Mama is Emma's Mama: Emma's Earth

The weather has been really nice here (when it isn't raining) so Emma, Jared, and I have been spending a lot of time outside. It feels good after the craziness of this last year and the cold winter.

Emma prefers to play outside with her toes naked. I do too, but digging with a spade tends to require shoes.

Front Garden expansion

We have some of the most interesting critters in our front yard.

Black bellied squirrel (our name for him) eating some PB&J crust

We love this squirrel. He cracks us up! One day he was fighting in the front yard with a corn cob. Hilarious. And he is pretty brave. Emma and I were pretty close to him to get this photo, I would say about 10-15 feet. He just sat there, eating his PB&J.

We also get a cool assortment of birds; cardinals, sparrows, grackles, robins, blue jays, and crows. My favorites are the cardinals and the crows. The blue jays never really stay around long enough for us to get a good look at them, though they are the only bird I have managed to get a picture of so far...

I was going to add the picture of the blue jay, but it is a really pathetic picture and you can't even really see the bird.

Today Emma and I managed to play outside for a bit before the rains came down. I did some art stuff, she filled the bird feeders then played. While we were out there we had a lot of visitors. Mostly sparrows, but we did get a mama cardinal at our vinyl record bird bath

This would be our vinyl record bird bath. And a before picture of the front garden.

We also got to watch a bunny hop around the front yard. He got pretty close to me at one point (I was sitting on the ground). Then he hopped over to our tire planter that has a bird feeder and enjoyed the buffet of seeds set out for him. As bunny was munching on seeds, a crow hopped over from the vacant lot (that we are in the process of purchasing) next door. He was really fun to watch. For a while I was worried he would chase off the bunny, but they grazed in harmony.

After all the critter excitement, we headed in. Emma was upset. "All we did was watch the animals!" She really wanted to play with the girl that lives across the street but she was at school.

When we haven't been busy outside, we have been busy inside. I could lie and say we have been putting our house back together after this last year of packing-one-suitcase-after-another-with-nothing-every-getting-put-back-where-it-belongs, but we have been busy being creative. Emma's creativity usually manifests in her horses. She loves to create adventures for them, and other such imaginary stuff that I have long forgotten how to do. She can play in her room for hours with not a peep. Those are the days that I make all kinds of crafty things.

Other days Emma likes to get crafty as well. She came out of her room the other day and showed us this:

Both Jared and I were like, "Wow, who drew those for you?" thinking that maybe when she was at Gramma's last maybe Auntie Sara had drawn them.

"I drew them!" was Emma's reply. "Wow again, those are awesome!"

When we asked her how she drew them, she showed us the little paint cup she had used to trace the circle, then explained how she was planning to do a zentangle...

...like she had done a few weeks ago.

As she was drawing it, she realized it looked like, "my earth", (the globe in her room). So she decided to make an earth. Emma's earth.

As she is explaining all of this too us, her eyes got really big!

Emma- "Mama, do you see how if you connect this land here, with this over here (she is tracing over the lines on the earth picture above), it looks like a duck!"

It sure does!