homeofthebudds

Five minutes of our lives in which it was sorta sunny, Dave was cleaning out the garage and we were outside.

  

 

Moth

Several months ago (at a local church's Easter Egg hunt of all places) Ellen acquired a butterfly net. All the kids have been trying to catch something ever since. Last week, they finally managed to net their first butterfly. Or Moth as I informed them when their excitement quieted down enough to hear.

They were very calm and careful with it.

It rewarded them by being very calm and quiet back.

Field Day

Last week we participated in a field day with our homeschool co-op.

Originally, Isaiah wasn't sure he wanted to participate. (He didn't want to 'be bossed around' he said.) But once we got there, he got serious about it.

Ellen was excited about it from the minute she heard about it.

She's pretty sure she likes basketball. Especially when the 'hoop' is a bucket, held by one of your team mates who is allowed to move it around to help you score a point.

Isaiah was attempting a bit of a head start on the 50 yard dash.

Brennan figured he'd rather hang out with me and Joel instead of playing crazy games.

Ellen played enough crazy games for us all. In this relay you pass a leaky cup over your head to fill a bucket at the end of the line.

I'm pretty sure she had a blast.

4th of july

We waited for dark to start our fireworks this year.

Ha! Just kidding. Dark doesn't show up until about 10 pm these days and we are not that crazy brave.

Maybe when the kids are teenagers.

We were going for some tame firework fun which meant sparklers, poppers & flowers for us.

With a few baby fountains thrown in for fun.

I had the hardest time getting a good sparkler shot. The kids kept saying something about wanting to wave them around.

Lucky for me we saved a few and I'm going to try to talk Dave into helping me out tonight.

Maybe we'll even be super crazy and wait for dark.

Wooo! We're wild sometimes.

Last night we finally got some dusk light (which I helped along a bit in camera)

Happy Fourth of July!

And now if you'll excuse me for a few days, I was a bit ambitious at the library this week.

in which making bubbles is the easiest thing in the world

We were in Target the other day doing some random looking around (we have time for that now that we're slowing everything down) and decided the summer would be so much more fun with a wide supply of bubble making wands. The package came with about 6 oz. of bubble formula and I was about to buy more when I decided to make some - I figured surely it would be at least a little cheaper than the bottled stuff.

After a small bit of research during which I bypassed anything that would require buying an extra ingredient, I found this:

1 cup water

2 T dishsoap

Done.

I don't know if I'm the last one on earth to discover this, but I'm never buying bubbles again.

From what I read adding a little glycerin makes the bubbles downright magical, but these bubbles worked great. And it cost maybe 1 penny.

Most of the last several days have been pretty darn nice weather wise. We thought we'd take advantage of the sun and take some school work outside to the park.

We packed up some clipboards and did a little data collection on a few of Mt. Tabor's rocks.

And we thought, really it's more fun to play at the park with friends, so we found some to join us.

The little people occupied themselves playing in the big trees,

while the bigger little people occupied themselves talking (or perhaps yelling)

and listening.

I'm fairly certain there was a fair amount of Star Wars discussion.

*sigh* That was a fun morning.

And now it's started to get rather rainy again. But I am certain, certain, the sun will be returning any moment.

At least it will if it knows what's good for it.

park play

roly poly sequence

Finding the sweet spot with a macro is slightly challenging.

I find it works best to manually focus,

but still,

it's so hard to keep these little buggars still!

One should always bring a pocket camera when going for a walk (assuming one is not trying to maintain a certain heartrate of course)

Saturday morning I woke up super early and couldn't sleep so I decided to go for a little walk.

My friend Megan and I used to wake up early every morning and walk, but it hasn't happened since the weather turned nice.

This particular morning I noticed this lovely lovely garden. Dave told me next year he wants one of the garden boxes for himself and I'm thinking maybe he could have the whole thing and I'll just take pictures of it.

Right next to that lovely whatever flower it was there was this pokey cactus. Talk about juxtaposition.

Look at this crazy bright caterpillar. I think a bird had seen him before me...lets just say he didn't look alive from the other side.

I can't decide - is this a face or a bum?

Playing at the park

We went to the park yesterday hoping to try out the lens I rented. Unfortunately, after walking around with it for a minute I realized it's just too big to take on park trips with the kids. It's heavy, you really need to hold it all the time (there's no way you can sling it over your shoulder) and it's obviously expensive. I felt like I had a big sign "Come take this from me! It's expensive!!" So we packed it back up in the car and played with the manual setting with my lovely little lens.

It's hot here , so after an attempt at feeding the geese (Insanity I know. I must have been crazy to try that without Dave around. Those geese are freaky. Especially when you're trying to hold a big huge lens and defend your children.) we found some shade and some close by play equipment.

Brennan got some good duck pictures.

See?

The kids hung out mainly at the merry-go-round, probably cause no other park we go to has one.

I was trying to get one of those sweet 'everything's a round blur behind the person' pictures,

But that is not easy to do in the sort of light you get in the middle of the day.

Especially when the photographer is crazy susceptible to motion sickness.

After all that crazy hot fun-ness, we decided a small rest was in order.

(Notice Isaiah putting grass down Brennan's shirt? Such brothers.)

Under this tree was a much better place to be.

Much better.

Ellen and Isaiah wanted one of all three kids, but Brennan wasn't so sure.

He thought maybe it should just be him

Or maybe him and Ellen. He was probably still remembering that grass down the shirt from a little earlier.