At Home in the Mountains

 It's practically been a nature preserve around here for the past few weeks. For her birthday, Maddy got a cup of caterpillars. One of our friends at DBU gave it to her. The caterpillars come in a plastic dixie cup kind of thing with a lid. The lid is covered with a thin paper on the inside. The cup comes with enough food to feed the caterpillars until they form a chrysalis. The crawl to the top of the cup and attach themselves in their chrysalis to the paper on the lid. When all the caterpillars have done this, you remove the paper with the chrysalises and attach it with a pin the side of a butterfly habitat. After a few days, the butterflies emerge inside the habitat. Maddy loves watching the butterflies. She checked on them every day. She named them Hermie, Snail-y, Mickey Mouse, and Minnie Mouse. One of Aaron's students raises butterflies so she told us about some ways to get pics of Maddy holding a butterfly without the butterfly flying away. We had a coupon for 5 more c

Spring and croquet just go together! Sorry for the sideways video. I can never remember which way my phone needs to go to record it right side up. Fortunately I now have a cordless electric mower than makes mowing the croquet lawn a cinch! I highly recommend if you are looking for a new mower. Our behemoth, noisy, hard to push, overheating, die after five minutes of mowing and refuse to restart mower finally bit the dust at the end of last mowing season. Our new mower is quiet enough to hear people talking while mowing and light weight and easy to push. Looking forward to lots of good mowing time with this baby!

 It's been several weeks of nothing but birthday. First me, then Maddy, and yesterday, Aaron. With Easter thrown into the mix as well, we are pooped from partying. The party for Maddy started on Thursday when she took cupcakes to her class at school and had an Easter egg hunt, all in the same day.  This is a random pic of a "beautiful bouquet" of weeds Maddy picked from the backyard. She is telling her bunny to say cheese for the camera.  Friday we did egg dying. Maddy loved it as usual. We went a bit overboard this year with 12 colors of dye and a total of 32 eggs. I was going to do 18 but Aaron thought we were wasting dye so he boiled another dozen for us to color.  I think Maddy likes eating the eggs as much as she likes dying them. What a little ham.  Saturday was the big 0-4! Maddy requested an "Abbey and Houdini chasing a bunny" cake. Tam and I put our heads together and came up with one. She loved it.  We combined Easter/Spring decor w