Date Day

To celebrate the end of a long stretch of over-working at work (likely to be followed by another long stretch of over-working), Andy and I took a "date day" on Tuesday this week and went birding. No kids, no work, no real agenda except to enjoy the day and each other. We decided to head to Berlin Pond in Vermont, a perennial favorite springtime birding spot that is just over an hour drive from our house. It's a 5.6 mile walk around the entirely undeveloped pond (it's Montpelier's municipal water source) and the scenery is gorgeous. Old farmhouses flanked by rolling fields and apple trees bursting with blossoms (and orioles and indigo buntings), lots of rich deciduous woods, and marshes galore to look for things that like to get their feet wet. As usual, we struck out on the Virginia Rail, but no matter. It was a beautiful day and it was all ours.

Berlin Pond

We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant and then headed back to New London for a bit of dragonhunting in the warm afternoon. The first dragons are out, but only barely... it's a late start to spring this year. We saw 4 different species, but some were so newly hatched that identification was difficult. This is the last year of the NH Dragonfly Survey so we will be trying our best to get our town up over 75 species (we've got about 10 left to go)... it's going to take a few more "date days" I think, or else the kids will have to become a lot more patient!

Chalk Fronted Corporal

Yellow Bellied Sapsucker

Greetings from Haley

May Too Busy

Posting has been sparse this month since I am preparing for a big training at work- my biggest week of the year, basically, and the most stressful. I'm sure at this time next week I'll be calm and relaxed but right now I'm thinking of the million little details I have to arrange to pull this training off without a hitch!

Mothers Day weekend was lovely though, with a trip to the bog and lots of time outside. This past weekend... not so much... rain, rain, rain.... and more rain forecast for the next 6 days or so. We'll just wait it out and hope for the sun to shine eventually.... more when I'm a free woman again!

Tee Ball Time

Aiden started tee ball for 4-6 year olds this weekend, and as we suspected, it is as much fun (read: amusing) for the adults as it is for the kids. At this level they don't really play any games, though they are sorted into teams by shirt color... it's all drills, skill building, and learning the rules of the game. Some kids are pretty good but most are obvious beginners. I watched Aiden's group do throwing & catching drills for a good 15 minutes and I don't think I saw one kid actually catch the ball. Some good throws out there, but the catching... that is a bit harder to master. Andy helped run drills with a bunch of other parents while I got to hang out with Haley-doo in the sunshine. There are only 4 girls and 27 boys on the tee ball fields, so Haley will need to represent when she gets to be 4!

A Ruff and Stormy Easter

At the same time that Grandma Chris was heading back to Long Island, Grandma Sally and HaPa were driving down from Vermont to take the second shift in the Easter parade. And if I complained about the weather when Grandma Chris was here, it certainly didn't improve for the first part of Easter weekend. After a brief period of sunshine on Friday (which we soaked up thoroughly with an afternoon hike at Low Plain) we woke up to SNOW on Saturday. And it snowed and snowed, four inches in all... enough to bring the plows out, and enough (apparently) to force a lot of families to forgo the local egg hunt sponsored by the New London Rec Department. On a normal year the egg hunt is swarming with little people, but the snow put a serious damper on the festivities (though Aiden would beg to differ- he thought it was fabulous) and only a few more than a dozen kids showed up to collect the 2,500 (yes, you read that correctly) candy-filled eggs scattered all over the elementary school. Cha-ching! is what Aiden was thinking. Check out the photo of him alone in a giant hallway full of eggs... there were enough hallways that the kids split up and everyone's basket was full to bursting. The candy spoils were staggering. At the "one-piece-a-day, if-he-eats-a-good-dinner" that Aiden is allowed, it'll be next Easter before he's done consuming it all.

Aiden at the town egg hunt - had a whole hallway to himself!

After the egg hunt, we walked back home in the snow to prepare our Easter supper. Baked ham, roasted root veggies, spring asparagus with hollandaise, deviled eggs, and homemade ice cream cookie sandwiches rounded out the mid-day feast. After the gluttony we pretty much lounged about playing games and talking for the remainder of the day. In the evening Andy and I had the rare treat of an adult evening out- Grandma and HaPa watched the kids and we went to Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction with some friends to see Colin Hay. It's a great little concert venue and we realized (not for the first time) that however much we love the kiddos, it's really nice to get some grown-up fun time once in awhile too.

At Low Plain on Friday, before the snow

Looking at a nesting Great Blue Heron from one of the blinds

Friday egg hunt

Since our Easter festivities were on Saturday, we were determined to stay home and get some important things done on Sunday. Like brewing that beer we didn't get to on the previous weekend, and planting some early garden crops and clearing out our perennial beds. But alas, Andy woke up, checked his email, and reported that a Ruff (rare European vagrant shorebird) had been spotted earlier that morning at Chapman's Landing in Stratham, a little over an hour's drive from our house. That was it. The day was shot... or pretty much. Depending on how you look at it. Grandma and HaPa went back up to Vermont and we crammed in the mini-van with all our optics (ok, we don't cram in there anymore) and took off in pursuit of the Ruff. It was an easy find thanks to a crowd of birders already entrenched in the parking area, scopes all pointed on the poor Ruff, who was trying his best to sleep in some dead salt grass. We did feel slightly bad dragging the kids all the way over there on Easter Sunday to stare at what is basically a glorified sandpiper, so we took them to Ordione Point State Park afterwards. Haley tried to eat fistfulls of tiny pebbles and Aiden searched the beach for small treasures with his Dad. It was (finally) sunny and springlike outside, and we enjoyed every moment of the day we should have been spending at home. When we did arrive home in mid-afternoon, it was a mad dash to get something (anything) productive done... which turned out to be clearing all the dead winter tops out of our perennial beds and getting started on the hardy garden veggies. Done and done. And a Ruff to boot.

Looking at the Ruff (sorry no pic... too far away)

Haley at Ordione Point. She tried to eat a billion pebbles.

Here Comes Grandma Cotton-tail...

Grandma Chris came to spend the week before Easter with us in New Hampshire. It was a busy week despite miserably cold and dreary weather every day. On the weekend we went out to the hibachi grill in Lebanon again (Aiden's absolute favorite restaurant at the moment... how can you not love flaming volcanoes made of onion slices?) and were all readyto brew our second beer... until we decided to take just a "wee moment" to install a new storm door. Eight hours, several stripped screws, and much cursing later... the door was a thing of beauty but there was barely time left in the weekend to even enjoy a beer, let alone make one.

Grandma watched Aiden and Haley (on alternate days, so she could devote her whole attention to one grandchild at a time) all week long while Andy and I were at work. She and Haley went for walks in the stroller (despite the cold) and played on the floor (at 9 months now Haley is crawling all over and getting into everything she shouldn't so you can't leave her alone for more than two seconds). On Aiden's days with Grandma, they launched jump rockets on the driveway, baked cookies, watched Star Wars movies, played legos, and read lots of books. Both kids and Grandma enjoyed their special days together.

On Thursday night we got together with some friends to have pizza and color 5 dozen hard-boiled easter eggs. I prudently invested in a plastic-lined tablecloth, and the kids made short work of the egg decorating... gloriously spilling egg dye, splattering glitter paint, and spotting easter stickers everywhere while somehow getting more color on their fingers than the eggs. No matter about the mess; it cleaned right up and the eggs were perfect. Just as they should be for three and four year olds! The kiddos headed downstairs to watch Finding Nemo while we all got to relax for a few moments in the living room and kitchen. It looks like deviled eggs will be a major component of all our Easter tables.

Beer and Baseball

A long time ago (sometime after college but before I met Andy) my brother Micah gave me a beer homebrewing kit for a present. I can’t even remember where I was living at the time, but I remember being fairly transient and thinking that I didn’t have an appropriate place to ferment beer at the time…so the kit got stored in Mom & Dad’s garage (or equivalent) for years and I never ended up trying it. But recently Andy and I have been inspired by some very tasty homebrew made by friends and family to try our hand at brewing beer. Unfortunately many of the pieces of the original kit I got from Micah seemed to have disappeared, so $100 or so later, we were back in business. The ad in the Northern Brewers catalog where we purchased the new kit declared, “If you can make Mac n’ Cheese, you can brew your own beer!” Ok, then. Let’s do it!

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as Mac n’ Cheese… we weren’t sure how to get started so we bribed our friend Kyle to come over and show us the ropes. Five hours of sterilization, boiling, and funneling later, and we have a “wort” (I think) that is fermenting in a big jug in our basement. It will be interesting to see if we get something potable out of that brown stuff in the jug! Once we added the two varieties of hops to our “beginner” irish red, the whole house certainly started to smell like a brewery. Aiden came upstairs and said “Eeww, what is that smell?”… His friend Finn is clearly used to that smell at his home, as he made no comment. We’ll have a full report in about 6 weeks!

Besides brewing beer, we also enjoyed the rare occurrence of warm temperatures and sunshine this weekend. We spent lots of time on our new deck, getting a taste of what it will be like lounging out there this summer, and also went to a Dartmouth College baseball game. The Dartmouth games are free, with real stadium seating, hotdogs, popcorn and some decent baseball talent too, so that makes them a great alternative to spending hundreds of dollars and four + hours on a bus to go to an actual Sox game, especially with kids in tow. If the kids have a fit in the second inning, so be it. Just leave. No harm done. As it was, there was no fit, but Aiden, Ben, Molly and Finn did need to get out of the stadium after a few innings to go run around on the Astroturf of another ballfield. They had as much fun playing their own wacko version of baseball as they did watching the real game. From the look of things, Molly and Aiden have a lot to learn before t-ball season starts in a few weeks!

Good to the Last Drip

I think we caught the last, best day of the sugaring season when we headed up to VT for a quick visit this past Sunday. We had the Andersons in tow, caravaning behind the mini-van to experience their own taste of sugaring. The day was gorgeous. Bluebird skies and warm enough to go without a jacket if you stayed in the sunshine. The two boys were in heaven, bursting out of the car doors as soon as they were opened and running around like tops that had just been wound up. Chickens to feed, eggs to gather, sticks to wield, forts to build, buckets to fill and dump... we could barely get them to sit down for a few bites to eat at lunch, which was splendid at the sunny picnic table in the back patio.

Haley got her first maple steambath in the sugarhouse, and she schlepped around the sugarbush with me as we dumped all the buckets in the woods. Rich and Heidi trooped all around the forest collecting sap too, enjoying the melting snow and the smells, sights, and sounds of mud season. When the boys got tired of filling their smaller blue buckets with sap, they found the old wolf tree that fell over a few years ago and imagined they were Barred Owls creating a nest in the old tree. They were climbing in and around the tree, poking and scraping and hooting for a good hour with HaPa supervising nearby. Who-Cooks-For-You? Who-Cooks-For-YOOOOUU-ALLLL? was riniging out through the woods when we finished with the sap collecting. One little owl got a bit of wolf tree bark in his eye at one point, and boy did he howl! It's painful to get grit in your eye, but we got it out eventually thanks to a little eye-cup my mom had, and Aiden got a "band-aid" for his eye to give it a rest for a moment. Happy to report that the owl has completely recovered by now, and his eyesight is as keen as ever!