Spent a wonderful spring day enjoying the outdoors and doing art:

- Sophia (5), Olivia (3), and I enjoyed a pancake breakfast sponsored by the Scandia-Marine Lions at the Scandia Community Center with Jamie, Dan, Jack (4), and Hannah (6). 

- The kids all played together on the outdoor trampoline at the Boardmans.  Lots of jumping and bouncing...lots of laughter.

- Visited the two llamas...almost time for their first shearing.  Beautiful deep brown and black wool.

- Saw the chickens (Easter Egg breed) feeding.  Olivia was a little scared because she thought they'd bite her. Funny thing is...she's scared of such a little bird but wanted to keep touching the llamas.

- All the kids painted pictures.  It's so much fun to see how different paintings turn out with the same material used.  Love that about art.

- After painting, the kids watched a movie about dinosaurs.  We've been learning about eggs, and animals and reptiles that hatch from eggs so this was a nice movie for them to watch.

Came home and ate a quick lunch.  We all fell asleep for a couple hours.  It's been a long - but fun - week.

Ate dinner, and then the girls played outside for about an hour after dinner.  They took Casey for a walk around the backyard, stood on top of the woodchip pile for the longest time - like they had conquered some huge mountain and were admiring the vista.

While they were out, I cleaned off the 4x4 cubbie shelves.  Realized that I had too many things on the shelves for the girls to do, and that it was difficult for them to really see and play with the things on each shelf.  Now, each little cubbie has only one item with the exception of the art cubbies for each girl and the notebooks, lapbooks, and other work they are currently doing. 

They were so excited to see the new arrangement when they came inside.  It's so much easier to find things now. 

We spent part of the morning before going to the breakfast hanging up and putting away clean clothes in their room.  Again, now it is much easier and we're not wasting time trying to find things each day.

My goal is to really do a thorough spring cleaning and get rid of clutter - physical stuff that's occupying the home that we no longer need or want, and that others may find useful. 

Tomorrow it's going to get into the 70s.  A great day to explore the outdoors and do some nature journaling and drawing.