Pictures and Words

And now for something completely different....

We have a great maple tree in our front yard that is fairly easy to climb, so the girls do.

I found some rope in the basement left by the owners or a previous tenant and decided we needed a rope swing.

A is helping to make a batch of strawberry jam by squashing the berries we got from the farmers market.

E helped by stirring the cooking jam. She looks a little apprehensive, don't you think?

One weekend we went to an arts festival in the next town over. There was a community mural that the girls and I put our mark on.

Despite E being done before the rest of us, we had a good time looking at all the art for sale and even bought some for our home.

The girls came home very inspired and painted for two days straight until I ran out of canvases!

This last one requires a story. One night there was a heavy rainstorm. Water was getting into our basement under two doors and even down our electric line. Then the power went out at 1am. That meant we no longer had to worry about the water on the power lines, but now we had to worry about water filling up our basement. C stayed up to bail out the cistern since the sump pump couldn't run with no electricity. He got me up, not that I could sleep worrying about water damaging our stuff in the basement, at 3am and I helped with the water bailing efforts until the power came back on at 6am. C immediately left to go buy a generator at Home Depot! This is a picture of A trying to get it started for a test run the next day.