The new year has brought bread making with sprouted flour (a real hit in our home!), a gingerbread house completely made from scratch being finally finished *yay! and yum!*, and finishing up of the healing salve (and giving some away :)).
Snowfalls of late gave way to sledding and cave digging where the workout required kept them warm outside in frigid and windy temperatures!
Handiwork and project making led to quiet, focused time. I love the ‘non-sound’ of it all.
It’s been a full few weeks of lovely, wonderfully, juuuuust right moments!
I have so many images that I have yet to edit and post but many of them are over a year old! I enjoy sharing our ‘goings-on’ on the blog because I love scrolling through and seeing what the year was like, what we did, where we went, and friends and family we spent time with. It’s all so wonderful for me!
I decided to create a Throw Back Thursday blog post. I am hoping this will give me incentive to edit all of those images!
Last July we made our yearly visit to Pictou Lodge Resort. We all love the resort and look forward to the next year’s visit before the current one is over!
There is so much family that comes along that there is always someone to chat with, play with or swim with! It’s a ton of fun for kids and adults alike!
Fun playing basketball with the cousins. The ladder toss game is the first things the boys run to. These hammocks are placed throughout the resort and we just love them. It’s the perfect spot to just chill and watch family play the games. The boys were really keen to try the new paddle boards at the resort. Instead of standing they decided to sit on the boards and use the kayak paddles to maneuver. I think they would have stayed on them all day if they could! A lot of swimming was had at the salt-water pool. We laugh every time we go to the pool because it’s most often busy with just our family. One year we took a family photo and there were 97 people! 97! Wow! For the first time ever we saw a blue heron during our visit! We saw it fly overhead when we first arrived and I was thrilled to see it stayed around long enough for me to take some pictures of it on the beach. I swear I did not saturate the greens in this one bit. Aren’t they amazing? Love that bird too! You just cannot go to the beach without skipping stones! Finding skipping stones is hard work! The boys are big into Nerf and so this cool piece of driftwood happened to make its way home with us. I think that particular stone may have too. Eventually you have so many stones and sticks around the house you forget where they came from! This fire pit was a new addition last year and we were all too eager to put it to the s’mores test! There’s always at least one marshmallow that catches on fire. I’m not sure it’s all by accident, either. 😉 These are the best vegan marshmallows. So so good!How often do you get to play checkers like this! If you go to the Pictou Lodge home page there is a video ad where you can see us playing checkers! We had a good laugh when a relative told us about it. His kids happened to be in the pool portion of the ad. Yes, there are a lot of us. 🙂 The sunsets. My goodness. This one is just a hint at what you get. They can be just amazing. On the Saturday night a hefty portion of family get together for a sing along complete with instruments. It is now the boys’ absolute favourite part of the weekend. Plus, they get to stay up super late! These orb weavers were very cool – and very busy with their dinnertime ‘guests’. Goodnight Pictou Lodge. Until next year…
We had a wonderful day yesterday, a lovely Solstice and Christmas as well.
A dear friend of mine bought us this beeswax cancel for Solstice. Every year we say what we are thankful for and look back on last year’s wish list and make another. It just goes to show the power of intention because most of our wishes from last year came true and we hadn’t even looked at the list we made last year until this Solstice!
I finally got around to finishing my fire cider (all bottled and with a kick!) and doing the third round on my bee balm glycerine. I just love the colour that the glycerine is turning!I don’t do much baking. I actually hate baking. But I love this cookie press that my mother used to use to make us cookies as kids. It’s dear to my heart and quickly becoming our own tradition.
Christmas Eve is always an exciting time and never passes without reading The Night Before Christmas from this beautiful book! Christmas Day proved to be so mild that I was thrilled about not having socks on my feet! Snow is a beautiful thing but I gotta say, bare feet are pretty awesome too! There are always Christmas Crackers to pop! Oui Oui!The boys received a few games and we all had a great time with this one. Qwirkle rocks! Even our little Gypsy received a gift. *I think she likes it!* whispered*On the 27th we had a storm and the boys took no time in throwing on their layers and getting out there!Candy cane precision.We had a wonderful new year celebration just the four of us. The boys stayed up and we rang in the new year together with some Minecraft fireworks that L made. He even made seats for us to sit in to watch the display. I can barely build and they do this! We took a screen shot in front of the banner that Xman made. Here we are in our MC skin glory!Of course today we had to toast to a wonderful new year! The boys have sparkling peach apple juice and we have mimosas. Yum! I am all ready for January! I even painted a calendar for this month and plan on doing one for every month this year. They are sized to fit perfectly into my Leuchtturn1917. Love it! If you want to download a copy for yourself just hop on over to my art blog! Here’s to a wonderful 2016 and more posting! 🙂
Yes, I see the last time I posted over here was in July. My goodness!
Truth is that I hate editing photos and I would rather being doing other things. But, one of the main reason I have this blog is for family that lives in other places and for us, as a keepsake. So today I grabbed some photos from the past month to show what we have been up to.
I have a bunch of photos to edit from our summer vacation but they are on my big camera (my real camera as I call it!) and it’s just a matter of sitting down and editing. It’s always hard when you try to edit your own pics and decide what to show when you want to show it all! Maybe later this week–it’s only been four months after all!
We got back into the swing of lessons and some winter prep with herbal concoctions. Plus I got some time to do a bit of other things with the boys and for myself.
There are a lot of photos:
Busy with herbs. Tis the season!Love our sunsets! Happy!The season for knitting!We have spent many a day outside enjoying the fall weather.Pretzel making!The Lunar Eclipse was a big deal for us. The boys stayed up late to watch. Totally worth it! The moon the morning after the eclipse.Lessons!More fun outside.Love all of the colours!Trying to catch the leaves as they fall. Chipmunk! Feeding the chickadees is a favourite pastime of ours. It never gets old!We love the hemlocks at our local park. So big and beautiful!We went to a friend’s house and picked cranberries in her back yard! How cool is that! Thanks, Dawn! xxLove Dawn’s yard. There is always many a treasure to be found.My bit of time to make some fun art. (more on my blog)Birthday Lego making together. 🙂New socks!More outdoor fun!Halloween fun!Splatoon Inklings! I had to take a quick pic as they rushed from house to house!Brains! Who doesn’t love Pop Rocks?!Weekday mornings. Someone always end up getting rolled up in the yoga mat – yoga sushi!Minecraft Lego table making!It’s always a lot of fun outside. The boys loved raking the leaves and even went out to do it of their own accord. This may be why…it’s fun to bag them…or fun to play with the bag!They also decided to whittle the hammers they made a while ago so that the handles were rounds and then filed smooth. Love this stuff.With all the leaves we collected I decided to frame them. I love how they look. Nighttimes consist of games of all kinds. 🙂Home made bread. Oh man, that’s good. Eek! The Eyes of Cthulhu!One of our bridges is being completely redone without closing it down. Amazing, right? He loves tamari almonds and loves making them almost as much! These are a couple of big camera pics – as in the real thing and not my phone. Love these guys.
Hope you’ve had just as wonderful a fall season as we have. Yesterday we got our first taste of snow. It was a quick one and nothing stayed on the ground but still exciting and beautiful.
This week was all about bugs for us as we are joining along in the Mud Puddles Summer Nature Camp! The camp is spread over a month and each week there is a different focus. This first week was all about bugs! It’s always fun to hit the outdoors and see what we can find!
The boys really got into drawing and labeling bug parts after reading about bug anatomy in the Summer Camp pdf. Later in the we learned about making a bug hotel! There were some great ideas posted onto the Mud Puddles Pinterest board. The boys had a great time hunting around for bit of bark, twigs, pine bundles and dead leaves.We had a great time with the first week of the Nature Camp and the boys were excitedly asking what we would be doing for the next week!
Other goings-on: I have had a pile of my husband’s old t-shirts laying around waiting to be repurposed into a rug. This was one of my tasks for this week and the boys helped me with the prep. Well, they kind of helped! Ha! I cut up strips of t-shirt and they pulled on the strips until they curled in on themselves and then rolled them into a ball – or onto each other. Fun! I wish I had counted how many t’s I had before cutting them up. It would have been nice to be able to gauge how many t-shirts it takes to make a certain size rug. I’m guessing there were about 12-15. And so it begins! I will post the final rug next week. Xman was interested in learning to crochet as he sat next to me watching. He caught on quickly and will be helping me finish the rug. 🙂 While mowing the lawn this week I happened upon some little mushrooms as we have a lot of shade in our yard. I decided to pick a couple and make some mushroom prints. I wasn’t sure which colour of spores these wee ones would have so I used a sheet of black and a sheet of white paper.
We also spotted these love bugs…on our hike yesterday. Amazing colours! Wow!
Yesterday we decided to take a morning hike along the Salt Marsh Trail. The trail extends for many kilometres and there are many parking areas along the trail depending on where you want to hike. We decided to make it a short walk as we ended up getting out just before noon and it was already hot.
It was a beautiful walk and I am glad that I brought my DSLR to take some photographs. The quality far, far outweighs my handy phone or even point and shoot. I get lazy though, some days and want to travel light. The camera backpack made the walk that much hotter but it was worth it.
This part of the trail consisted of mostly wooded areas so we super sprayed on the diy bug deterrent. X-man loves the ferns and so do I so I needed to take a quick pic of them all gathered together. So pretty. At one point in the trail the woods open up and you see Cole Harbour. What a beautiful site. I asked the boys to hold back so I could take this shot. I love all of the wildflowers in our area, from the buttercups and horse vetch to the lupins (now fading) and daisies. Plus, the little islands that are scattered about our province as so lovely. We happened upon these hug dandelions – at least that what I figure they were but the seed pods were as big as the one of the boys’ fists!Love spotting the wild irises!
It was a great week that ended nicely with our walk. We were happy to head back, though, to the coolness of our home because the heat and bugs were getting to be too much. The rest of the day was spent tending to the garden, drawing and watching a movie.
Stephen was waiting for his new Merrill running shoes. He got a hole in the sole early on and Merrill helped him into a new pair – awesome customer service! He was like a child waiting for Christmas day: he kept checking the tracking on the package and when the day came for them to arrive he was looking out the window more often than not in hopes of seeing Joyce, our postal deliverer (she’s awesome!). When Joyce did arrive she joked with him saying she expected to see him in a moment running in his shoes on the next street over!
Arriving a Cleveland Beach with some friends. The best sunscreen. 😉 Okay, so Xman and I found this mushroom and it’s for sure the best find in a long time! Look how big it is! On returning home I found it in our mushroom book as being a fly agaric, it’s poisonous/hallucinogenic. How ironic since I had commented on it being a very Alice in Wonderland ‘shroom that the caterpillar would love! 😉 Seriously, the coolest! I love the rocks, the seaweed, the coral, the shells and more. Always good finds at Cleveland Beach. …and good friends make it even better! 🙂 <3 Dawn and L found this awesome jellyfish on the beach. They are called comb jellies or Sea Gooseberries. I found an interesting article here about them here. When we first made our way to the beach we all had on sweaters or hoodies but once there the sky opened and the weather was beautiful. F found a crab with eggs. Geez she find the coolest things!Fun in the water! Saying goodbye to the mushroom. It was like a beacon along the path. Thank you, Mushroom! Another morning, making the most of the weather: enjoying a bit of breakfast with my basket of things and my bullet journal while listening to the birds sing. At one point I got up to survey the garden and saw a spider’s web alight in a neighbour’s tree. At another angle I wouldn’t have seen it!
Car wash!Fun with Dixie Cups!
The boys are getting used to their new bikes and the best place near us (since we live on a narrow street with rushing cars!) is the nearby parking lot. The day went from sun to rain quickly but the boys were having too much fun to stop and the rain was warm. The pavement had been hot from the day’s sun so when the rain came it started to condensate on contact. Very cool! My witchy Willow ordered from the local comic book store. The boys love Lumberjanes so we are in there on a regular basis. If you haven’t heard of this comic book series you should check it out. It’s great for kids (I laugh my head off!) and all about the girls! We visited a friend at work and the boys got to test out a demo toy to see how well they could understand the directions and construct it before it went out to stores. Very cool stuff! Plus, she showed us their cool 3-D printer! A relaxing evening at home. Love. Happy Canada Day fireworks! It’s hard to see but just to the left of the fireworks is a white dot in the sky – that’s Jupiter. Venus is hiding behind it all. Some hopscotch fun at the local ToysRUs… …a little Pikachu drawing…
…and more hopscotch.
We had a great week and we hope you did too! Again, if you’d like to share post your link in the comments!
We had a wonderful day today at Oakfield park as part of Dawn’s Forest Friday group where we get together and learn about nature while going on a walk through the woods. It’s always a lot of fun for the boys and myself – I always have my trusty iPhone and rubber band macro handy (so much easier than my DSLR for these kinds of things!).
Warning: I took many photos and most of them are included! So fun!
Since reading Gathering Moss I find I am more in love with mosses if that’s possible. Lady Slippers! I love Nova Scotia for its abundance of this beautiful orchid – you just have to know where to look… I am a big rock lover and in turning one over I found some busy ants. I think I made them busy by exposing them! They hurriedly carried all the babes into their underground home. Mama was a big one and was the first to disappear down the hole! British Soldier lichen Irises – I just love wildflowers! Spiders are the coolest. Dawn created this super fun exercise where we place masking tape (or duct tape) on our wrist or onto a sheet of paper sticky side out. Then we find flowers, acorns, whatever strikes our fancy and stick them on. I enjoyed this so much that I wore my ‘bracelets’ into the grocery store and Tim Horton’s afterward!Lightening bugs mating! Summer is the season of love…! 😉 This guy was hanging around the lovers. I dare say he was quite the voyer! I bought a bird/nature journal a couple of weeks ago. I could have used a basic journal but this one has some great quotes and nest illustrations in it so I couldn’t help myself. I think I will use it for a flower press too and then write down what happened on that specific day. 🙂 A wee little daddy longlegs. I love this guy. He hung out on my thumb for a long time. We played together: I would gently raise his leg and he would hold it there. I’d raise it a little further and he’d still hold it there. I’d lower it down and he’d again hold it there. I think he was humouring me (simple human…). Mushrooms! Love mushrooms! I haven’t checked the type of this one yet but had to show a couple of photos for details of the gills… …and the webbing across the top… The kids became completely absorbed in playing in the woods and surrounding field – as kids should and it makes me sooo happy! Xman was in the woods and found this dragonfly just coming out of its nymph skin. I have never seen this before. It was THE COOLEST thing I’ve seen in a while. I’m sure I will see something just as cool tomorrow because Nature is that way but for today, this was THE BESTEST. Beautiful life. If you aren’t familiar with Dawn’s Forest Friday and are in the Halifax, Nova Scotia region you can find out all about it here.
She also has a workshop coming up on her and Annie’s Mud Puddles to Meteors site that I am so excited about called Mud Puddles Summer Nature Camp. It’s an online workshop so you can be anywhere in the world and still participate. It’s gonna be awesome! Hope to see you there!
I just finished this book and loved it so much I had to share. I originally mentioned it on my art blog so I did a review post over there too. Click on over if you’d like to read about it. I hope you will. 🙂
One of THE BEST things about living in Nova Scotia is that you do not have to go far at all to find yourself in a natural surrounding. Yesterday morning we went with friends to our usual park and trails and this afternoon to a beach.
Oh, what a great day! I’m pooped! But it was worth it because the weather was amazing and we were in the company of good friends. What could be better?
The water was freezing but that certainly didn’t stop these boys! Digging, digging, digging! I love that they still become so enthralled with sand and all of the things you can create.I found this amazing shell with some coral anchored into the top. Nova Scotia coral is often white and very small.
After taking a good look I had to bring it home to draw. It reminds me so much of a heart with all of its veins and arteries. Goodness, it’s just the coolest.And then there was this guy making the most of an amazing day. Totally.
The water was freezing but that certainly didn’t stop these boys!
