This Abundant Life: Country life

Life in the country is busy. I should have realized that before we moved - that things would be really busy. In a way I did, because obviously unpacking and moving in can take awhile. But I didn't realize that the fertile soil in our garden would produce thigh-high weeds and I forgot how much more time it takes to mow a bigger lawn and I wasn't thinking how crazy things would get when we were out of town for much of June. We came back to ants (fun, fun) and those tall, tall weeds that have slowly been getting subdued with many hours in the garden by both Matt and I. Plus, I want to get the kids to the beach and take them exploring in the woods (because summer in the U.P. is short and we need to enjoy it while we can).

There's something about pines and blue skies that make me think Isle Royale. :-)

I love this little swing in an old apple tree.

Here's a very early picture of our garden when it was just tilled and there were no weeds.

There's a lot more mud in the country than we had in town!

This sweet kiddo goes thru several clothing changes each day.

Now onto some adventures. Here are a few photos from a trip to the pond earlier in June.

Clare had fun making a wildflower bouquet.

Sadly, this may have been Clare's first time climbing a tree. How could I have let that happen?!

Looking for tadpoles.

The tadpoles.

We've seen all the stages in a toad's life. First we saw the adults mating (the kids really didn't know what was going on) and long strings of eggs in the pond. Then we found the tadpoles. Several weeks later we found thousands of toadlets. So cute.

Karl's favorite outdoor past-time is playing with water.

Walking home through the field.

Clare LOVES playing in the tall grass. (Tick checks every night...)

Chickens are an adventure themselves. It's been so fun to see our girls free-ranging all over the yard.

Our three breeds in their run.

Out wandering in the yard. We now know why our lawn is so nice here with all that good fertilizer...

Clare shows the Orpingtons and Reds a treat. The girls love clover.

The Orps are our most friendly chickens but they're getting harder to catch.

Karl feeds an Orp.

Nora is such an animal lover. She gets so excited about her "chick-chicks".

And we discovered that they're not all girls. Somehow we ended up with a rooster: see the big comb and wattle? He'll likely become chicken soup this fall. We have neighbors with roosters and they're plenty loud from far away. In the meantime, it's fun listening to him try to crow. He's very awkward and abrupt about it, a long way from "cock-a-doodle-doo" (which is not actually what they say, of course, but I can't even decide how to phonetically write what our rooster does say).

Adventure to the northwest corner:
This was our first time exploring this section of our property, probably for good reason. It's thick and brushy and rather miserable once the mosquitoes found us. But before that we stumbled across a wild strawberry field - yum, yum!

First we waded through the tall grass. Karl wanted a piggy back ride.

Searching for strawberries.

Tiny but delicious!

Into the thick woods.

Next adventure: to the woods just west of the house. I gave the kids "Explorer Bags" and they had a great time. We went during Nora's nap which was a little unfortunate because she would have loved it. We'll take her next time. It takes about twenty steps to get to these woods (I feel so incredibly spoiled living here) so it's a place the big kids can play unsupervised.

Into the woods. The light spot behind Clare is our front yard. Again, I feel so spoiled.

Our red pines. I love, love, love being able to leave my house and in less than thirty seconds be in these woods.

My little explorer. He put pinecones and pine needles and bark pieces from the ground in his bag. Later, he and Clare pooled their collections to build a "city" in the front yard.

Clare took her saw into the woods and cleared the way for us. (Not really - she still hasn't gotten the hang of sawing but she likes to pretend she knows how.)

This picture was taken on the northeast corner of our property. We went for a walk one evening looking for old fence posts which mark the borders of the property. We were excited to find that a nice big oak looks to be on our land. :-)

My least fun adventure lately has been unpacking. It's so hard to unpack and organize when it's sunny outside. It's even harder to decide where things should go in this new house. Here are a few pictures from earlier in June of our house.