Clare's band performed at the Country Western Show recently.  They sounded very good for a very small (and very young) band!  

Spring!

Our bus driver is the best.  The kids' afternoon bus route was almost 50 minutes long. She suggested dropping the kids off at an intersection a mile from our house after only an 8 minute bus ride.  They walk the mile home and are still back 25 minutes before the bus would go by.  It's been a great arrangement!  I'll sometimes meet them with Kirby if it works for my schedule.  Otherwise Clare keeps an eye on them.

Taking a shortcut home through the field.  Reminds me of Little House on the Prairie.

Scotch & Callie

 Scotch and Callie are our two new kittens.  Queen Callie and Sweet 'n Sassy Scotch.  Callie is beautiful, independent, aloof at times.  But she loves being picked up and snuggled and she likes sleeping in laps.  

Scotch is busy, busy, busy.  Today he made it to the top of our tallest apple tree and thankfully was smart enough to get down on his own.  He'll run around like crazy all over the house and then conk out in a chair or on someone's lap... for hours.

These two cats are the busiest and most playful of any kittens I've seen.  Whether it's genetics or the fact that there's two of them to keep the play instinct alive I don't know. 

Return to Summer: Strawberries!

 We had good strawberry-picking helpers this year!  

Clare's garden is starting to bloom!  The delphiniums really like their new spot close to the house.  

Clare and I went to a local tea shop/restaurant to have a special lunch and all the tea we could drink. Back in the day, they had a little bowl of sugar cubes.  Not as sanitary as little packets of sugar but a lot more fun!

We hatched several rounds of Monarchs this year.  The girls saved 7 Monarch caterpillars from milkweed that was going to get torn up by the phone company as they installed new lines.  

My "Christmas" roses.  This one is from Breck's and is called "Sheila's perfume".  

I fell in love with daylilies this year.  They're so easy to grow and have such gorgeous flowers.  Because they only last a day, you have to enjoy each one as it comes!  

We remembered to water our raspberries this year and had such an amazing crop. The kids were able to sell the extras and make some money.  

November

 In recent news, before I flashback to summer again: 

We've been ice skating most Sunday evenings.  It's the one event all the kids enjoy and want to leave the house for.  We meet one of Clare's friends there, which is what got us started.  

This past Sunday we convinced Lena that she really didn't need the pusher anymore.   

A friend had given some fun treats from her little corner of the world, so the girls helped make a "tea party."

Christmas has started early in this house!  This tree hasn't gotten much use since we moved here and have been able to have real trees.  It's a special tree from my Grandma and it was fun to set it up early and have the lights on when it gets dark at 5 pm.  

Karl and Nora both won the drawing contest in their classes for Veteran's Day.  I don't have a photo of Nora's.  Karl's is below.  

Lena wrote a research report on sea turtles. Her class read their reports to parents who came in to see the hard work the first graders are doing.  

In June, Clare and her cousin went with my dad to an archery conference downstate.  They were able to shoot their bows on a course through the woods with various animal targets.  One of their favorites was an alligator (!). 

In their free time, Grandpa took them to the dunes.  

More fun with chicks!

The girls performed with their Finnish-American dance group at Old Victoria.  

Despite a bit of rain, they still played games and had lots of fun.  Even Matt was dragged into the adult sack race!  

In late June we went to Mackinac Island.  A first for all our kids.  

The ferry was so much fun for them!  We went under the Mackinac bridge.

Ah, the horses!  One of my favorite things about the island.  Also, the ice cream.  And the fudge. 

From the many flavors of handmade ice cream, she picks... vanilla.  

We saved the Fort to do another time.  We were traveling with little nieces who would have been bored, and my dad and Carol, who've been there before. 

We hiked to Arch Rock and Fort Holmes.  

In Grand Marais, Karl had fun jumping off sand dunes.  

Clare's garden is coming along!  The delphiniums really liked that spot.  (These were already several years old, I just transplanted to this new location this spring.)

Horse-drawn wagon ride after Strawberry fest.  Clare had played in the marching band.  

Oh, I just love Lena's face here!  The horse had turned its head to sniff her.  Karl missed out because he was with his cousin and Grandpa at the rodeo all day.  

 

Chicks, gardening, and the Hanka homestead

 Flashback to summer! Ah, green grass!  Right now we have snow on the ground, about an inch or two.  

Lena wanted her own chick this year.  Since we had already ordered our normal amount of chicks, we ended up at Tractor Supply.  You couldn't just buy one, so we came home with four little chicks.  Lena was thrilled. 

Nora was jealous so she used her own money to buy two of the chicks we already owned.  Ha.  It didn't do any good to tell her she didn't have to pay for them - she wanted the chicks to be HERS.  

Making houses kept the girls entertained for quite awhile and even the big kids had to come check it out.  The chicks seemed to enjoy their cardboard abodes.

Clare helped plan and plant our foundation planting this spring/early summer.  We had started a lot of perennials from seed and had some annuals to put in too. 

In May, I chaperoned the elementary field trip to the Hanka homestead.  This little door leads to their enormous root cellar.  I was a bit jealous as we haven't a good place to store root vegetables during the winter.  

Lena learned how to use an old-fashioned phone.  Although now the rotary phone I grew up with would be old-fashioned to them! 

I love how simple and tidy this kids' room is with no piles of stuffed animals or clothes scattered everywhere!  But the boards on the ceiling show the points of the nails from the roofing - I'm sure it was freezing up here in the winter. 

TN Trip

Over spring break, we traveled to Kentucky (Mammoth Cave) and Tennessee.  We had an interesting start to our trip when we ran into 12 inches of wet, heavy snow 1.5 hours into our drive.  It was a rough 16 miles of driving in the tracks left by pickup trucks, our van scraping the snow underneath.  Of course we had taken the snow tires off for our trip.  

We managed to white-knuckle it to Florence, WI where we pulled into a gas station's parking lot and decided to wait.  We learned that of the 3 plows on the road, 2 were stuck and a car was stuck on the very road we needed to drive down.  We were advised to sit tight.  After two hours of waiting in the van, a plow truck finally roared by.  I've never been so glad to drive behind a plow truck! 

We were a little behind schedule after that, but the rest of the drive went smoothly. 

We were supposed to stay in a quaint woodland cottage, but changed our plan last minute to stay in the park's hotel-like rooms instead.  The cottages had no heat or insulation and the temperature was predicted to be 34 degrees that night!  I was very grateful for the heat and the kids got to watch cartoons in the morning.  Win-win.  

At Mammoth Cave, we took the 2 mile historic tour.  The kids loved it.  

Some of the stairways were pretty tight!

Fat Man's Misery was the favorite part, squeezing through a narrow passage for quite a long way. 

Mammoth Dome: 

The Eastern Redbuds were about the only thing in bloom in Kentucky and northern Tennessee. So beautiful. 

In Tennessee, we stayed in a two bedroom cabin at a KOA with a year-round heated pool and lazy river. 

It might spoil me for regular camping!  We had two bathrooms and a kitchen in our cabin.  So convenient.  

The first day there we explored the Titanic Museum.  Each of us got a boarding pass with the name of a real person aboard the Titanic.  The kids really enjoyed the museum, although it was different than we all had anticipated.  We walked up the grand staircase, listened to a self-guided audio tour, and learned a lot about the different people aboard the ship.  

If it were summer, the low area behind the kids would be filled with water, and water would be spraying up from the ship's bow.  

Nora had fun learning how to write messages in Morse code.  

One of my favorite things was hiking in the Smokies.  The older kids enjoyed it too.  The 6 year old liked complaining about the steep trails and the many steps and how long it was taking to get there.  

Arch Rock on the Alum Cave trail.  

If you look closely, you can spot the "eye of the needle" in the rock jutting up.  

Alum Cave Bluff.  This was a neat spot! 

Cataract Falls, a very short hike.  Lena ran the whole 3/4 mile with Karl, just shortly after finishing such a looooong and hard hike to Alum Cave Bluff.  

Photo credit: Nora  :)

We spent Tuesday at Dollywood. I wasn't expecting it to be SO busy.  85 degrees and spring break meant a lot of people.   From 10am to 12 we only went on 2 rides, the lines were that long!  The kids got to try a few roller coasters (everyone liked them but Lena) and a few other rides.  I waited in line for an hour to get food.  So crazy!  

By 6 pm we were all hot and sick of standing in line. Even though the park was open til 8 we decided to go back and swim.  

Blazing Fury: a roller coaster in the dark. 

On Wednesday, we hiked the Chimney Tops trail in the Smokies.  The quiet woods was a relief after the busyness at Dollywood.  Lena preferred Dollywood over hiking.  

Lena was relieved to finally make it to the top of the Chimney Tops hike.  We couldn't actually go to the summit (in the distance) because it was closed due to unstable rocks after a fire. 

This was the more strenuous of the two hikes.  And Lena sure let us know it!  1400 feet of elevation gain in less than 2 miles.  The trail was gorgeous with bridges, little creeks, and stairs that looked like works of art.  

Matt and Karl had just finished reading Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard.  It tells of Danny trying to get through mountain laurel to shoot a wolverine that was a danger to his prized dog.  Karl tried climbing through laurel.  It's not easy!

Getting a parking spot at Clingman's Dome was almost impossible!  First we waited in slow-moving traffic on the road up.  The parking lot was completely full, and cars wanting a spot drove very slowly through the lot hoping someone would leave.  We got lucky as two people hopped in their car right as we were approaching.  Whew!

View from Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the Smokies.  Supposedly one can see 7 states from the top.  The kids thought it was neat that they were actually in North Carolina as they hiked to the Dome.  

Clare and Matt wave from the Dome.   We tried not to linger too long, as we knew people were waiting for parking.  

The girls got to hold parrots at our KOA.  A man comes every Thursday to drum up business for Parrot Mountain.  The bird were so calm, friendly, and beautiful.  (We left the pool to see the birds so the girls are wrapped in towels.)  The bird Clare was holding was an African Grey which made door bell and phone sounds and a cat call while sitting on Clare's shoulder.  

 

On Thursday we took a trolley into Gatlinburg.  We had anticipated getting out there and walking around but it was such a crazy tourist-trap that we just rode the trolley back to go swimming again!  It gave Nora a chance to grab a quick nap.  

Dinner was an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, kind of like Pizza Ranch but without the ice cream.  

Karl chose macaroni-and-cheese pizza.  I didn't know that was a thing!

On the way home we drove through MI to avoid Chicago rush hour traffic.  It was the first time across the Mackinac bridge for our little girls and Karl and Clare were too young to remember their last time across.  The kids were really good in the vehicle, only four super-quick stops on the 16 hour drive home. 

All in all, it was a fun vacation.  Kirby (the dog) was very glad to see us again and Ravi (the cat) has been following me around for several days, seeking attention.  My brother took care of our critters while we were gone, and Kirby stayed at his house.  It was much easier animal-wise (and garden-wise!) to take a spring break trip rather than a June trip!