Greening Sam and Avery

stepping away

Selling a house and relocating your family is a task that I would not wish on most people. Even when the reasons are joyous and wonderful, as our's are, selling a home and moving is never easy. 

I am feeling very overwhelmed right now with trying to keep my home "show" clean (a level of cleanliness that is not easy with two young children and a big, hairy dog) and knowing my husband will be living four hours away in just two weeks. 

Right now I need to take care of me and trying to keep up with everything on my plate is just not working out so well. Something has to give. 

SO, with a sad and heavy heart I have decided to step away from this space for a while. I truly hope you will keep me in your readers and stop by every once in a while. I may still post our big adventures or if we happen upon a wonderful activity but our daily updates full of outdoor play, great resources and fun nature themed activities will be on hold. 

Thanks so much for sharing a journey with me over the last few years! 

embrace the rain

It has been SO dry for SO long in WI that when the rain shower started you would have thought there was candy falling from the sky my kids were so excited. We celebrated the rain!

The camera didn't come with us because it was actually raining pretty hard on and off. But I did want to share a few of the things that we did on our walk yesterday. 

Of course we looked for, found and jumped in lots of puddles! But the girls also discovered that along the curb there are "little rivers" and they had a blast following the rivers to see where the water would go. (With slightly older kids this could lead to great conversations about how water flows down, what else might be flowing in that drain and where the water in the drain ulitmately goes.)  We walked down to our neighborhood creek to see how much bigger it was with all the rain and to throw things in the water. Unlike normal you could actually see some current in the little stream so the girls had a lot of fun throwing things in on one side of the bridge and then watching them float out the tunnel on the other side. Great floating v. sinking lessons! (Speaking of that, I have been meaning to link up this great post from my sister with an awesome float or sink experiment that they did, oh and check out the SUPER adorable photos she got of my kiddos last week. Just love have a professional photographer in the family!)

Next time it rains at your house be sure to encourage your kids to enjoy the rain, love the rain and even go out and have fun in the rain!!

keep it simple

When you have two sick kids, a very sick momma and are trying to settle back in from a long weekend away the best thing to do is to keep life simple! Which we did today. But I was determined to also NOT plant the kids in front of movies. 

I went back through my bag of tricks and we headed out for a simple color walk. 

Have I told you all that Sam broke her arm while we were backpacking? Well, it isn't a full break just a small fracture right below her wrist but there was a thin line that went all the way across her wrist that made the radiologist nervous and forced Sam into a cast! 

So the idea behind the color walk is to take a color wheel (mine is made out of paint color samples from the Home Depot paint department) and have the kids match up as many colors to things in nature as they can. If you wanted to make color wheels for a whole class I wouldn't suggest taking paint color samples but you could make the same thing out of card stock or construction paper. 

Can you tell which girl was DONE and ready to go home at the end? 

Our little walk lasted almost an hour, we got out of the house and used up a big chunk of our morning with this fun activity. And we didn't see anybody else which means we kept these awful germs to oursleves and didn't infect anyone else! 

So, I want to share with you all some news in our life. We are MOVING! Chris has gotten an amazing job offer with a new insurance company in Illinois and will be starting the new job in the middle of August. The girls and I will stay in our home until it sells and then begin the process of moving and finding a new home. We won't be WI residents anymore. 

This makes me a little sad. We have found a great home, church, community and friends outside of Madison and will be sad to say goodbye. But we will be so much closer to family in our new town and that, plus the great career move for Chris, will make it worth all the stress in the end. 

Anyone in Madison looking to buy a house?!!!! HA!