The day started with a 6:30am phone call from the Post Office.
That was followed by squeals, loads of squeezes (not too tight!), the picking of names, and visiting three classrooms (heat lamp in tow).
Now that the sun has gone down, the peeps have finally quieted.
Formal introductions to come tomorrow!
See Spot. See girl ride Spot. See girl fall in love with Spot.
Go, Spot, go.
(Somehow she managed to forget her helmet on the day I took pictures, so she’s wearing this loaner that looks a bit too big. I wondered how she could even see.)
These huge flocks of black birds are a hallmark of winter in the Midwest. Their seemingly endless numbers never cease to amaze me, like this flock that was none too troubled by my passing car.
Are they Blackbirds or Starlings? I need one of my Audubon friends to sort this out for me.
This girl loves the chickens. Especially Fluffy—those girls have a special thing going.
The first thing she does in the morning is let the chickens out of the coop, and she puts them to bed last thing at night.
This afternoon I spied them on the patio, hanging out together in the sunshine, and my heart lept. I had this sudden notion that this is exactly where she’s supposed to be. Doing exactly what she’s supposed to do. There’s so much right about her in this little slice of time.
We’ve been having a cold spell. Every now and then a warm day peeks through and I feel like we have to enjoy every instant of it because the winter will be here before we know it.
I needed this moment at the end of a long day.
The egg, not the chicken, people.
I still get a little giddy every time we find an egg in the coop. It’s just like when seeds magically grow into plants—I get the scientific principle, but it still doesn’t stop me from wanting to tell every person that I see about the truly spectacularness of it all.
While Jim was helping with the high tunnel, Nancy brought Sylvie over to play. Down the road a bit they found this bird, stuck on the side of the road with a broken wing.
We held onto it while Nancy went to work an event at the community arts center. Tomorrow Nancy will take the bird somewhere to be rehabilitated.
“Take this broken wing, and learn to fly again, learn to live so free…”
Now you’ll have that stuck in your head all day. Ah, the 90’s.
She emerged this morning! Really, this Mother Nature thing never gets old.
What do you buy at the grocery store? What’s that? Just groceries?
Not in this house. Tom took the kids to the international grocery store today, and came home with a (deceased) octopus. Neko wanted to do a little science research. Did you know you can get an octopus this size for under a dollar?
Nothing like coming home and finding an octopus in your sink.
(Photo by Tom.)
Today we made the two-hour journey from Pensacola to Gulfport, the home of IMMS. Of course, we’re doing this in a U-Haul, so it was a bit of a bumpy ride. But U-Hauls have come a long way since my early twenties, and I was surprised by the gentle-ish ride. (Of course, by the time we made the two hour trip back, I was more than happy to turn in the keys.)
We had a fantastic time learning about their facility, and even got a behind-the-scenes tour of the turtle rehabilitation facility. It was so heartwarming to see all these turtles, big and small, swimming around, looking healthy as can be. I can easily fast-forward twenty years in my head and see Neko busy at work in a facility like this.
Of course, we had our share of seven-year-old moments (gift shop…you are my nemesis), but all in all, the whole trip went really well.
(Plus, there was a bonus three-legged bearded dragon, which always makes the day go well.)
Spending so much time together this trip, I’ve learned a few new things about Neko, which is always the best part of these sorts of trips.
1. When she grows up, she wants to be a Nature Girl. This isn’t the first time she’s declared this as her future profession, but I finally had a chance to ask exactly what that meant. Apparently, a Nature Girl is someone who lives in the woods and takes care of nature. You build a house out of all natural things, and you don’t live with your family any more. Although, she did concede that her friends could come live with her if they decided to be Nature Girls, too. I hope Nature Girls still come home to visit their parents to do their laundry.
2. She’s afraid of going to the movies. There’s always a scary part somewhere in the middle, and it terrifies her. I could go into a whole English lesson about rising action and conflict, and how she just needs to hang in there for the denouement, but it seemed pointless. So instead of going to Beezus and Ramona, we went home and watched two hours of Ace of Cakes. In our pajamas. Which was awesome.
3. She’s really a homebody. I thought with it being just the two of us, we’d go out for a fancy dinner (i.e. no drive-thru), and she’d be thrilled by the novelty of it. But she fought me tooth and nail. So tonight we ate take-out while tucked under the covers, and she couldn’t have been happier.
Tomorrow we fly home, but we hope to visit the beach before we go! Just looking, no swimming.