Mountain Mama

Busy Week, Busy July

 

Owen is staying at her Grandma's all week, so that she can go to her day camp. Mom called after dropping her off this morning and said she was so excited she ran in without a glance back and started chattering away to anyone and everyone.

Excited she may be, but her family already misses her. This will be the longest period of time we've ever been away from her. Ever. In five years. She'll be gone a week. Sigh.

As much as we'll miss her, I think it'll be good, too, for her and for Barrett. We hope to spend some quality one-on-one time with Barrett this week, something she sadly doesn't get much of. We plan to take her to the library, the park, on a short driving trip, to her music class (which starts this week for the next six).

Also, Paul will have to go to graduate school three days. And since it's such a long drive, that means he'll be gone those days most all day. I'm not complaining. He's on a special project and he's been very much available this summer for fun stuff (like visiting with our friends last week). And, presumably it'll be easier for me since I'll be down to one kid.

I do have some projects I want to get working on myself, so I hope you'll forgive me if I take a mini break from the blog this week. I'll post a Wordless Wednesday, but will likely not have anything else until the weekend. Please come back, though, and check in with me.

The rest of July is bound to be busy as well: we have weekly music class for both children, a weeklycreative program for Owen at our church, two weeks of swim lessons at the end of the month, a birthday party for one of Owen's preschool friends, and, hopefully, a camping trip squeezed in there. Not to mention Bele Chere at the end of the month.

Looks like we're going from a quiet, mostly at-home summer to a go-go-go summer. Even so I hope to have plenty of down time for the girls, and for us. I think it's important for us to just be together without a plan or agenda, especially as the fall semester is bound to be a very full one (Owen starting Kindergarten, our new nanny situation for Barrett, I may be taking a class or two, Paul is going to try going full time at school while staying full time at work with new responsibilities).

So, I think I will take advantage of our week with only one kid to recharge, renew, and work on my own things.

I do miss my girl, though.

Happy Weekend, and it's only Friday

What I'm loving already on this long holiday weekend ::

 

:: A visit from this cute little fella and his three lovely sisters :: friends we haven't seen in too too long :: baby toes in the grass ::

 

:: Owen showing off her garden to our friends :: happy harvesting ::

 

:: Giant zucchini (turn your back on those suckers for a day and they get too big!) = zucchini bread for all ::

 

:: Sunflowers at my front door, greeting all who visit :: 

 

:: Back to Deep Creek to show the river to our friends :: picnic and tubing and river play ::

 

:: Collective castle-building :: Four girls playing happily together ::

 

:: Independence :: two ways ::

Have a safe and happy weekend.

Could she be another Eric Carle?

I've talked before on this blog about Owen's art--how she describes herself as an artist, how she will choose art over other activities. One thing I don't think I've mentioned yet, however, is that her favorite, or most used technique, is paper collage. This is nothing new for her, really. Over the last year or so, she has created a number of collage creatures--beginning with the Tyrannosaurus Rex (below) and moving on through butterflies, turkeys, a giraffe named Flower and her baby giraffe, Alice. She's made American flags, a field of flowers with a ladybug in it, and numerous birds, all from cut pieces of paper, glue (or tape), and crayons or markers, sometimes even cardboard.

Lately she's really shown increased creativity and skill with her chosen art form.

I deliberately did not plan much structured activity for the first half of the summer, choosing instead to focus on downtime and family time. As such, we've had many days to fill with play, or art, or whatever moves us. And yes, the children have watched DVDs nearly every day, but not all day. And not to the exclusion of other things, like playing in the yard or working in the garden or running through sprinklers or building castles from the couch cushions or simply blowing bubbles. Or doing art.

Owen, in fact, has been quite prolific this summer with her art. Here are just a few examples of some of the paper crafting she's been doing:

• Barrett one day was playing with a plastic lion and calling it a dragon. Owen decided that what we are missing in our collection is a toy dragon, so she set about making one for her sister. She used a Solo cup, paper, tape, and crayons. After she finished the first one, naming it "Solo" of course, she decided to make a whole herd of dragons, including "Flower Dragon" and "Heart Dragon".

 

• After the dragons, she moved on to making a flock of birds from the rest of the Solo cups. Cardinals, of course.

• She made a paper person but became frustrated in her attempts to make the person a cardboard chair and have her sit without bending so she threw the person away. I fished her out of the trash, telling Owen that even if she didn't want her I did because I really liked her. That spurred Owen on to making a chair, a bed, a pillow, a sleeping hat, a companion (a man dressed in his "work clothes", meaning a tie), a chair and bed for the man, and a car with a garage to put it in. All of which she taped to my bedside table.

• While we were trying to figure out how to create a chair for the person, above, Owen decided that one of our attempts looked more like a tiny beach chair, so she made an ocean scene on a piece of paper (beach, water, waves) and taped the beach chair to it, then made more beach chairs to sit beside it, taped the whole thing to the living room side table, and placed her Little People people on them. "They're at the beach!"

• She made herself a Princess Crown and arm band.

 

• She took a small cardboard box I had, took it into her room with the paper, crayons, a scissors, and worked for nearly an hour turning the box into a surprise for me. On the side of the box she wrote "Mom" and she filled the inside with cutout images of my "favorite things" like my favorite flower (daisy), my favorite bird (apparently it's a duck, who knew?), and my favorite food (kumquats, or so Paul told her).

• One day while Paul was mowing, she worked for a while at the kitchen table, then rushed outside with a wooden box and a rolled up paper under her arm. She had made the box a treasure chest (filled with gold coins--little pieces of yellow paper) and she hid it in the flower bed. Then she handed Paul a treasure map and helped him use it to find the chest.

• Today I bought her some craft popsicle sticks. She decided to make a house for Chirp (of Peep and the Big Wide World). In one episode of that show (one we haven't seen in a long while because the DVD is from the library), Chirp decides to build a nest, and so constructs a house on a tree limb. Only Chirp's house is unstable and falls down. Owen wanted to build Chirp's nest "so it won't fall down". It took about 45 minutes of focused work, two rolls of Scotch tape, some tears, and several popsicle sticks, but she did it. She then made a paper Peep, Chirp, and Quack to go in the house. Before she went to bed she promised to make Peep's house and Quack's pond tomorrow.

Oh there's a bunch more. The shark. The owl. The bald eagle and baby eagles in the nest that I featured on another post. The swan family. The duck family. The ladybug with a hand reaching for it. The flower stickers. The rainbow door decoration. The cat mask and tail. The alligator mask. The rhinoceros beetle (seriously, she said that).

 

Maybe, just maybe, she's another Eric Carle in the making. Regardless, I love seeing her creative mind working. And I'm glad I've given her the space this summer to explore on her own.

She's going to love her art camp next week.

Wordless Wednesday

 

What we did instead

I should know better than to make declarations of plans on my blog. Seems every time I do, I end up going back on it. Sigh.

So...we did not end up camping out after all. We were too tired from our fun day at one of our favorite places with my aunt, my cousins, and their kids. I figure it's okay because even though we didn't camp, we were outside in the woods (National Park even) all day long.

Here are some of my favorite shots. I should have more up on Flickr by the end of the day (I hope).

    

Fun day :: fun weekend.

Weekend Event

This weekend we'll be participating in the National Wildlife Federation's Great American Backyard Campout.

What about you? Will you "Be Out There"? Go ahead. It's fun!

You say it's your birthday

 

Well it's my birthday, too! I'm celebrating by taking some time to myself--went to the library, the bookstore, and now am sitting in the coffee shop working on my new Dell laptop computer (thanks to my sweetie--for the computer and for the time alone).

Add to that the happy birthday greeting I received this morning from my sweet gals and I am having a truly happy day.

Wordless Wednesday

Happy Father's Day

In honor of father's day (and of my dad), I am not posting much today. Instead I will give you a link to a post I wrote for my other blog last year--about fishing with my dad. He took Owen out for the first fishing trip of the year this weekend. Got rained out in the Wal-Mart parking lot as they were buying Owen the pink Barbie fishing rod she insisted upon. The next day they had better success with the weather but not so much with the fish, although the highlight of the day was that they saw a water snake eating a trout. Cool stuff.

I do have a post I want to write about the girls and my dad, about his living next door. But that'll keep another day as my busy week is now catching up with me.

Go here and read this post for father's day, and think of my wonderful dad.

 

Love is...

The other day I was standing on the porch talking with Paul as he was loading the truck to go to the dump. How romantic, don't you think? Actually, it was, kind of. We were joking and laughing with each other (as we often do).

When I came into the kitchen, I was smiling and Owen noticed.

"What?" she said.

"Oh nothing, sweetie. Daddy and I were just flirting."

"What's flirting?" she asked, not taking her eyes up from her drawing.

"It's when we say sweet things and joke together and tease each other and laugh together."

"Oh," she said, and then she looked up. "People who are in love laugh together all the time, don't they?"

"Yes," I said as she went back to her work, already forgetting our conversation.

Later, I relayed her insight to Paul. "You know," he said, "Of all the lessons we could be teaching her about love, that's a pretty good one."

Indeed.