Kinda, Sorta, Almost Land Barons!

That's the big news around here. We have a contract to buy 7 acres of semi-wooded bliss about five miles north of our current location. It has to be subdivided and lawyered up, so for the next several months we can just draw increasingly elaborate house plans, realize the true cost of said house plan, resign ourselves to living in a double wide for the next thirty year, and then design another house. And spend all laundry-folding time and scrubbing-floor time and staring-out-the-window time thinking about THE LAND and THE HOUSE.

You know how, in all the cute house magazines, the lady sketches her house plan on a cocktail napkin, and a year later, she's moving into that elegant house? Well, obviously, her husband was not a builder. Then the cocktail napkin would have lots of subtractions, and she would hear mutterings about "really important measurements are in multiples of four" or "that window would add $10,000 to the cost" or "there's no way you can put the sink there because of hall clearances" and "blah, blah, blah, blah". Actually, Evan and I have pretty similar ideas about the kind of house we would like to build. Unfortunately, there is still the reality that we have expensive tastes. Not extravagant tastes, just too expensive for our actual budget. Oh, well, I've heard they've really done a lot with double wides lately.

Saturday morning, we skipped out on the mounds of summer clothing that still needed to be folded and put away in drawers, and the winter clothes that were seemingly permanently encamped on the guest room beds, and headed out for Suburban Fun. (I should be clear-- *I* skipped out on the clothes. I doubt it entered much into Evan's calculations for the day.)

We headed up to a state park we'd never been to, about half an hour north of us.  Gorgeous trees, and almost empty of human beans!  Except for our cute little peanuts.

Admiring the tall trees.  At least the people who figured out what Daddy is pointing out.  Lincoln is definitely not getting it.

Lovely-ish trillium.

Evan relaxing.  ("See?" my brain says.  "We really need a large front porch.  And adorable wood rockers.  And maybe a swing.")

The playground.

The twirly seat.

It's pretty much a perpetual motion machine.  Perfect for dizziefying children.

Which is why Evan had to go over and help Elliott off.  The first time.  The second time, Elliott tried to do it himself, did a face plant in the mulch, and bent his thumbnail back.  Tears ensued.

Pigtails always in motion.

Nice swings.  ("Hey, we could have some nice swings hanging off some of our beautiful trees at The Land!")

Then, down to the shore line.  (By a highly precarious, definitely unauthorized path.)

Watching his skipping stone go.
 

This video was shot after Evan announced he had found The Perfect Skipping Stone of the Day.  Naturally, I wanted to get the amazing event on video.  Yeah, he was humbled pretty thoroughly.

Lincoln searching for the perfect rock.

The scenic skyline.  Take THAT, Manhattan.

Another cute stone skimmer.

We should be able to incorporate these beautiful stones in our house somewhere.

Flirting with waves.

Some water-tumbled concrete!

 I was questioning whether the first rock was really concrete, until I saw this second piece, rebar still intact.  We saw later that there had been a sea-wall built in the 1930s, so it's probably remnants from that.

 Doesn't my new camera make all pictures purty?

Even the picture of my poor widdle son's hurt thumb.  This thumb was good for about 45 minutes of sniffles and sobs.

It's a shame Rilla hates being in front of the camera.

Rilla making a cairn.

Kids getting in place to pose with Evan's cairn.

Elliott is "smiling through the tears."  Poor pathetic little boy.

Check this out!  An actual payphone!

It's so quaint and iconic.

This, too, is iconic, but it's hard to carry a portable hydrant, so it's still relevant.

Isn't the spring green just wonderful?

Every Vaughan kid will have to say, at least twice a spring, "Nature's first green is gold, its hardest hue to hold."  I'm glad we had a poetry-spouting Mommy.

The injured boyo, getting a pity piggyback.

What are these green plants?  I remember playing with them in Delaware.  Tyler and I would pick them, and set up a store in what would later become Mom and Dad's bedroom.  We'd separate the stem from the rest of it, and sell pig's tails (the stem) and something else I can't remember.  Cabbage, maybe?  It's seems like it made less sense than that.

Tree stump photo op.

I still need to learn to meter the light better with this camera.

See?  Back-to-back shots where the light varies quite a bit.

My flaming redhead.

Lincoln's favorite perch.

Taking a "shortcut" back to the van.

On the way home, we naturally had to stop in to tromp around The Land.  Here's the corpses of old, old trees, probably felled by the power company.

Explorers!

We WILL save this maple tree, even if the dirt guy has to use silver teaspoons to dig the foundation.

An odd lichen-y lump.  There's several of them scattered around.

There is an old four-wheeler trail heading back into the property.

Some sort of everygreen-y vine that covers the ground.  (I need one of my Paul Smith graduate relatives to come visit and sort me out here!)

There's an open area in the back.

Very sandy, not much grows.

Viney things across the path again.

We have our own stone wall!  Swoon!

It needs a bit of sprucing up, but still!  A stone wall!

There's several old tiers lining the little ridge at the back of the property.  I wish I knew what they had been used for.

Elliott, running for the ridge.

Can't you just picture a Jersey cow, a few pigs, a goat, some chickens, wandering through here?

Yeah, neither can Evan.

Evan can, however, imagine all the maple syrup waiting to be tapped in the abundant sugar maples.

Teaching the kids Maple Sugar Love.

Yet another unidentified tree!

So, that's what's happening in this neck of the woods.

(Woods!  We have woods!!)

May Day

I am sitting in a quiet house, pleasantly tired from a long, busy day.  The whole house smells like sunshine from the nine loads of wash I hung on the line today, and the sight of the folded flannel sheets and electric blanket make me feel all fuzzy with accomplishment.  Of course, not everything got done.  There's unstable piles of folded clothes on the coffee table, and lots of dirty dishes stacked around my kitchen.  To offset that sight, though, there are numerous little weed bouquets strategically placed around the house, picked and arranged by grubby, earnest little fingers.

I always want more time.  The pictures I finally learned to download from my new camera are crying to be put up on this blog.  There's a delicious heap of books on my nightstand, patterns and material down beside my dusty sewing machine, "electronic devices" trying to seduce my late night hours.  I'm glad for times when I can realize that having this paucity of free time is due to the wonderfully rich life I have.

Upstairs, there is a little girl sleeping in my bed (one of the few benefits to Daddy being gone for work).  No matter how she tried to stave off sleep, her busy day caught up to her before Mommy got out of the shower.  And that shower?  The first cool shower of the season, and the delightfulness of feeling the heat wash out of my hair.

The suitcases still haven't been put away from the weekend's trip, nor all the manure washed off the kids' rubber boots.  But just the sight of these little farm girls makes me glad we have such interesting places to visit.

And so, "to sleep, perchance to dream".  And to wake up in the morning to another busy, lovely day.

Not-So-Springy Morning

Rilla was deeply disappointed when the first day of spring didn't bring loads of flowers.  She's been reading too many Eloise Wilkins books.  Today, we still have loads of snow on the ground, but the sky is a gorgeous blue!  Hopefully, the maple trees are producing sap like crazy to make up for their negligence the past few weeks.

The kids have a half day today, so I am trying to cram in lots of productivity before they come home.  I just had to stop and console a sad baby with a few renditions of "Be a Little Candle" and "Building Day by Day", though, and since I was already seated in the chair by the computer, I thought I would type something up quickly!  My poor, poor neglected little blog...  If only the posts written in my head while I do dishes/fold laundry/braid hair could magically appear here every day.  Or the posts I could actually write if I wasn't too busy reading books until unearthly hours, or playing Ticket to Ride on my iPad...  But that's all changed!  I have put myself on a stern schedule of going to bed a decent hour every night.  Mind you, I haven't actually gone to bed at that mythical hour yet, but at least I'm getting to bed before midnight now.

My husband recently picked up on my exceedingly broad hints along the lines of "wives who hold down the fort all winter while their husbands are away would sure appreciate a new camera", so I am in total picture-taking bliss.  I still need to sit down and install the software on the computer so I can download the pictures (#13 on today's schedule), but I am having so much fun with it!  I can't wait to take pictures of sugaring this weekend.  (Hear that, Madam Maples?  Crank it up!)

The kids are currently blissfully engaged with playing in the new dishwasher box.  Our dishwasher up and died the beginning of December.  It took a few weeks (and millions of hand-washed dishes) for Evan to get home to verify it was truly a dead dishwasher.  We planned on going to shop for one that same weekend, but that was the weekend the kids had such bad fevers, so Evan went shopping without me.  Well, the dishwasher he bought that night never worked great.  I tried every trick I knew of, but it wouldn't clean the dishes.  Finally, a couple of weeks ago, we bit the bullet and took the new dishwasher back to the store.  The new one we chose, while significantly cheaper, had to be ordered.  Two weeks later, we finally have it!  I haven't run a load yet, so I can't speak to it's efficacy, but I'm already happy because A.) It was cheaper, B.) The kids have a new playhouse, and C.) I didn't have to wash the dishes from the last two meals.

Since I'm a terrible person and not putting up pictures for far-flung relatives, I'll give a State of The Children brief here.

Cheyenne is nine now, and fearfully Grown Up.  She wanders around with the camera we gave her for her birthday, photographing everything.  Thankfully, she has no way to post pictures anywhere, so the umpteen pictures where I'm in the background at an unattractive angle are safe from public view.  She's doing Battle of the Books in school this year, about the only bright spot in this grade.  (Battle of the Books is a quiz-type competition about books.  2013's titles are thus.)  She's a very fun person to be around, as long as you're not a younger sibling.

Elliott has outgrown a lot of clothes lately, which makes me happy.  He is heavily into the computer game, Minecraft, and will grudgingly play with Legos when he's used up his computer time.  He's starting to have a little pre-teen attitude, which is somewhat encouraging.  He's growing up!

Marilla is Miss Helpful these days.  Every morning, she tells me, "I want to help you ALL DAY!"  Of course, it's more "help" than otherwise, but I keep reminding myself that "help", if encouraged, leads to actual Help someday.  So, there's a middle man in all my chores.  No more tossing clothes from the washer to the dryer-- they go from the washing machine to Rilla's hands to the dryer.  No tossing chopped potatoes into the pot.  They go into Rilla's hands, THEN into the pot.  She also needs lots of hugs and books read.

As does Lincoln.  Lincoln is into babies in a big way right now.  There's four or five that have to be with him when he sleeps, and he struggles to carry them all over the house.  Very cute!  He's talking a mile a minute, and generally growing. 

All this is weak sauce compared to pictures, I realize.  Maybe soon!