Fountain Fun!!

A few weeks ago, Chris's sister Sara and her boys came to visit us for the day.  We went downtown to our fountains, and the cousins had a great time splashing around!!

I think we have the coolest fountains ever - seriously.  We are a small town, so this surprises me.  But go ahead, look through the (many, many) photos and try to tell me there are some awesomer fountains somewhere. ;-P  If there are though, I want to see pictures!

My nephew John 

Both nephews here, John and Andrew (not the kid about to dive into water only ten inches deep... I have more intelligent kids than that in my family)

Here's the huge fountain in the middle... the way it is set up, there are three "rivers," which are the shallow pool areas like the one pictured above.  The "rivers" begin where the water spills out of the columns, and then it flows down the shallow river area, and then after that there are rows of small fountains which lead to the center, where the three rows of small fountains meet in the huge center fountain.  It represents our town's three rivers and how two of them join to create the third.

The rivers also have the Cherokee Indian name on them, written using the Cherokee alphabet.

Lucy is sitting at the end of this "river" while John plays near the "source."

The three biggest kids in the large fountains in the center

Tall kids in this family... Andrew is only four, and Caroline is only seven, yet look at how tall they both are... Cecilia, to the left of the shot, is only a few months younger than Andrew.

You can see the third "river" behind Caroline - it was not turned on today for some reason...

Lucy looking down the drain at the end of the "river"

I moved Lucy over to the second "river" where there is a very shallow area over these rocks.  I had to keep her from climbing over the spillway and into the deeper water here.  You can see the first "river" where she was before in the background.  I'm getting tired of the quotation marks around "river," so maybe I'll leave them off starting now... you get the point, right?

John gets a shower from the Coosa River!

Lucy and John

And here's my best attempt at getting a group photo... four out of five looking at the camera, and the youngest one who is looking doesn't even know what a camera is, so I'd say that's pretty good!

See, better than this one!

After the fountains, we changed the kids into dry clothes in the cars and walked over to my favorite restaurant, at Sara's suggestion... mmm, yummy.  The kids were exceptionally patient waiting for our food, and the waitress commented that our kids were "so well-behaved" as we were leaving.  How nice of her to share that comment!

Back to School and the Feast of St. Anne

Apologies for not posting anything in so long!!  I have Zoo Atlanta photos to share from over a month ago... hope to get to those eventually!  But in the meantime, here's what we have been up to in the past two weeks.    Caroline began second grade - here she is on the first day of school, which was July 23rd.  We got a bit of an early start so we can take our time when needed throughout the year.  I'm about to find out how homeschooling with a toddler in the house goes!

We are really excited that this is a big sacramental prep year for Caroline... she will make her First Reconciliation at the end of January, and her First Communion in May!  We had a special treat to kick off the preparations and learning she'll be doing about these sacraments this year.

I found this idea on Catholic Icing... we cut the ends off large marshmallows and frosted a cross on each one and then stuck them on some sugar cookies we made.  The marshmallows represent the host, and of course I made sure that the girls - Cecilia, mostly, as Caroline would not confuse this - understood that this was NOT the actual host and they were not consecrated - they are just to be a symbol of the Eucharist to celebrate Caroline's beginning of her sacramental preparation.

They ate their snack with milk while I read to them from St. Patrick's Summer, which is one of the chapter books we're using in our in-depth, fun sacramental prep curriculum.  I have had so much fun putting together our religion materials this year!

Caroline will be putting together a First Communion notebook this year... here she is creating a cover for it using special stickers she picked out from the craft store.  I hope this will help make the preparation meaningful and enjoyable, and then she will have a keepsake book to share with guests on her First Communion day and to look back at over the years to come!

The following week, we celebrated St. Anne's feast day.  St. Anne was the mother of Mary, and traditionally she is pictured wearing red and green.  We made some red and green watermelon treats for the day: a watermelon sherbet pie and a watermelon drink garnished with mint.

I don't like to use artificial colors, so I was excited to find a simple watermelon drink recipe with just the natural coloring from the melon.  The sherbet, of course, is artificially colored, but after I made it, I was struck with a great idea for next year: use natural strawberry and pistachio ice creams for the green and red!!  

Mmmm...

Caroline shows her new St. Anne card - they always get a holy card on their name days.  Caroline's middle name has the name "Ann" in it.  July 26th is also St. Joachim's feast day (Mary's father), but we focus on Anne since it's Caroline's name day.

Cecilia enjoying her snack

One other thing we've done recently... we made a "Fishers of Men" craft for St. James's feast day, since he was one of the apostles who was a fisherman prior to being called by Jesus.  I gave the girls some construction paper and let them be pretty free with their design: I instructed them to sketch a boat shape and cut it out, to cut out dark blue paper to look like waves, and then to cut a mast and sail.  Actually, I think I cut the sails, now that I think about it...

Then they glued it all down to make a boat scene.  they drew apostles on the boat and fish in the water, and then we attached nets: pieces of a mesh bag that had onions in it.

Here's Caroline's... she opted for two small nets and copied her own Bible verse.

And here's Cecilia's... she chose to have one very large net!

Things I Love About Summer

I know, technically it's not summer yet, but it's our summer break, and we're enjoying it so far!  So, here are some things we are loving so far about our unstructured time during our summer break.

Ice cream!  We had Neapolitan ice cream to remind us of the Trinity... we topped them with nuts, chocolate chips, and coconut to make Trinity Sundaes for Trinity Sunday!

Short hair!  Cecilia has a new summer haircut to keep her hair off her neck... she's never had it cut this short before, and she loves it!  I cut off more than I meant to, but I think she's glad about that!  Caroline got a hair cut too, but I took her to Mastercuts at the mall since she's working on growing out her bangs, and I didn't trust myself to  even it out and taper the bangs so they looked decent...

Free time in the out of doors!  They can get dirty, messy, wet... Caroline's digging dirt to make a mud pie, I think, in this shot... she's also wearing dress-up clothes over her regular clothes.  I had to send her inside to take it off because she'd gotten mud on the dress, so I had to wash it.  We have a no dress-up clothes for dirty play policy here.  They have plenty of regular clothes that aren't dressy, so they can get dirty in those!

Fresh basil!  The kids like to pick it and eat it off the plant, or tear it up and put it in a jar of water for "herb stew," as they call it.  

Honeysuckles!  I showed Cecilia how to pick the flower apart to get the drop of honey out... we have lots of these growing beside our carport.

Mud pies!  Here's Caroline with her mud pie, topped with a few blueberries.  This is what childhood should be: the freedom to just play without adult guidance or rules when school is out!  One thing I want to try hard to do is not overschedule my children.  I don't think they need to take a bunch of classes and lessons outside of their schoolwork.  School, ballet, and church activities are plenty for elementary school, in my opinion.  Then they have so much more time to do things like this, to play with siblings and friends, to observe and enjoy nature around them, and the best part: they rarely complain "I'm bored!" because they aren't used to be constantly entertained in structured or contrived activities all the time.  Okay, end of rant. ;)  And I'm thinking on where would be best in our yard for a nice mud pit to enable more of this kind of play...

Fresh tomatoes from the garden!  This year, I bought bigger plants which were apparently already well enough established that we were unable to kill them. ;)  They have at least doubled in size and are giving us lots of nice tomatoes currently!  Hoping this lasts... we've had poor success with gardening in recent years.  These plants were purchased from a local person who raises lots of plants on his property about ten minutes from our house.

We have three varieties of tomatoes: Rutgers is one type, and I can't remember the other two now...

Chris moved the garden boxes to a spot where they get more direct sunlight, and I think this has helped them to do better this year!

Fresh blueberries from the backyard!  Our berry bushes are doing very well, so we're picking about a cup or so of blueberries each day right now.  They'll go into the freezer for future baking and for stirring into yogurt.  I think we'll have some of the fresh ones on our cereal in the morning, mmm!

Food cooked with our home-grown food!  Blueberry muffins and an egg-veggie casserole... with our own eggs from our hens, who aren't laying very well right now.  I had to save eggs for a week to have enough for this!  Maybe the hens are starting to show their age...

Baby birds!  We continue our nature study year round, and this is an example of why.  There are always new things to notice all around our yard!  We think this nest belongs to a sparrow... she flies away so quickly that we haven't gotten a close look at her.  The first egg actually hatched yesterday, so we'll be checking each day to notice the changes!  The nest is in a small bush near our garden.

Watermelon!  What, these don't look like watermelons to you? ;)  The hens enjoy the rinds after we eat the best part!  That reminds me that Lucy seems to know the word "hens" - she looks for them when I say the word.  She also seems to be beginning to understand the words "wave" and "baby," and she knows Caroline, Cecilia, Mommy, and Daddy.

Extra cooking time!  With not doing school comes extra time in which we can bake together (if it's not too hot to turn on the oven, that is!)... the girls wanted to make gingerbread because a girl in a book the read had gingerbread and ate it outside in her secret tunnel, so they did the same.  This had crystallized ginger in it too, mmmm!

Extra project time!  We have more time now to follow the whims of our artsy girls... they wanted rag dolls like Laura and Mary Ingalls had, and Caroline found directions in a book for making dills from old socks.

Here they are with the finished dolls... sock bodies filled with stuffing, button eyes, embroidered mouths, yarn hair.

Cecilia's is named Charlotte if she's pretending to be Laura...

...and Caroline's is named Nettie when she's pretending to be Mary.  Otherwise, the names change.

And another project they have enjoyed: finger-knitting.  Caroline and I learned from a youtube video.  Cecilia learned in one day from watching Caroline and me (though she doesn't always cast off so that it gets tied right at the end and it sometimes unravels as a result).  She made me this bracelet.  She finger knits left-handed, interestingly, although she draws right-handed.