Today, two friends came over to play with Sylvia and Lily.  They spent hours outside doing lots of great things, but they spent the most time on Mother Nature’s Palace – restaurant extraordinaire.  They created menus and made very creative dishes using grass, leaves, bark, mushrooms, even cut up bugs and millipedes.  They had so much fun!  It’s amazing what they can do with just a few simple items found in nature.  And I had the pleasure of dining there.  Not quite Fancy’s Diner, but quite fun nonetheless.  Oh – and there are 2 other random photos at the end!

Menu written on birch bark; plates made of tree “cookies”; appetizer (or appetite, as Lily says) made of grass.

The excellent wait staff. 🙂

Mushroom cupcake

Centipede salad (you can see them cut up on the side). You can also see the napkin and silverware to the right.

Nice presentation!

Sylvia made 8 of these Thank You cards for the kids at her birthday party. It took her forever, but she had a lot of fun and they sure turned out cute!

Last day of Kinderhaus! Mr. Steve, Lily, Olivia and Miss MIka

Sylvia turned 8 in January, but we were at Holden Village (and had a great celebration there!).  Sylvia wanted to celebrate with her friends and horses back home, so we had a party for her last weekend.  Sylvia was especially lucky because Grandma, aunts Laura and Mikaela, and cousin Melanie were able to attend!

8 girls and 4 horses – everyone got to groom the horses and ride for a while. Some rode without a lead rope.

Sylvia is riding Lilly, the horse she takes lessons on. All the horse crazy girls loved being around the horses!

Shootin’ the breeze over the fence. 🙂

We ate lunch in the barn and had cake of course.

Opening presents!

Sylvia wanted a double layer spice cake with cream cheese frosting – it was delish!

Yesterday was one of my favorite celebrations: Fairy Fest!  Our friend organizes (with help!) a day long celebration that includes making fairy houses, singing songs, chasing the Green Man and dancing around a maypole.  The festival is at her beautiful house in the woods outside Decorah.

Lily is working on her house. We use natural items we all collect and hot glue guns!

It’s fun for adults, too!

Sylvia with her finished product.

Bringing down the maypole

Painting the maypole

The maypole! We didn’t get any pictures of it this year because Jon and I were both dancing! There was a pick up band of about 5 people.  We danced several dances, including a complicated weaving dance!

A beautiful spot in the woods. We burned an effigy of winter at the end to keep winter away, but who knows with the crazy winter we’ve been having!

We went to DC last weekend to attend a funeral for Jon’s uncle Allen.  It was good to be with family, even if the reason was so unfortunate.  We extended our stay in order to spend a day and a half in DC on the National Mall.   We had a great time – the weather was beautiful (it was actually spring!), we really enjoyed the museums and it was fun just being in a big city.

There were 2 highlights to the trip that are not depicted in the photos below.  Taking the Metro was a a super fun adventure.  The girls had never done anything like it before (not even a train, since our two attempts at riding Amtrak were foiled).  And on our last night (in Crystal City), we ate dinner in a revolving restaurant.  We had fantastic views of the city, the Pentagon and the planes landing at National airport.  And the food was great, too!

At lunch and then the Botanic Gardens (one of my highlights):

Museum of Natural History. Jon is holding a hissing cockroach at the insect exhibit.

This was Lily’s favorite part of the day – watching Olivia, the tarantula, eat her cricket.

Riding the carousel on the mall.

Weaving a basket at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Spring flowers blooming everywhere!

The girls are great travelers. They love their roll-y suitcases!

Waiting to board our plane at National airport.

On the first of April, we had two friends over to play since there was no school.  We took field trips to watch maple syrup being made and to bottle feed an adorable lamb.  We came back home to make an April Fool’s trick for Jon and my friend Emily.

Running to a maple tree to see the sap running at our friends’ sugarbush.

Tasting the sap straight from the trees – yum!

The sap goes into this big tank and is eventually moved to the evaporator pan where it gets boiled down into syrup.

Sylvia is tasting the maple foam – it tastes like a maple marshmallow! You can see the evaporator in the background.

Our friends raise sheep on their beautiful land near the river. They have a guard alpaca to keep the coyotes away.

The girls got to bottle feed Blackberry. Her mom abandoned her shortly after she was born.

Blackberry was certainly adorable and loved the girls and all their attention!

Potato candies! We fooled Jon and Emily into thinking they were potatoes and then taking a sweet surprise of a bite!