Beautiful Day

Yesterday was great. The kids had the day off from school and the weather was gorgeous! We had planned on going with a group of friends to Stokoe Farms but since we had gone to Long Acre Farm the day before with family, we were pretty burned out on corn mazes and such.... and we were still recovering from Hudson's 9th birthday party extravaganza... so we hung around at home instead. Hudson spent nearly all day putting together his new Lego sets. He got a lot of new Lego's for his birthday.

Ethan spent a good deal of the afternoon creating his "masterpiece" in chalk on the cement slab that we call our side porch.

He said he was finished, so I took a picture... then he changed his mind and went back to work. I love this version of it though. It looks like a Picasso face, doesn't it?

Cate and I feed the chickens a huge feast! Soy beans and corn from the farmer's fields, tomatoes, a huge zucchini, a rotten pepper, apple slices, carrot greens.... just about anything we could find that they might ingest.
Alex asked me to make her a leaf crown. There is probably a better way to do this, but I just braid the stems together and add a new stem every third "twist" or so... kind of like french braiding.

She and Cate dressed up like "fall fairies" (I made Cate's crown from flowers) and played in the leaves. Alexandra seems so mature sometimes for her nearly 11 years, so it is so nice when she acts childish and lets go and does something like this!

Then to top it all off, when I went out to the compost heap I saw this on a tree. Alex's doing.... warmed my heart!