Wild

We now have a yard. This yard is wild. There are benefits to having a wild yard - namely you don't have to maintain it regularly yet since you have never had even a non-wild yard and have no idea where to start with this tangle of 50 year old azalea bushes, pine cones and English ivy. When you have little kids.. this is a wonderland of non-stop fun and adventure. It is finally warm enough for us to venture out in the afternoons. The girls can swing and slide .. and also seem to love collecting the zillions of pine cones in our yard for various purposes. One such collection became a queens garden. Another ammunition stores to defeat the plastic owl that hangs on our tiny fig tree. Still another grouping of pine cones has been used to practice throwing at Daddy and seeing how many he can hit back with a stick. Also they just like to practice throwing them. They stand at the top of this little washed area in the middle of the yard and throw with all their girlish might. They are getting pretty accurate. Tonight Ada built the above "fire" and prepared a pot of spaghetti complete with meatballs and sauce. Here she is showing me her "blow-offer" - an ingenious device that allows you to cool your food without having to blow on it yourself. Simply wave the blow-offer like so and .. voila! Perfect eating temperature. 

Another "fun" thing about our wilderness is the bamboo. We are fighting it where we can which means lots of little baby bamboo on the yard waste pile. Margot decided that this baby tree needed to be a "Queen's Christmas tree" (kind of into queens right now). She then set about carefully balancing those pine cones and sycamore balls on the tiny limbs of said tiny bamboo shoot. It was tedious work and quite honestly I am not sure how she managed it. I tried a few myself to no avail. 

Daddy came home bearing gifts today - well one gift. Rings. Ada waits patiently in line every time we are at Marbles (the kids museum in town) to be able to swing and flip on the rings there. No longer! Thrilled. New swing next month perhaps ;) 

The yard needs so much work and we truly have no idea where to start but it has been amazing how just having a fenced in space to let all of us out in has been so relaxing in the afternoons. Better than going to a park - for right now at least. They have so much to do just exploring and poking sticks into the ground and chasing each other around the trees... paradise.