spring days are here

....even if the nights still feel like winter and we're still using the wood stove daily and waking up to thick frost (which was responsible for the death of some nasturtiums that I risked putting in the garden yesterday - boo!).

Today was a day of practicing cartwheels,

using a string to help keep his cartwheel straight

puzzle-building (and some geography),

recently thrifted puzzle map of Canada

completion of a puzzle is always satisfying - especially when you find all the pieces are there!

egg dyeing,

they loved experimenting with color blending and layering - we did also experiment with homemade dyes (cabbage, beets, turmeric...) this year but they didn't work. we have yet to figure out what went wrong

Age of Empires playing, which Kale opted to do with Aden while we were dyeing eggs, saying he was fine not to participate. He realized later he didn't really want to miss out on the egg-dyeing but the lure of his favorite computer game felt so big at the time... He was sad about skipping out on a tradition that he normally enjoys (and feeling the inclusiveness of us all doing it together), so we just talked about how we can learn a lot from our feelings if we pay attention to them. All you can do really, when you feel regret, is try to learn from it...

There was also our first trip to the lake of the season, it was beautiful, sunny and warm and so there was game inventing,

bulls-eye and sand bowling were a couple of fun games we improvised

Hillary preferred working on some of her Jedi Mind Tricks - notice the incredible the focus ;-)

lake wading and log balancing,

concentrating hard on balancing because in April you don't want to fall in

....and what else? Oh, a little bit of snake charming,

Kale thought watching the snake's body expand and contract with each breath was very cool

"S"

And lastly, we've been making up word lists lately for fun, starting with the same sound....
"S" for snake, slither, sneak, side-winding, scaly, slick, slimy, sunshine, spring, sssssssssssss.....