No Joke

I thought maybe it was an April Fool's joke when I saw the forecast for April 1st was completely dry and 60 degrees! Thankfully, it wasn't a joke, and we got outside and had a wonderful time in the sunshine. We went to the park for several hours, and then came home and planted some shrubs in our empty flower beds. When Daddy came home, he mowed the lawn while Ryan pulled weeds for about an hour (and earned three bucks doing so)!


Yes, believe it or not, there are shrubs in that flower bed!

Enjoying His Job

How this big of a tube is deemed to be only
one inch of precipitation is beyond me!
When we first signed Ryan up to report the rainfall I wondered if he'd soon tire of it and have to be prodded and threatened to go do his daily reading. I have been pleased to see that that isn't the case. Though I do remind him most days, he eagerly runs out at 8:00am to read the gauge, then reports the numbers to me so I can submit them online. He's learned how to read hundredeths of an inch, and this week he got a lesson on a different kind of precipitation...snow.

After correctly reading the gauge for a few weeks, he's been
released to read it on his own without me hovering over him.
Normally he just reads the numbers on the tube to see how much rainfall we've had, but when we woke up to snow yesterday, he had to bring the gauge inside so we could melt it and then do the reading. It was a bit of a cumbersome task, but fun nonetheless.


Replacing the gauge after melting the snow.
Of course, he couldn't wait to get back outside to play in the snow. Unfortunately, he ended up having to wait a few hours, but at least the sun was shining when the went out to play.

First Reading

Promptly at 8:00 am this morning Ryan and I went out to read the rain gauge so we could submit the data to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network (CoCoRaHS). It didn't rain at all, but we had freezing fog this morning (yep, weird but true!) and the fog was all frozen on the outside of the gauge. We submitted our data online and an hour later I looked out the window and it was snowing! So much for a dry day today. So tomorrow instead of 0.00 rainfall he will get to report a T (trace).


He is pretty excited by his new job, and we're all having some fun with it. If you want to see our station on the map and see our precipitation for any given day, click here. Currently there are four stations in our county, and we're the northernmost station.

Playing in the Snow

As we watched the snow fall yesterday, Ryan begged to go out and play. Unfortunately, the flakes were so small that the accumulation was very small as well, even though it snowed for the majority of the day. Finally when it looked like the snow was turning to rain, we let them go out to play.


The Weather Channel said it was 35 degrees outside but felt like 26 degrees. I believe it! It felt really cold to me, so I stayed inside and made hot white chocolate to warm the kids up when they came inside. It must have felt cold to them too because they wanted to come in before I even finished making the hot drink!

Christmas Fun

The Daughters of the American Revolution are the caretakers of the museum in our little town. The Caples House belonged to the first physician in Columbia County, and the house and several outbuildings have been turned into a museum. They had a special Christmas festival this weekend, and we took the kids. We toured the neat old house, had a story read to us by "Mrs. Caples," looked at the old tool shed and its tools, and learned some history. They also had a bazaar and activities for the kids. Each child got to decorate his or her own gingerbread man, and they each got to hand dip a candle to take home!

When I Googled the name of the museum to get the URL of the website, it turned up another site with some, shall we say, interesting information about the museum.

Homeschool Challenges

Remember we were collecting leaves for a leaf book? Yeah, well, we did and then we forgot about them! We collected Bigleaf Maple, Red Maple, other unknown Maple, Yellow Birch, Oak, and various other leaves. We pressed them in an old phone book, and that was as far as we got. Then I was cleaning out one of our homeschool drawers (yes, the same drawer as the race car!) and found our leaves not yet put into a book. That's one of the challenges when you homeschool, at least when you don't have a room to do school in. We do all our school at the kitchen table, but we use the kitchen table to eat at three times a day too. So everything needs to be cleared off the table for mealtimes. At least that's my excuse for not getting it done yet...it got put into a drawer and forgotten about!


So we got out the leaves, paper, colored pencils, and got to work. We found a great leaf identification website (you didn't think I'd actually use a book, did you?), and we labeled, pasted, and put our leaf books together. Ryan did a great job! And at least we got it done before the official start of winter.

The Christmas Patch

We usually get our tree the weekend after Thanksgiving, but this year since Thanksgiving was a week earlier than usual, our preferred U-cut tree lot wasn't open yet. However, it worked out well since this weekend when we planned to go cut our tree, it was snowing at the lot...or as Ryan called it, the Christmas Patch! We may never have a white Christmas at our house, but it sure was fun getting a tree in the snow.


Since Daddy has a sore neck and because it was pretty cold, we chose a smaller tree near the parking lot instead of searching the lot looking for the perfect tree. It was kind of sad to knock all the snow off our tree. It looked so pretty covered in white!


After playing a while and getting our tree, we went inside for some hot cider and cookies. Each child got to choose a toy, and Ryan chose this little stuffed Pumba from The Lion King movie.

At the Pumpkin Patch

We have had a busy month and haven't been able to get to the pumpkin patch this year until last Monday, the second to the last day before they closed! It worked out well though because the crowds were gone (it was a weekday too), and it was a dry and beautiful day.


Ryan isn't a big animal lover, but he did pet the sheep and got close enough to the turkey coop to get a peck on the hand!


He got to climb on not one but two tractors and was thrilled one of them was a John Deere!


Playing King of the Mountain!


Ryan zipped through the hay maze several times, and...


we couldn't keep up with him in the corn maze. He ran ahead and found all the animals before we were even halfway through.


Not quite strong enough yet to handle the pumpkin slingshot.


Enjoying a hayride through the pumpkin fields.


So many pumpkins...how will he ever choose?


"Look at this cool gourd!"

Berry Picking Again

We headed back to Kruger Farm Market yesterday to pick more berries, this time blueberries and raspberries. The strawberries are pretty much gone, but there are plenty more varieties of berries left for the summer. Blueberries are among Ryan's favorite fruits, and he was so excited about going to pick them. Mommy was excited because they are by FAR the easiest berries to pick, wash and eat. They are sturdy and last quite a while in the fridge, and if you pick too many, they freeze beautifully!


When we left the house the thermometer in the van said it was 60 degrees, and by the time we got to the farm and actually started picking I'm guessing it was about 65 degrees. The sun was shining and it was just perfect...or so I thought. I had to laugh when Ryan sat down under the berry bush to get into the shade because he was too hot! He's a true Northwesterner, that's for sure.


It is still early in the blueberry season so there weren't huge quantities of ripe berries to harvest, but we managed to pick a quart or so fairly quickly and then headed to the raspberry patch which was a long walk from the blueberries! The raspberries were pretty well picked over that day, but we got a pint and half before taking the long walk back to the car (and the bathroom).

Berry Picking

Ryan doesn't have many foods that he loves, but strawberries and blueberries are among the chosen few. The strawberry season here in Oregon is all too brief, but we managed to get out to the strawberry fields this week to pick a flat of strawberries. Hood Strawberries are the kind most people grow here locally, and they have wonderful flavor and are very sweet. However, the texture is rather unpleasant to me, pretty mushy (the locals call the California strawberries "crunchy!"). They also are highly perishable and have to be eaten pretty much the day you pick them, or no later than the next day.


We drove out to Sauvie Island to pick at Kruger's Farm, which is a neat family farm. Ryan turned out to be quite a good picker once he figured out which strawberries were ready to be picked. He was good and only ate the two or three I allowed them each to sample, unlike the woman and her two kids picking nearby who were eating more than they were putting in their box.


After picking we walked among the U-cut flower beds that were almost spent for the year, and then the kids played on a couple of tractors for a while. We had a great time and are planning to go back next week as well...rumor has it the blueberries might be ready then!

Missing the Snow

We were missing the snow, so we decided to make some paper snowflakes to hang around the house. I found some beautiful patterns to print out online and then cut out, and we also just made a few designs of our own. Ryan has gotten pretty good with his scissor skills, and I was impressed at how well he was able to follow the lines I drew for him!

Building a Snowman

Ryan wanted to go outside again today and try to build a snowman. We rarely have snow that stays around for an extra day, so the kids are very excited that they got to go out and play in it again today. It snowed a bit more today, while we were outside playing even, and it was a much wetter snow. The temperature was a bit warmer too and beginning to melt our powdery snow. It worked out well for us because it became the perfect snow to build a snowman with! Ryan did a great job rolling the snowballs in the snow for the body and head. He's getting to be so big!

More and More Snow!

We woke up to an inch of snow this morning, and it continued to fall for five more hours! Ryan was dying to go out and play, but it was so cold (24 degrees) and a little windy that I put him off for a while in hopes it would warm up a bit. As of right now, it's still only 29 degrees outside, but Daddy came home early from work so I'm glad we waited so that we could all play together. Also, the wind had stopped blowing, so it didn't feel quite so cold this afternoon.



Now, that's what I call snow tires!

Ryan made his first snow angel, and then he couldn't decided what to do next. He played with his bulldozer and tried to have a snowball fight with Abby. Unfortunately, it was a very dry snow, and it didn't stick together very well. I tried to make a snowman but it just wasn't sticking together enough to fuss with it, so we just got out the sleds and slid down the driveway instead.

Snowplowing

We had some snow today, and though it wasn't much, of course the kids were dying to go out and play in it. We bundled up and out we went. There was less than an inch, but they made the most of it. They plowed the whole patio and the kiddie table and just about anyplace they could find to plow. After about 45 minutes, our backyard was just a slushy mud puddle, so we went inside and the kids had a nice warm bubble bath. It's supposed to snow more today, but we're going to enjoy the rest of it from inside by the fire!