this little guy is officially on the move--if he's not crawling on hands and knees, he's pulling himself along army-style. pulling up to stand? check. eating all kinds of solid food? check. giving mama one heart attack after another? double check. we love him all kinds of crazy. especially when he lets us get away with stuff like this:

it doesn't get much sweeter than a baby in a vintage ice cream bucket. we bought the bucket with intent to resell, but i might have a hard time letting go. one day not long from now it will be pretty impossible to believe that any child of mine could have fit into something so tiny. plus it looks good on my shelf. 

cheers!

flowers by lucy. the collection started with one, and due to my excitement, i suppose, has continued to grow. such sweetness, watching her figure out drawing, all on her own, without guidance. we've always kept many art supplies down within reach of the kids. they get into it all, everyday, usually in the mornings before breakfast. good stuff. 

we got the first of the strawberries at the farmer's market last week. as you can see, they were not totally ripe but the kids thought they were such a treat. tucker too. we've had a string of sunny days. reaching the point where it seems winter may not actually last forever. the strawberries are a good reminder of things to come. 

speaking of spring, our chickens are downright confused by all of the sunshine. the above photo is not the greatest, but it does show off the newest little peep-peeps in our coop. this mama hen hatched out two ducklings and a chick early in the week. they are so stinking cute. i get an especially good laugh when the ducklings hop into their water bowl, and the little chick (which hudson named bingo) hops in after them. they're all up to their knees in water (well, they don't really have knees but you get the idea) and mama hen looks at them like they're a bunch of crazies! yes, mama hen, i feel that way about my own three every now and then. 

baby chicks are cute but i am just in love with ducklings. we will be moving to a bigger property in the next few months and we'll be able to have a bigger duck flock. i am so excited!

lucy has learned to ride a pedal bike. this deserves a post of its own, but i will say that transitioning from her strider balance bike to a real bike without training wheels went off without a hitch. i can't say enough good things about the strider bikes that we own. they are truly fantastic (and of course our gal is pretty fantastic, too!). 

in the months leading up to christmas, i decided on the perfect gift for the kids. their "santa" gift, a "big" gift, something they could share. i ordered them a handmade teepee, found on etsy, and was super excited about it. on christmas eve, after they had been tucked into their beds and were sleeping soundly, jeremy and i opened up the huge box that we'd hidden so well, and set up the brand new teepee. i trimmed it with colored lights and hid it all behind a makeshift curtain. i just knew the kids would love it. 

here is where i would love to insert a photo of our teepee, in our house, with my kids curled up inside of it, reading books, dressing dolls, etc. except they haven't. used it. all all. not sure why. the teepee is adorable, it's well made, it's a perfect little place to hide away. and yet, no interest. 

fast forward to this afternoon--we spent today at the home of good friends. a sunny day, an afternoon with nothing planned activity-wise for the kids. the "fearless foursome," as i like to call them, spent awhile riding their bikes and then busied themselves with collecting dry bamboo shoots from a neighbor's house. they were hard at work, caught up in a sudden burst of creation. with just a bit of help to sink the poles, a teepee was constructed. raking, digging, spreading, decorating. handfuls of grass were pulled for carpet. bamboo was broken to set a pathway. a makeshift oven was put together out of bricks and dirt. the whole thing was a true enjoyment to watch, and to help out with. creativity and teamwork at its finest. 

the only issue is that this was a teepee made with room for three and not four. improvements, design-wise, can always be made. but that is the case with most prototypes, wouldn't you say? 

they'll get it right next time, no doubt. and no worries, he got his turn eventually. 

i'm holding out hope that our christmas teepee will eventually find its place and purpose around our home. come springtime, i think it will be moved outside to provide a little quiet spot in the yard. or perhaps i'll hire the fearless foursome to design something even more fantastic for themselves. they're a good team. 

and they work for food. always a bonus. 

not sure if failure is the right word for it, but our bees did not survive the winter. it seems, in leaving them the entirety of the honey they stored (which is what they feed on through the winter), we also inadvertently left them too much real estate to maintain. the hive population dwindles through late fall and winter as the queen takes a break from laying. water got into our hive, because the bees could not do the upkeep on such a space. they also likely had trouble keeping themselves and the queen warm--even when doing their best, they were heating a condo, instead of a hut. 

in hindsight, this could have been combated by inspecting the hive in mid autumn and combining frames full of capped honey down from three boxes into one. our hands-off approach, which had seemed to be working well since the springtime, led us down the wrong road here. it's not a mistake that we'll make again. these are the kind of lessons that stick. 

the only upside to the sad state of the bees was the honey harvest. unexpected, for sure. conditions definitely not optimal--honey flows well at about 90 degrees. our house, at its warmest point that day, was 61. midday, with kids playing outside (and thus, the back door open) it was 55. 

we set the frames (heavy with honey) directly in front of the fire to warm. jeremy headed to the local urban farming store (biofuel oasis) and rented their honey extractor--a big, electric behemoth of a machine that spins the honey right out of the frames and into the bottom of a big tank, where it flows out and into the vessel of the harvester's choosing. 

of course, had the room been 20 degrees warmer, the whole process might have been a bit smoother--literally. in the end, after a whole lot of sticky, sticky, sticky mess--i can truly not impart how messy the project actually was--we ended up with three and a half gallons of honey. not a bad haul. we ended up opting to stop trying to strain the honey--the cold room just didn't allow for the honey to be viscous enough to flow through the fine mesh of the produce bags. instead, we heated the honey slightly on the stove. this made it easier to pour into jars, and it also sent the wax and other bits floating to the top where we could skim them off with a spoon--a much easier, though slightly less perfect process. 

cleanup required not one, not two, not three but FIVE wipe downs of every surface in our kitchen, including the floors, plus a proper mopping. later that night, fully exhausted, i read about people doing an outdoor honey harvest in the summer, after dark, when the bees are tucked away for the night. 

sign me up for this, please. 

next time. i am missing those darn bees already, and looking forward to spring when we can install another package or two, and give it another go-round. it's funny. of course the bees aren't pets--nothing close to it, but they do give a lovely presence to the yard and we came to think of them as our own. they are hard workers, tireless really, and i am sorry we couldn't have done a bit better by them. 

next time.