Common Ground Fair

Now that I have rested and recovered from the Common Ground Fair I figured I'd jump on to share a few quick photo's.

These are just a few shots of the children's area this year. We had some great happenings and all in all the weekend went well. The nail banging as always was very popular. Kids and hammers...you would think more people would have gotten hurt but we only had a few mishaps between hammers and fingers or hands. It is amazing that when you let a young child play with a toollike that...they really do use it appropriately.
One of our new crafts this year were newspaper hats. They were amazing. Thanks Mary Ann and girls. They came up with this idea. We also had lots of donations of material and yarn which the kids used their creative genius and made some most amazing hats. I was very impressed and also saddened that I was not able to take a moment to make one myself.

Friday & Sunday we also did pinwheels for peace. That was also a huge hit and we even put the pinwheels around the children's area as decoration.

The last crafty thing that we did was we received a donation of brown bags from the Hannaford in Belfast. We asked the kids to decorate the bags and leave them and we would return them to Hannaford and they would use them to bag groceries. How cool was that! And the management at Hannaford was so excited when they got them back! They all wanted to look through and check out the bags.

All in all it was a great time. We had some great performers and some ...well not my favorites. And fave painting. Wow...what lines we had at times.

The boys enjoyed it. unfortunately no pictures of them at the fair. I never seemed to have much time when they were there. No coordinator for me next year. I will volunteer but I want to enjoy the fair with my family!

Lots of Things to Write Today

And the most exciting one is...

BENNETT IS WALKING!!!

He just all of a sudden took off the last few days. It's only been since about Thursday or Friday that he took his first steps and today...he's been walking everywhere. He did the most walking this evening before bed. He was in our bedroom and he walked from in the bedroom down the hallway into the boys room to me. It was probably about 20-30 steps! It's amazing how he's just taken off like that.

Uncle Keith is up visiting until late Wednesday. He went for a walk with Bennett this afternoon. Aiden & Bennett had lots of fun playing with Uncle Keith today. The boys certainly kept him on his toes all day! And two more full days to go!!



In other exciting news we finally relocated our chicken house. We use electric net fencing so we wanted to be able to rotate the chicken pasture to 4 different locations but with the house right up against the tree line it made it tough to rotate. So we moved the house out into the open. Erik thought it would a great idea to hook the house up to the truck and drag it (don't we LOVE our F250!!). I wasn't so sure this idea would work...but oh did it. Check out these photo's.

I don't always share this but sometimes my husband can be a most brilliant man. After a few seconds of concern the house started to drag along beautifully and it didn't even dig up the yard! We did lose one of the center support beams under the floor so the floor is a little squishy when you go inside.

But as long as we don't do jumping jacks inside the house it should be fine. It is in a fabulous spot right in front of the garden so after we harvest all out vegi's (when we actually plant them next year) we can let the chickens in to clean up and do some tilling for us. They are already doing a great job turning our compost pile for us!

And last but certainly not least Erik finished shingling the front of the breezeway! We also started on the land scaping we had wanted to get done before the winter. Still have some work to do there but at least it is started. We are hoping the roof will be done in the next month or so then Erik can finish shingling the breezeway side of the house and we will save the other 2 sides for next summer. Once he finished the back of the breezeway (should only take him 2-3 days) we can focus a little in the basement and maybe get started on staining the front side of the house.

Oh! And I almost forgot. Here is a photo of the fruits of my (& my mom's) labor this weekend. 23 jars of canned tomatoes and 14 jars of apple sauce (and I still have a huge pot off apples to still be put through the food mill...but I am thinking of turning those into apple butter). I am hoping to get another 10-15 lbs of tomatoes to can up a bunch of salsa and there are still TONS of apples on our trees and they are just PERFECT right now. I haven't sweetened any of our sauce and I still plan to make apple butter, jelly, juice and can some sliced apples for pies and crisps through the winter. Then it is on to tomatoe & broccoli soups (and maybe more). Our house has been smelling amazing this last week!

So, all in all it has been quite a busy week for us with still more business to come!

Oh and the Common Ground Fair is this weekend. For those of you not familiar check out http://www.mofga.org/. I am one of the coordinators for the children's area so will be there all weekend. Aiden is going to have SO much fun this year I am sure. We will have a houseful for the fair this weekend. Erik's mom is coming and Heidi & Jack. Mary Ann & Justine are also helping out as co-coordinators so they and Janelle may be staying a night also.

Have I mentioned yet how much I LOVE this time of year!

HUGS!

Today's Parenting Quote

Hi There,

I am part of a daily parenting quote email list. Most of the parenting quotes I really don't find all that great but today's. Well, today's was a perfect example of why we parent the way we do. We don't try to "teach" our kids. We try to be the way we would like our kids to behave and when they behave in a way we don't like we look at ourselves for the reasons. How can you tell your kids to say please and thank you for things when you don't, or how can you tell your kids not to hit others when you spank them? Here's the quote...

"Children are natural mimics -- they act like their parents in spite of every attempt to teach them good manners." ~Anonymous

Don't teach. BE!!

You're Jurassic Park!

by Michael Crichton

You combine all the elements of a mad scientist, a brash philosopher,
a humble researcher, and a money-hungry attracter of tourists. With all these features,
you could build something monumental or get chased around by your own demons. Probably
both, in fact. A movie based on your life would make millions, and spawn at least two
sequels thatwouldn't be very good. Be very careful around islands.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

SpiritWire.com

Hi there,

Just wanted to share this great site with you all. Read the poem Hello World as it scrolls on the homepage. This was shared on one of the radical unschooling lists that I am a member of. Radical Unschooling you ask...it's one of the ways people look at children. It's about respecting your children as individual people and treating them in a respectful way...just like you would treat other people, friends, family, etc. Next time you make a statement to your kids, think about how it would sound and the other person would feel if you made that same statement to your friend or your husband. Treat your children respectfully and they will grow up to be beautiful, honest, respectful people. To learn more check out my favorite links. I'm not quite there yet but that is my daily goal. One of my favorites, Learning in Freedom, shares this quote on her site:

"All of the people we admire and teach our children to admire - the history makers, the world changers - have been rebels, & they accepted that sometimes that meant being an outsider."

Something to think about...

Painting

What a dreary day. One of those days that reminds us that winter is not far off. So today we stayed in for most of the day. Aiden and I ran down to pick a few apples when the rain let up for a short time. We have about 6 apples trees on the property so we get lots of apples!

We decided it was a good day for painting! So paint we did. Aiden had a great time and I learned to just be quiet and let him be. LOL. Enjoy the photos.

Family Day

Today was family day on the base. And the boys had a total blast. Aiden got to sit in the cock pit of a KC135 and "drive the plane." For the rest of the day he was "steering his plane around." It was too cute. They had a lot of great activites and it all took place right on the tarmack, which was too cool! They had a bounce house and I couldn't hold Aiden back...so no trauma from yesterday's bounce house mishap. They also had TONS of clowns. And the clowns were making balloon things. Hats, animals, weapons, etc. They had lots of food and lots of free give aways.

But the highlight for Aiden were the planes. He LOVED "driving" the planes and they had a number of planes to go on. Unfortunately I only have these two in the KC135. We put the camera away after that so didn't have it when he went on the other 3 planes (smaller ones). Maybe we will have a pilot on our hands!

Then the boys and I went grocery shopping. Aiden is just getting so grown up. He doesn't want to be in the carriage anymore (which is good cause there wouldn't be much room for Bennett & the groceries). He helped with the shopping (grabbing lots of things we didn't need...LOL) and putting all the groceries up on the checkout for me. He's getting to be such a big help!

All in all it was a fun day!