Waiting on the storms

After whining a bit this morning, I feel like I need to come back and give an update on our really good day today. When the big girls woke up, Mary decided she wanted to back some muffins for our breakfast. Which she did totally independent of my help. Then she packaged up some to share with our neighbor. The very same neighbor she made a pizza for Sunday night.

Once I was no longer necessary inside to oversee the oven use, I took Robbie and Emily outside while Mary and Katie worked on some bead art projects. They ran around while I finally got to putting my new blueberry, raspberry and blackberry plants in the ground. In the area I wanted to plant the blackberry I actually found some wild blackberry shoots, so I am hoping that it will be a good spot for the plants.

We totally took advantage of the 70-degree weather by staying outside up until lunchtime. Katie loves being able to ride her bike and being able to 'go as fast as Mary'.

Once we had lunch and got the littles down for their naps it began to rain on and off. I am glad we got our outside time in early. It was a good time to pull out the books. We read "Life in a Village", a history book about what a village was like during the colonial period and how people produced the goods they needed. It was an excellent lesson on what makes a community. The girls then took turns reading to me, Katie is willingly branching away from her readers to read me a variety of books.

I did have Mary run through a couple on-line games at IKnowThat targeting capitalization and punctuation rules. In a couple of months she has to take the IOWA test and I know that it will be on there and I also know it isn't anything we have spent a lot of time on. Surprisingly (for me) she did very well. Now I know that she has managed to pick up this information here and there and that eases my mind a bit. We will do more in this area over the Spring so that she can be comfortable with this at testing time.

This evening Mary caught me getting ready to dispose of the chicken parts (heart, liver, etc.) from the chicken I am roasting for dinner. She decided that we needed to dissect them. And she did. I helped identify the different pieces on the internet, but she did all the cutting. Pictures follow for the non-squeamish. After she was done with what she considered a "Cool" activity she diced them up and is going to feed them to the dogs with their dinner tonight.

Now I'm just waiting for our bad storms to hit. It will be a high-heart rate night for me...I HATE severe thunderstorms.

Pictures coming - click away or scroll fast if you don't care to see what is normally packaged in a chicken cavity.

The fun never ends around here.

Peace,

Amy