All of these pictures were taken within a 5 mile radius of our house. Cameras just don't do it justice. Today I saw a little more red, but the leaves are starting to fall, so I know it won't last much longer. The last one is from the bottom of our driveway looking into the canal, and the next to last one is of the trees in front of our house from below. The first 8 I took at Beaver Lake, which is a favorite nature walk place the kids and I like to go to. The ninth one is along the road. The tenth and eleventh are from Sonrise Mountain Ranch, which is a Christian retreat center two miles from our house. It is where we played last week in the pictures of the playground on the mountain.
Dwelling in the Land and Feeding on His Faithfulness,
I haven't done a show and tell for a long time! I've been trying to control my blog time, but I needed to make this post, and this seemed a great way to do it.
Last week we had some friends here from Illinois. On Friday the kids and I took them around to some of the local sites. Our first stop was a museum at the Cimarron/Curecanti area here in Colorado, but unfortunately it was closed. We walked around outside and found a neat train area where in the late 1800's they had loaded sheep and cattle to be hauled either to Grand Junction or to the other side of the mountains. For some strange reason, I didn't take any pics there.
Next we drove behind the museum into the canyon at Morrow Point. It is where the Cimarron River and the Gunnison River come together. There is a huge dam here, but I didn't take pics of that either. The following picture is a bridge close to where the two rivers meet. The smaller looking one is the Cimarron, which flows within a few miles of my house. We hiked down to the bridge and then to the tiny little bridge on the far left that looks like a white line on the other side of the river.
This is my kids on the bridge.
This is the group including our friends. These rocks are just past the second bridge in the first picture. The weather was so lovely that day!
From there we drove down the highway to the Black Canyon National Park. It is the second largest canyon in the US, and the deepest. However I didn't take many pics since we had been here many times already! This picture is from the bottom of the canyon where we ate our lunch. It doesn't really show the deep part.
We drove around the rim for a short while and visited the visitor's center, then went to the Ute Indian Museum, which we had never gone to before. We learned a lot about the people who were in the area before the white people came and sent them away. I love museums like this. It was kid friendly too and had tipis and such outside that the kids could go into. My kids pretended to be Indians there for awhile.
Across the street was a lovely memorial area and garden. We saw pretty frogs in the water and took pictures there too.
Good Morning World! I had a wonderful night of sleep in my new bed! Here it is! Dh installed it last night:
He and a friend pulled all of the wood from the woods around here and built it from scratch. His friend had built beds like this before, and so taught dh how to do it. If you remember seeing dd10's bed, the railings in our loft and the railings on our front deck and steps, dh's friend also made these. Cool, eh?
I hope you enjoyed this show and tell. You can click on the image above if you'd like to see more similar show and tells.
This week has been great!I’ve gone for a walk almost every morning walking uphill for the first 30-40 minutes.I am very pleased with myself that I haven’t had to stop during that whole journey.I find that I am getting much more cardiovascularly fit!Each day I try to go a little further than I did the day before.On Monday I walked up to “the first lake” taking the “pipeline” which essentially is a path that goes almost directly up the mountain.
This is the pipeline path looking up:
This is the pipeline looking down:
This is the first lake (it is the lowest of a series of lakes that are managed to help control the water coming down coal creek that feeds our electric generator):
I didn’t stop at all.On Tuesday I went to a lookout above the second lake from the bottom in 41 minutes.I only stopped to take pictures. This first one is the second lake from the bottom.
Then these are some of the views I saw from the top:
Then on Wednesday I decided to take the road and see how high I could get.It is a gentler way, but much longer.I got to another great lookout, but I didn’t have the camera.Yesterday was intercession day at the base, so I didn’t have time to take my early morning walk.Today I walked to another place above the first lake, but I took the road to get there.It took about 45 minutes or so, and had some great views too.I am loving to go walking in the early mornings.Although it is cold outside, the mud is all frozen, and the snow stiff enough to hold my weight, as long as I go on the snowmobile tracks since they pack the snow underneath.
A week or two ago we finished the New World Explorers unit put out by Amy Pak at Homeschooling in the Woods.That unit was packed full of great activities, book recommendations, and a wonderful lapbook.The girls both made a notebook that is full of their lessons, a few notebook activities and things we did together in an ocean unit study last fall when we went to San Diego.
Besides doing this unit, we also have been making our way through many of the readers that go along with the same time period in Sonlight’s Core 3 language arts.They were a good match-up, and the girls read lots of books about things they were learning about.
One book we found especially good from our public library was “The American Story” by Jennifer Armstrong.I hope to get this book for our home library as it has 100 true stories – very living – about many historical themes.We barely made a dent in it as we read through the first 20 stories or so before I had to take it back!We also read Elizabeth’s Diary (a diary of a girl in 1906), Sign of the Beaver, Secret of the Andes, Plimoth Plantation, Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky, Treasure Island and probably a few more.We watched several videos put out by Schlessinger media from the library that proved to be interesting too.
Some of the activities that we did are in pictures below. The first week we worked on our lapbooks and learned some knot tying and made "limeys" like the sailors used to have to drink.
The second week they made "captain's journals" from cardboard, cloth and paper soaked in instant coffee to give it an old, weathered look. The girls then wrote journal entries as though they were sea captains. I was delighted with how well they turned out, and the stories were fabulous. The last picture here is my 3 yo dd's.
The girls also enjoyed making pueblo dioramas.
The last week we worked hard to put it all together into a lapbook complete with a photo album to remind them of the fun we had. You can see a slide show of the whole lapbook at my daughter's blog: MountainPrincess.
This has been a show and tell with Canadagirl. Join us through the Mr. Linky on her blog - warning...it is addicting!
On Thursday morning as the girls and I were sitting down to do our Bible reading, one of the girls looked out the dining room window and noticed this grey bird at one of our suet feeders. He is all grey except for black and white on his wings and tail. He has a longish black beak, and is about the size of the Stellar's Jays. I quickly grabbed my camera to capture some shots of him through the window, with the zoom all the way out and trying to avoid the baby's finger prints from looking out the window this morning. The bottom picture has him with the stellar's jay behind him. Pretty cool, eh?
If you'd like to join the fun or see other blogs that are doing Show and Tell Friday, hop on over to Mary's blog aka Canadagirl.
Hello Everyone! It's Friday and the sun is shining! Whippee!
For my Show and Tell Friday Hosted by Canadagirl I will be showing some of the birds who have been visiting my birdfeeders. I have two suet racks on trees, and two hanging feeders. I used to have three hanging feeders but Boomer the dog got ahold of one.
This is a stellar's jay, taken from my window.
This is a chickadee.
And this is a nuthatch, I think. It is hard to tell from the picture, and we do have some. It might be another shot of the chickadee! Nuthatches are a little bigger than the chickadees and go upsidedown to eat or crawl down the tree.
These are two Mennonite Cookbooks that I wanted to share. The top one is my very well-used copy of More-with-Less that I got for a wedding gift. I had an even more used one before that that I had taken with me to Europe when I was a young lady. This cookbook is awesome because it cooks without the extra sugar, and uses all natural ingredients. I can cook many things from scratch using it. It came in handy to make salad dressings and other things that I couldn't buy in Europe in the early 90's. Sometimes my dh brings it over to the base kitchen, and I can't find it...boy does he hear it!
This next one was sent to us from a man who visited with my husband while he was the program director at Camp MennoHaven in Tiskilwa, Illinois. He came across this cookbook and sent it to us out of the blue. It was published in the 1950's and has all sorts of traditional Mennonite foods in it. I used it last week, and will probably be using it much more. I also appreciate that it uses natural ingredients (as opposed to "a can of this" or other prepackaged foods.
One thing have I desired of the Lord that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. To behold the beauty, the beauty of the Lord. To inquire in His temple, the temple of the Lord.
This is my everyday thoughts about being a mother to three little ladies (12, 10 and 5) and a two year old son. We serve God full-time, and I am a physician assistant. I have the most awesome husband in the world. I am trying to seek and serve God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength.
