What a Beautiful Morning....

What a way to wake up. I love looking out our back slider and seeing a picture as perfect as this. Notice, I even caught the birds in the top right corner. I just love all the amazing colors. Now this weekend was another story but thankfully once the fog wore off it was a bright sunny day but chilly day.

Marley etched this Pirate Ship all by herself on the Etch a Sketch. She was so proud. We were impressed a three year old could do that well on the silly thing.

Over the weekend we finally had a chance to check out a new toy store: ChildTrek Natural Toys http://www.childtrek.com/ What a great LITTLE store. They were packed with mostly all wooden toys. We were probably there for over an hour. We had fun demoing the toys we had seen on the Internet and were able to see what they were about and the scale in size of them. We have spent the last few months working on weeding out a lot of the plastic toys that the girls have. There are still plastic toys buy far fewer than before. This year we bought all wooden toys for Christmas presents. There are so many great natural toys out there and we wanted to start supporting being more Green in our house hold. Paul and I let the girls pick out a toy to get and they choose this tea set. It is made from recycled milk jugs. Yes it's plastic but the wooden set they offered was too small. McKenzie could have choked on every part but the tea pot itself so we decided since it was recycled plastic that it would be OK until McKenzie grew into the other set. Now they do have a REALLY nice Longaberger Tea set that their Gramma Kathy got them a few years back but it is breakable. We use that set for those special tea parties until they get a bit older and are not as rough with their toys. They enjoy using that set with supervision though. If the girls had not both played so well with this set for half the time we were in the store we might have passed on it. Besides the begging influence for the set as well.

On the Weekends we like to incorporate as many activities with the girls as we can. This way they learn, play, and stay busy at the same time. Plus it's a great way to bond with the girls one on one. They grow so fast and we like to preserve all the time we can with them at any age. This weekend we made pine cone bird feeders. A baby squirrel stole the last four that we made two weeks ago so this time we tried to outsmart him and used wire instead of yarn or string to hang them from.

This is one of the 6 wall hangings that I worked on over the weekend. It turned out nice. Gotta love two gnomes in the middle of a forest roasting marshmallows next to the fire. I plan to finish up another couple today and sew some appliques on about 11 album cover that I am resurfacing. Lets see how much of it I actually get done. There is also a mountain of laundry to tackle.