January 2014 Archives

Welcome ALT SLC friends!

Yay – you made it to my blog and I’m 100% I’m excited that I met you during Alt!

A little about myself – I’m a stay at home Mom with two kids (maybe three if you count my hubby…I kid…kinda) and four chickens and we live in Mountain View, CA. Patrick is 4 and Alice is 2 and we love doing crafts, going for nature walks on the way to the park, cooking, eating out, and traveling. This blog is where I post all of that and then some.

For example, today we all helped plant a ton of flowers, cleaned out the chicken coup, dug holes for bulbs, and tried to figure out exactly where to plant all the fruits and veggies for next season.

It was a lot of work with finding a LOT of roots in one section of the yard (oh, right next across from the sequoia tree – what a surprise!), trying to work with soil that has lots of clay in it, and still finding shards of glass from a ginormous glass window that shattered a few years ago when we renovated our home. Phew!

Please check out my About Me link.

Leave me some love.

And to my friends and family who follow my blog – I am about to head off to a conference in Salt Lake City and I’m really pumped because I get to relax for 3 days, learn new things about blogging and design, and party it up with the most creative people around!! The nerd in me is already looking forward to blogging about everything and I haven’t even packed yet!

Nature activity

I have to admit that I’m enjoying this drought weather we’re having a little too much. I always plan for rainy day activities and rain dances with galoshes, but I’ve really enjoyed the lack of cabin fever in our house. We’ve made use of going on nature walks which to Patrick and Alice just mean a walk where we pick up a few things we haven’t seen or felt before. We are lucky that we live near very thoughtful neighbors who always share their bounty may it be hydrangeas, oranges, squash – whatever they’re growing. So they love when we walk around taking notes and asking questions about what flowers are growing in their yards.

Today we kept it simple and found things in our yard during our nature walk. It was a very slow day for exploring. One of those “let’s turn over every rock to see if we can find a worm” on it kinda days. I had Patrick and Alice locate things that had different textures and were from nature. We also have buckets, baseballs, etc in the backyard so we kept it all about what was natural.

After that, I put Alice down for a nap and had Patrick ready with a quiet time activity while I set up some afternoon art.

We had crayons, makers, and colored pencils and I had the kids draw our nature objects I laid out. It was an incredibly relaxing time and not much was said while creating. It was as slow and thoughtful during our backyard discovery earlier that morning and a great way for kids to learn about texture, nature, and art all together.