Greening Sam and Avery

outdoor play link up and an honor

So for personal reasons that will be revealed soon enough I have had to step away from the online world (really the computer in general!) for a while. Which means that this week if you want to find the Outdoor Play Link Up you should head on over to 

Mama Pea Pod 

Learning for Life

The Golden Gleam

Kitchen Counter Chronicles

 

I will be back soon with news of what we are up to, features from the past link ups to share and the outdoor fun we have been having!

Also, I wanted to say a BIG THANK YOU to  Curly Bug for honoring me with not one but TWO blogging awards last week. 

   

Such an honor to have someone acknowledge your hardwork and let you know that they enjoy what you are putting out there! Thank you so much for thinking of me and including me in a great list of blogs. 

 

blogging award

I was recently (I use that term loosely as the award was given to me almost TWO WEEKS ago!) awarded the Versatile Blogger award. This is my second time to get this award and I am thrilled. So fun to be thought of and mentioned by another blogger.

Thanks so much Dinosaurs and Octopuses for giving me this award!

So, the rules of the award are

• Thank the person that nominated you with a link back to them.
• Tell everyone seven things about yourself.
• Pass this award on to 15 newly discovered blogs and let them know that they've received an award!

Seven things about me....hmmmm....

1. I am a little kid's choir director at my church.

2. I am addicted to hot tea. And not just any tea but the tea that I can only get from a store that is half way across the country where my sister-in-law lives. My husband orders it in bulk and buys it for me for gifts! So not green of me!

3. I play Freecell on my computer way too much.

4. In January I start my one year term as the Chair of the Board of Directors for the WI Association for Environmental Education and I am TERRIFIED!

5. I love Christmas decorations! So much so that I had my sister throw my a christmas themed wedding shower and everyone had to buy me christmas decorations for our house!!

6. I still dream about what I want to be when I grow up, like an actress or a broadway star!

7. I am hoping to plan a LONG camping trip for my family to the black hills in South Dakota this spring!

Now to pass the award along!

1. Wildlife Fun 4 Kids
2. Growing Roots for a Better Tomorrow - this isn't actually a new blog to me but I feel like I recently re-discovered it, so I think that counts!
3. No One Has More Fun Than The Adams'! 
4. Sun Hats and Wellie Boots
5. Make Early Learning Fun!
6. Happy Little Messes
7. Taming the Goblin
8. Rainy Day Mum
9. A Mom With A Lesson Plan - her blogiversary is coming up so be sure to check out the site and leave her some comment love!
10. The Learning Hypothesis
11. The Golden Gleam
12. The Iowa Farmer's Wife
13. The Mommies Made Me Do It

And these last two are ladies that I love right now who join me each week for the outdoor play link up. They have some seriously fun ideas for outdoor play and I love how dedicated they are to getting their little ones outside!

14. Mama Pea Pod

15 Learning For Life

Wow, that is a lot of great blogs that you should all go right now and check out!

Again, thanks so much to Dinosaurs and Octopuses for the award!

 

Day 247: man are they hungry

We had a small flock of morning doves find out deck bird feeders! They were too heavy for the juice bottle bird feeder that we made and actually broke it! So we made something new today.

Using those bags that onions and oranges come in and the suet recipe that I posted here, we made our own suet feeder. Sam and I decided that the birds needed some place to sit so we stuck some sticks through it too.

Sam had fun doing all the mixing and then helping me hang it up outside.
 
 
 
Gotta keep those birds happy!

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The Nitty Gritty!

I "double bag" these types of birds feeders so that not as much falls through the holes. You can put bigger nuts or seeds in there as well and they hold up pretty well. We are excited to see what the birds think of it!

Chris and I really struggled today with having sick kids. It was in the 30s today. Which means that it is warm enough that you don't mind being outside but cold enough that the ground is not completely a muddy mess. We wanted to go hiking SO BAD! But the awesome green that was pouring out of both kids noses told us that any kind of outdoor activity was probably not such a good idea. Rats. Hate when sick kids ground our outdoor enthusiasm. But many more hiking days in our future.

I'm Stylish!

I don't think anyone has ever called me Stylish before! Woohoo!! Thank you Amy at Child Central Station for this amazing award. If you need ideas for kids this is the blog to visit. Amy is amazing, but sick right now so head over and give her some get well soon comment love!

Now onto following the rules of acceptance -

1) Thank and link back to the person who awarded you this award.

2) Share 7 things about yourself

3) Award 15 recently discovered great blogs/bloggers (The Versatile Blogger guideline was different the first time I received it so feel free to choose 10 or 15)

4) Contact the bloggers to tell them about the award

7 things you all don't know about me? Hmmmm

1. I went through a "hippie" phase in high school and college where I thought the way I could help the planet was to not shower that often! HA! and YUCK!
2. I met my husband in college. I can still remember what I was wearing on our first date (grey pants and a blue turtleneck sweater).
3. I grew up thinking I wanted to be an environmental lawyer!
4. I went to a small enough college that they actually had an event at the beginning of the year called Pump Handle where we would all get in a line and shake the hand of everyone else on campus (yes over 1500 hand shakes when you add in all the faculty and staff!).
5. I am a tea addict.
6. I LOVE kayaking but haven't put my boat in the water in probably 18 months. Between Chris living away from us for six months, being pregnant, apartment living and finally the move I just haven't gotten any paddling in. I miss it.
7. I would rather drive across country then spend a second on a plane. Chris and I seem to be flying more and more and I have gotten better at hiding my fears but it still terrifies me!

Okay, hopefully there was one thing in there that was new for you all!

So to pass the award along. Here are some pretty stylish ladies that I really admire.

1. FreshArtPhotography
2. Family and Life in Las Vegas
3. Welcome to Our Wonderland
4. Life Without Pink
5. Got-2-B-Kidding
6. Chasing the Seasons
7. Getting There
8. Diagnosis Urine
9. Ladybug Blessings
10. Keiki On Board
11. All The Small Things
12. Keeping Up the Isaacsons
13. JDaniel4's Mom
14. Let the Children Play
15. Tristin and Tyler

Whoa! That is quite a list. These bloggers are the reason I can never keep up with my google reader! So many great blogs to read. Hope you will hop your way around the list and check them out.

 

A blogging award

My SECOND award! Woohoo! This is very exciting stuff people. It is fun to have people recognize what I am doing and want to acknowledge it, no matter how silly the award is! So thank you to Lena for this great award. Go check her out here!

So, here goes. Rules first.

Them's the rules, as stated by Jill at Yeah.Good Times, the creator of this honorable award:


1. You must proudly display the absolutely disgusting graphic that I have created for these purposes (put it in your post, you don't have to put it in your sidebar, I think that would seriously be asking too much). It's so bad that not only did I use COMIC SANS, but there's even a little jumping, celebrating kitten down there at the bottom. It's horrifying! But its presence in your award celebration is crucial to the memetastic process we're creating here. If you need a higher resolution version... I totally have one!!

2. You must list 5 things about yourself, and 4 of them must be bold-faced lies. Just make something up, we'll never know; one of them has to be true, though. Of course, nobody will ever know the difference, so we're just on the honor system here. I trust you. Except for the 4 that you lied about, you liars! But don't go crazy trying to think of stuff, you'll see by the example I've set below that we're not really interested in quality here.

3. You must pass this award on to 5 bloggers that you either like or don't like or don't really have much of an opinion about. I don't care who you pick, and nobody needs to know why. I mean, you can give a reason if you want, but I don't really care.

4. If you fail to follow any of the above rules, I will hunt you down and harass you incessantly until you either block me on Twitter or ban my IP address from visiting your blog. I don't know if you can actually do that last thing, but I will become so annoying to you that you will actually go out and hire an IT professional to train you on how to ban IP addresses just so that I'll leave you alone. I'm serious. I'm going to do these things.

Five things about myself...hmmm. I am keeping this simple people and decided to go with the theme of food for my five things.

1. I don't eat things that jiggle.
2. I hate broccoli.
3. I eat beef.
4. I know how to make pasta noodles from scratch.
5. I love jello.

Treat this like one of the awful questions on the SAT and try to figure out which one is the true statement!

Passing this along to women that make me laugh. Cause sometimes there is nothing more important than knowing where you can go to find a smile!

1. Buried With Children

2. Shades of Blue and Green

3. Airing My Dirty Laundry, One Sock At a Time

4. MommieDaze

5. Namaste By Day

Okay, I think I followed all the rules!

Be back later with more fun winter stuff to share.