Warm Days of January

This is one of the things I love about Boulder, warm days in January. Yes, tomorrow it could be in the single digits (I don't think that's actually predicted for tomorrow, but a 50 degree swing happened just last week). Three little girls are outside enjoying every last ray of warm sunshine they can soak up with their little bodies.

Josie is making chalk paint: scrape chalk to make chalk powder, add water, stir, repeat.

Anna is busy painting with her chalk paint some objects that she found.

They said this is bounce town.

Anna is trying to walk her slack line at bounce town, or mostly she just bounces on her slack line, holding a hiking stick for balance.



Barefoot in January. Well, barefoot and not screaming and running back inside in January.
Who knows what crazy scheme they will come up with in the next 5 minutes!

What Are You Making?

Oh so many things! As Anna told me today: "My favorite things to make are crafts and food!"

Yup, that just about covers it. Anything you can make would fall into one of those categories, right?

Meatballs:The meatball production -first you have to make the mud, in this dry climate. Use a spoon to mix the water and the dirt, collect it in a cup, form the balls, powder them with something white and fancy like crumbled cement, let them dry out of a younger sister's reach:
Sage spoons and acorn top bowls, for a feast in the playhouse:
Brownies, by Anna:

Little acorn people (yes, we collected all the acorns last Fall and made an acorn bag out of them-as opposed to a bean bag- but today the girls requested that the bag be cut open so the real treasure inside could be put to good use):

A surprise for Daddy, energy bars for his bike rides, freezing on plates before being dumped into bags:Anna made them with peanut butter, honey, different chopped nuts and dried, chopped fruit, oats, chocolate chips, and the secret ingredient- ground coffee beans.

Also being made: Squirrel food:

They liked it.

It doesn't count as feeding wild animals if you're just giving them back their food source that you stole for them last Fall, right? Anna wanted to know what the inside of acorns looks like, so she found some rocks and spent a while pounding them open. When she realized that the meat of the acorn is inside, the squirrel's favorite food, she left it out for them. It was amazing how fast they found it. Within half and hour it was all gone, even while we continued to play within 5 feet of the food offering.

Yes, most of these are things Anna made today, as opposed to Josie or Ruthie, although Ruthie helped on some of it. Josie has been sick. We made her a throne to recline on in the kitchen today where she was able to feel like she was an intimate part of all the activity while still getting the rest that her body needs. She seems to be feeling much better this afternoon, and I'm betting she'll be as good as new by tomorrow morning.

Laundry House

Come visit us in our laundry house! We made it with our friend Nora while Mom was hanging laundry on the line.

We even ate our snack inside:

Doesn't Nora have the most beautiful eyes?!!!

This little Ruthie girl has sooooo much fun with her special Nora.

So does Anna, for that matter.

An addition to the original house:


How many of you can have this much fun swinging from the rafters of your house?

Another later addition, the house just kept growing:

Josie wanted to sing for us in this room of the house. We all sat down and waited. Turns out she actually wanted all of us to sing with her. So we did. We had our own little concert in the 'wedding room' of the house.

I don't think these girls had ever had quite this much fun while mom was hanging the laundry on the line! We love it when Nora comes over!

Gold Hill

Did I ever tell you that I like camping? Well, I do. In case you hadn't figured that out by now. Getting away from the noise, the lights, the home chores, the screens, the lack of dirt, all the stuff we have, and getting back to the basics of enjoying who and what is real around us. I do love it.

This weekend we went only about 15 miles from our front door up into the mountains past the little town of Gold Hill. We camped on Roosevelt National Forest land where camping is allowed, BYO water and TP. The girls and I left early on Friday and Mitch came up on his bike when he got off of work. Don't you love living so close to the mountains!

We found a great kid-friendly campsite. And the girls were in heaven for the weekend.They had a wrestling house:

S'mores toasted over the fire:

A hammock boat to play in:

Great trees to climb:

A fort (or hospital, as it became in their play) that we built for them to have fun in:

Can you see Anna and Josie in there?

Dinner cooked over the fire:

And lots of time for this little family to spend together without the normal distractions of city life as we know it.

It amazes me how fast these girls can get dirty. I guess it is a camping rite of passage. For the mom, I mean. Getting past caring how dirty your kid's face and hands and clothes are. As long as you clean their little hands before they eat, right?

Although, I have to add, maybe it has nothing to do with camping. Maybe all the dirt has more to do with being a kid, so free and innocent with none of the adult cares and joy-stoppers that we all carry around with us:

Little miss Ruthie. And I thought you got dirty camping! I got out the hose before I let that little munchkin back in the house!

My Outside Girl

You may have thought that all the Clement girls loved to be outside, but this one tops them all. She's the first one to ask to go outside each (and every) day, goes and gets her jacket, hat, shoes, whatever she thinks she might need, comes and finds me and says "ah-ah", in that distinct toddler talk way that only a mother understands. Outside I send her, and her sisters soon follow. Nothing brings a smile to her face like getting to play outside. She'll play outside for hours, long after her sisters have given up their games, felt the cold and come trooping back inside.

You never know what she might be concocting in the bird bath. Something yummy. At least she thinks so because she keeps trying it to see if she has added enough of this or if it needs a tad more of that.

This is her domain.

In the Snow

These are all pictures I took last week of the girls playing in the snow. The snow is gone from all the sunny spots now, but still lingering in the shade.

Josie making a snow angel with an icicle in her hand: Eating the Snow:

Peeking at us through the milk door:

Playing with Ruthie through the milk door:

Anna, on our walk through the woods:

Milk Door

We discovered the milk door that leads from my kitchen/dining room straight into the girls' playhouse! Back in the 50's this is where the milkman left the milk every morning, now it is where Mama collects mail from her two little girls:) This is my favorite piece of mail yet. Drawn on the front and back of some of Mitch's scratch paper from school, on the front of it Anna wrote her own name and then "I love you" (I-heart-U):On the back she wrote 'Mom':I love it. That just warms my little mama heart. I love that as Anna and Josie put mail for me in the box they're yelling at me to come get my mail. As soon as I get it they both run inside to read/show me what it says in a flurry of excitement, hand gestures and giggles. Then they run to the drawer for more paper, then they're off back outside composing more mail for mama. The mail box only makes it more fun, it doesn't really save them any time in the delivery. That's all part of the fun.

Playhouse

This was my work of creativity yesterday, I made the girls a playhouse outside. It is on the warmer south side side of our building, which is where we play in the wintertime, and is completely constructed out of materials that we had or things we found in nature.

This is the shell of it, wire mesh for the roof, connected to the railing on one side and some T-posts I drove into the ground on the other side. They were putting in new carpet on the upstairs walkways of our building and the workers gave us the carpet scraps they were about to toss in the dumpster. Josie wanted me to take a picture of her 'sleeping' on the carpet inside the frame of the playhouse:

Then we went for a walk and filled our wagon with willow branches we found on the ground. When we got home the girls helped me weave these through the mesh frame of the roof to complete the roof:

Then the dolls and tea set were brought outside, along with chairs, little pots and pans and other 'house' things, and playing commenced. Needless to say, they liked it!

Today I wanted to make walls for the house. Anybody have any good ideas of how? We just used fabric scraps and blankets we had, but that won't last long. It kept them shaded and cool while they played today, though. The blue panel in the middle is the door. That, at least, can stay. Behind the other material are a few widely spaced pieces of wood/poles, the beginnings of a wall.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you that I constructed a counter for their house, a 'craft counter' as Anna promptly named it. Since it is at little girl standing height it is definitely a counter, not a table that you could sit at. Once that was finished they promptly brought out their crayons, scissors and paper and started crafting in their little house. I showed them how they could hand their scissors from a stick in the roof so Ruthie couldn't get them and we found a bucket they could put their crayons in and hang from the roof in the same way, out of Ruthie's reach. You can see all of that in some of the following pictures. Their pictures we also hung from some sticks on the roof, so now their house is decorated.

Then we went inside and made some playdough. The girls were enthralled that we could actually make playdough! Anna kept laughing and dancing a little jig in her excitement as they helped me measure ingredients and stir the concoction, saying "That's so silly! Mommy's making playdough! That's so silly!" I loved her enthusiasm and excitement. They were also excited that this would be edible playdough, they could try it if they wanted, although I warned them it wouldn't taste very good because it was really salty.

When it was ready, we took the playdough out to the playhouse:

They had a lot of fun with their rolling pins, cookie cutters, pots and pans, slatted spatulas and other kitchen utensils as they made food for their house.

Poor Ruthie. She just wanted to destroy what the girls were making. So she and I hung out on the stoop where she could participate a little bit, see everything the girls were making, but couldn't quite reach it through the railing. I did give her her own piece of playdough to play with and squish around in her hands. She liked that. After one little bite I let her have she didn't want to eat it anymore but was so intrigued by it that she kept licking it.

When she started to get antsy and frustrated that she couldn't get to where the girls were at I took her down on the grass and gave her a pot of water to play with.

What kid can stay away from a pot of water? Not Anna and Josie!

They decided they were done playing with their playdough and it was time to wash all the utensils and the counter with water.

Then Anna ran inside, grabbed her hat, dipped it in the water and started running around all over the place laughing with her wet hat dripping water all over her face.

And Josie followed suite:

Lots of fun, inspired by a playhouse the girls go from one activity to the next. I loved that they had a playhouse to play in that was outside and I didn't care that water was going everywhere.

I'm sure there are many more posts to come of fun we will have in this playhouse. But any ideas for the walls?