn and the children have seen the "first robin's of spring. *I* of course won't see one until closer to the middle of July. I never see them til summer is in full bloom. However as we were driving the other day Aragorn did halt the car to point to one in someone's yard... for my sake. That hardly counts!

Here are a couple deer up by the fence line. One is the "three-legged" deer that's been dragging his bad leg around.

CRANES! Now these are my favorites and I hope they will set up their nest at our place somewhere!

I love the sound they make. I'll even tolerate them in the wee sma's.

For St. Patrick's day we had green shamrock pancakes for breakfast.

And for dinner we had our annual Ruben's. I don't know that we'd ever sit down to a Corned Beef dinner with cooked cabbage *shivver* but we do like rubens! So that is our St. Patrick's Day food. We had some tortilla chips on the side which are very obviously *not* Irish but they were "Hint of Lime" so they did have slight bits of green on them! Ok, so we like tortilla chips! Incidentally home-made rye bread dyed green takes on a rather uncanny color!

UPDATE! Today March 22nd I saw *my* first Robin of Spring! For me this is a phenomonally early experience!