Swing Crazy

We get creative with our swinging around here, that's for certain.

And 5 kids for only 2 swings?  

Not a problem!

I love these kids.

we like 'em black

::BlaCkbErRiEs::

picked some today.

with the little 2 while the big 2 were at school.

had to trudge through the ditch to get to the best of them. 

they were sweet.

most of them.

ezra really wanted to wear his (oversized) red shirt and blue overalls

to match a character named Benny from a farm book we read today.

5 seconds after the picture above, jiles fell backward into the water.

he cried.

it was not the warmest water.

i stripped him down to his diaper so he could warm up in the sunshine.

he cried some more.

we ate about a pint of blackberries.

we picked about a quart and put them in our bowl.

.02 seconds after i took the picture above, ezra dropped the bowl.

it landed upside down in the dirt.

when i picked up the bowl it was easy to see that they had pretty much bit the dust.

it would be hard to get them totally clean and edible.

jiles stopped crying and started to eat them.

i quickly put them back into the bowl the best i could, 

hoping to save at least some.

we walked for a bit 

and saw the little bridge that we used to play on earlier in the summer.

we had forgotten about it.

it is now hidden by willows that have grown so tall.

they splashed, bounced on the bridge,

floated the blackberries down the ditch.

then ezra fell in.

he was pretty upset about it.

as his denim dried...

...we swung and loved the sun warming our backs

(and their cold wet legs).

we swung single...

...double...

...and triple.

and the blackberries swam alone...

Sunday Love-y Sunday

  

I LOVE Sunday afternoons.  LOVE them!  Home from church, pull out the earrings, fill the tummies...  

The best are warm Sunday afternoons, like this last one, when we can be outside on the tramp, drawing with chalk, wrestling, cuddling, reading, lounging.  Or on the front porch looking over the creek, listening to it, as we're rocking in the rocking chairs, kids giggling on the swing, and Rancher playing his guitar.  Heaven.  Really.  He feels it too, and looks at me with a smile of contentment.  I can tell he is really happy, like me. 

Kate really wrote all of that - Spencer is just about to finish writing his own name, because Kate didn't...because she was "writing them adding one letter at a time", said she.

Ezra's suns.

Can you grab the stick?

Kate did (with a little help from Daddy).

Ezra.

"I'm putting my feet up here cuz they hurt."

Woohoo, chubby legs Jiles.

3-person swing in the front yard.

{Our computer monitor died last Friday.  Totally died.  It was nice: flat screen; sorta wide; good color.  But it's dead - don't know the reason.  Weston dug our old monitor - circa 1980 - out of the dirty garage.  I am seriously so surprised that it actually came on.  It is horrid.  It is 2 feet deep, at least; it takes up the whole desk, so we have to type with the key pad in our lap.  There aren't any speakers.  The screen is only 13 x 9 1/2 inches big, AND it is super dark, so it is hard to see anything!  It makes photo editing right tricky.  It's annoying, and really not very fun to use.  But since I am a hardcore blogger (ha), I'm posting anyway.  (And, p.s., these pix were taken on the wrong setting on my camera, so they are grainy - I can barely tell on this dark screen...but I still like them...so therefore they are post-worthy, you know, worthy of posting.)}

spider, hot-dogs, and chicky eggs

'Member swinging like thiss

sPiDeR sTyLe s

That was today.

Weenie and marshmallow roast - last night.

(Grandma, Kate, Ezra, Grandpa, Spencer, Jiles)

We've had some sweet weather lately. Super nice. We've been playing outside getting major spring fever.

This week, after gathering the eggs from the hen house, we've been putting them in a basket on the table, instead of the refrigerator, so that we could put them in the incubator to hatch them out.

Kate counting them...

...29.

And here they go into the incubator...

We rotate them 3x a day. I put an X on one side and a O on the other so we can tell if they've been rotated or not.

I broke one egg when I was writing the X ... weak egg! So now there are only 28. They take 21-ish days to hatch, so they should be here around March 27th. We'll (hopefully) have little chicks running 'round on Easter. We've never done this before; cross your fingers that it works.