Sweetness and Light

A YURT Excursion or The Ultimate 6 Year Old's Birthday Sleepover!

We had the distinct pleasure of taking our newly turned six year old and his very willing siblings on an incredible overnight adventure in a YURT!! 

On first thought I was a little nervous (okay, ALOT nervous) that is was going to be miserable as we are still experiencing temperatures in the single digits at night and this altitude that we would be staying at is even higher than our home locale, so...here we go!! 

These are the highlights of a most delightful and memory filled overnight with my sweeties!  Oh to be so blessed, I am so underserving!

I now present you, the Yurt:

 

And to the dear children's delight, there were a series of SNOW TUNNELS just outside the yurt door for my little explorers to play in, how cool is that! (Is he really six, sigh...)

 

A very delighted and smallish tunnel explorer:

 

Another tunneler Extrordinaire:

 

Is that a happy birthday boy or what?

 

A very snug sissy enjoying her top bunk status!

Yurt Mama happily on the bottom bunk with a very tired and soon to be asleep little snuggle-bug!

And here's the view we awoke to and 15 degrees!

We finished our excursion with a delightful hike back down to the lodge (about a mile) in the glorious morning light. Daddy and the older three couldn't resist sledding most of the way on some borrowed snow discs.

Then while my hubby and I sipped yummy steaming Lattes, the kiddos enjoyed Hot Cocoa with whipped cream and Cinnamon Apple Turnovers, and then went back for some more sledding adventures before we headed home. 

All I can say is that if I were six again, this would be the ULTIMATE birthday, and I think it WAS!!

Thanks for enjoying our adventure with us, have the best day today!

Blueberries...and Books

This post is a tad late, but I wanted to share it along with our new favorite Elsa Beskow book, Peter in Blueberry Land. Elsa Beskow has been one of our favorite picture book authors for some time. Her stories are so intriguing and there's always such a playfulness in how she presents her characters, even if they are trolls or mischevious little children. Her illustrations are so precious and there is just enough detail to make you want to linger on each page before going on the the next. This one is our recent joy and finally became available at our library! I think it will make a beautiful back to school surprise for Seamus too!! In fact in combination with Blueberries for Sal, it might just make a super little unit for him to start out his new year!

So, back in late June we went on a glorious morning of Blueberry Picking at a small local berry patch and it was such a delightful time! The weather was a fair 75-80 degrees and we had the entire four blueberry rows to ourselves! The kids had so much fun finding bushes with the ripest and juiciest berries, which ones were not quite blue, and that we decided were so sour!! This was of course discovered by sampling the many different shaded berries! Violet filled the bottom of her box completely and the boys between the two of them filled the bottom of another and I did pretty well, along with baby back-packed filling up about half-way up another flat, whew!! Boy did those berries make a yummy pie and some super tasty blueberry sauce for pancakes and waffles!!

Next year it has been decided to try raspberries, or with any luck we'll be in a new house with our own raspberry bushes, maybe we'll plant some delectable blueberries as well!!

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

I just had to post this as we had an impromptu visit to our new area Zoo on Friday and we were so excited to see the TIGER up close and personal!!

This beautiful giant of a cat likes to sleep right next to glass. His paws were the size of a dinner plate and Violet noted that his face had spots rather than stripes.

We felt like our luck was really with us on this day because not only was the Zoo lightly attended for a Friday, but ALL of the animals that we usually miss were out and very viewable!! The only misfortune, was that my lovely little new camera battery decided to go out right after I snapped the Tiger. I then had to resort to my cell phone camera when we went into the Butterfly house (more in a new post later!!)

Matthias was the tiger cub!

Here's the Zoo crew!! Enjoy and may God Bless you in your Day today!!