The Binker Files

Look what Levi can do!

Reading together

Snuggling & reading together while waiting for breakfast!

5 trips around the sun

Our tiny Levi turned 5 years old yesterday!

His day was filled with his favorite things: legos, swimming, chocolate.

Happy Birthday Levi, we love you!

 

Snuggling

This is how they sleep:

Have you ever seen anything sweeter? 

Levi loves bugs

Tiny & a white-spotted sawyer.

The peas are in!

Silas, Levi and I planted peas, beets, swiss chard, a mesclun salad mix and radishes in our brand new garden bed today!

Silas single-handedly filled a 12 foot row with perfectly spaced peas.

I've been waiting a long time for this day.  Gardening is one of my very favorite things and, for a variety of reasons, it has been years since I've grown anything; I'm so grateful to now be able to share this with my two little boys, who are embracing it with their typical energy and enthusiasm. 

Besides a fun day spent working together in the great outdoors, there is so much learning happening!  I think gardening may be the perfect homeschooling activity.  In the last three days, we've touched on so many different subjects - construction practices, biology, soil science, entomology, math and map-making, to name a few.  Plus, after all of our hard work, we have some delicious food to look forward to in the not to distant future - food that we'll harvest, prepare and eat together.  I don't think it gets much better than that!

Food not lawns

Silas and Levi helped me build two raised garden beds!  We now have 75 square feet of new garden space and we're very excited.  We're looking forward to getting some peas in the ground soon.

The boys were actually a big help and they were just thrilled when they found a some new pets - a clover mite and a couple of grub worms.

Two beds down and many more to go - we've got a big lawn!

How we're spending our days

This is the time of year when frogs and salamanders crawl out from their underground winter burrows and head for the nearest pond, looking for love.  And Silas, Levi and I are hot on their heels. 

Our world is all about the amphibians right now.  For the last week, we've spent the better part of every day tromping through the woods in rubber boots, exploring slow-moving streams and marshy wetlands.  At night, if we are all feeling brave, we head out with our flashlights to listen to frog breeding calls and look for migrating salamanders.  So far, we haven't seen a single frog or salamander, but we've discovered eggs and we've heard lots of frog songs. 

Spotted salamander eggs.

Our lack of success hasn't discouraged the boys at all, they just love the hunt.  Silas repeatedly steps into the black, quicksand-like muck and struggles to pull his boots out without falling over (he really like the challenge and so far has only landed in the mud twice) and Levi encourages me to watch as he jumps from hummock to hummock over the murky water or makes his way across a fallen tree bridge and I can tell he is feeling very proud of himself.  Every time we go out they both say they can't believe how much fun it is and Tiny always asks if we can come back to this same exact spot again tomorrow.

We are hanging out in some places I never could have imagined I'd willing spend time in, but it is actually quite fun.  We have a little window right now where the weather is perfect, as Silas says it's "not hot, not cold, it's just air", and the black flies haven't arrived to send us scurrying into the screen house or back to Portland, and we plan to be out there exploring until that window closes.

The front step.

Have you heard wood frogs or spring peepers in your part of the world yet?

Do I have to brush?

We have no idea what Levi was eating.

Tiny is 4

Our little boy seems so grown up, how did this happen so quickly?  Happy Birthday Levi, we love you so much!