I'm making strawberry pie right now. We will make freezer jam sometime in the next couple of days. And, maybe a strawberry rhubarb upside down cake.
All in all, a good day at the strawberry farm. There are so many strawberries you could pick a box full in 10-15 minutes.
Our homeschool group went on a field trip to the local fire station. It was a blast. I was thinking that this would've been an awesome one in the summer time. What do you think?
Honey and Pumpkin declined to participate. We had attended a tour at this fire station a few years ago and it was BORING. This one was not, however. I was pleasantly surprised. The guy was very patient and answered everyone's questions patiently. The only stressor for me was the roving hands of these children. Lots of curious children.
Gramma visited us for a few days a couple of weeks ago. I kept forgetting to take pictures, but finally rememberd to bring the camera on our outing to the Mayborn Museum. Here are some pictures from that trip. The museum is part natural history and part children's.
All in all a good day was had by all. I was exhausted by it, but the kids had a great deal of energy. One of my favorite exhibits is the mammoth exhibit. A big group of mammoth bones were found somewhere in Waco. The theory is that there was a big storm and the herd was caught in the mud and couldn't escape.
Friday morning dawned cold and cloudy. Not what I wanted for our Vanishing River Cruise. I assumed that we would be out in the open the entire time. Luckily, I was wrong on many counts.
I bundled the kids up as well as I could.
The girls were bundled in parkas we had from previous assignments in colder places, but poor Brother had to make do with what we had in layers.
We walked down to the dock and climbed on board. I was so relieved to find that the lower deck was enclosed and heated. 
We spent much of our time downstairs, but we did venture up occasionally. Unfortunately, I don't have a very good zoom lens for my camera (it's on my wishlist along with a good macro lens) so the pictures are not great. And, the pictures are a bit cloudy because of the windows. Anyway, we still did get to see the many and varied birds on this lake and I was not too stressed about the children either falling down the stairs or into the water.
These trees contain nests for the Great Blue Heron. These birds were everywhere. Here's one in flight.
That tiny white dot in the middle of the water is a pelican. I thought it was pretty cool to see.
The highlight of the ride was seeing the eagles. Now, I did not get a shot at all of the eagles. These eagles were only about 2 years old based on their size and color. The tour guide said that the eagle's heads don't turn white until they are older so it was easy to see that these particular eagles were adolescents. It was fascinating. Now, you may wonder why the eagles were in Texas. Well, apparently, they travel to our region when the rivers up north freeze. Apparently, these particular eagles were not informed about the bitter cold this week.
And, here we are on the top deck. We only stayed up here for a few minutes. The stress was too much. Pumpkin wanted to climb all the chairs and Honey wanted to watch the water from the top of the stairs. Brother wanted to sit up on the storage lockers near the railing. Sister was fine, but I didn't want to leave her there by herself.
We had a lot of fun. I wish I could've taken some better pictures. The birds were fantastic to watch.
About a week and a half ago, we went on a field trip with our homeschool group to the Salado Christmas tree farm. We had picked the date weeks in advance. Wouldn't you know it, the day ended up being one of the coldest we've had.
Here we are on the hay ride.
The gentleman driving us gave us a wonderful tour of the farm. He first showed us the horses.
See the coats on them? We Texans just were not used to this cold (it was in the 40s!!).
This tree has an interesting story. Apparently, deer use trees to help with the itchiness they get when their antlers grow. New growth is very velvety and itchy so deer will use a tree to rub their antlers. Well, the deer use the same tree every single year. In order to save the other trees, the tree farm leaves this tree for the deer to use. Wasn't that an interesting tidbit?
Now for our tree. Here it is at the farm.
The machine shakes all the loose leaves and branches off. It was so cold the water had frozen over. The shaker broke off the frozen water.
Wrapped up tight for loading on top of our suburban. The man was gracious to tie it down well for us.
Here it is in our house. I used purple lights for Advent (I got the idea from another blogger, but can't remember exactly who it was). We will continue to leave it like this until Christmas Eve when we will decorate with all our ornaments. The kids are working on Jesse tree ornaments, but we are ever behind.
You all know about our "field trip" to Niagara Falls, Canada. I was fully prepared for the extra security measures. I only carried medicine and baby food in my carry on. In Austin, we did not have any trouble at all. They let us through without a hitch. I was taken aback when I realized we all had to remove our shoes. Even 16 month old Pumpkin has to remove her shoes. I think she was a bit shellshocked. I remove her from bed at 4 in the morning and take her through this strange ritual of baggage and security check. Little did she know how stranger it was going to get.
The flight to Chicago went off without a hitch. Honey and Pumpkin fell asleep almost immediately. This made the trip very bearable. Brother and Sister took out activities that were in their rolling backpacks and occupied themselves throughout the flight. It worked out rather well.
In Chicago we landed in the F terminal and, of course, our next gate was in the C terminal. Sigh. So, I with my 4 and my sister, her husband and their 2 trudged to the shuttle bus stop. Well, we had strollers. The lady barked at us to fold them up. No explanation--just fold them up. To get to the buses we had to walk down some stairs. If she had just told us there were no elevators we would have known what to do. I was surprised because I thought people in Chicago, a city in the Midwest, would be friendly. Well, not this lady. She snapped at my 3 year old nephew to essentially hurry up down the stairs. I wonder how disabled people get to their gates. We did make it to the gate although a bit grumpy.
On our return, I had my carry on bags checked by the TSA. I wasn't upset, but it made me wonder why in Buffalo, but not in Austin. Maybe it's because Buffalo is so close to the Canadian border? I'm not sure. The things that were checked were the baby food and the medicine. I carried Motrin, Tylenol and Albuterol. The man kept thanking me for waiting patiently. I told him that if I can wait 6 months for my husband to come home from Iraq, I can wait 5 minutes for him to search through my bags. After that, no problems. Buffalo's airport was great because they had a little play area for the kids to burn off some energy before boarding.
All in all, the actual travel part went well. The kids behaved very well on the plane. I do wish that people would not give such dirty looks to us when the babies were crying. There's only so much a mother can do to calm a baby (yes, my 16 month old is still my baby) on an airplane. I didn't keep the baby crying on purpose. I did my best as did my sister to keep them calm and quiet.
There's much more to post about our field trip. We've had family visiting from Korea so seat work has been a bit neglected, but we are learning quite a bit.
This was the view from our hotel room. When we arrived last Wednesday, we were bedraggled, tired, and hungry. However, the view was magnificent. This particular picture was taken on Friday. It was raining when we arrived. I was trying to get the children to look at the Falls and to notice the mist that was rising up from it. I was having great difficulty describing to the girls what mist was. Well, Brother solved that. "It's water dust.", he said. Yeah. That's right. I love his mind.
