Waiting for Spring

 As I'm writing this, it does feel like spring outside.  Sunny, temps in the mid 50s, and hardly any snow left in our yard or field.  But it took a long time to get to spring this year!  Until just recently it was much colder than average and the snow just didn't seem to be melting.  

Here's how we spent those days. 

My sister's dog had puppies.  Eight Great Pyrenees pups.  So cute. 

We made maple candy with a fresh sugar snow.  We made the kind you pour over snow and we also made a few candies in a chocolate mold.  Those were really good!  

In honor of Palm Sunday, Lena made her own craft of people waving palm branches for Jesus.

I love how she had to cut out the palm branches separately and tape them on.  It's fun to wonder what's going through her head as she works.  She also made a picture of Jesus and strapped Him to our wooden ride-on horse (donkey).  

The kids had such fun dying Easter eggs, especially with the cute forest animal kit Lena picked out.  

Two of Nora's Easter eggs.

Can you spot Karl in the photo below?  On Easter morning the wild turkeys returned to our field.  Matt didn't want them eating all the pasture seed he had spent money on last year so we sent Karl out on his skis with his Nerf gun.  Karl got close enough to actually shoot one on its backside.  They ran off into the woods.  And we haven't seen them on our property since.  

Lena helped dig the last of the garden carrots and found this cute little round one!   (Though that's not actually true - when I was weeding last fall's weeds from the garden beds yesterday I found 3 perfect potatoes and two huge carrots that I had missed.  We ate them for dinner.)  

It's lambing season!  Or was.  All our ewes have lambed.  I'll have to take more cute baby lamb pics this weekend.  

We had a stream running by our house the other day and the kids had a great time damming it up. 

My window sills are getting full of seedlings!  Here are the tomatoes before they were potted up.

Took this little sweetie to a local bakery recently - not much time left for Lena-Mom dates before she starts school next year.  

She told me, "When I'm a mom, I'm going to take my kids to this bakery every day for breakfast."

Oh, it's so fun to listen to how they think things will be when they become moms!

When Nora was that age she said: "When I'm a mom, I'm going to make my kids do ALL the work and I'm going to sit with my feet up and drink coffee and eat cookies!"

Lena helped me scoop onion sets into bags when we went to the Feed store to get potatoes and onions.

Playing in the woods the other day, Lena made a "fort" out of a tree and spied on cars going by.