Spring on the Farm and my upcoming trip

This weekend brought a lot of spring-time weather to us long-suffering Wisconsinites. Even today, I believe the temp is hovering right around 70. Of course, we are not completely out of the woods yet. Last year we had a late freeze on....get this.....May 20th! Yikes. But we took full advantage of the weekend and had a great mix of work & play. Here are a few random photos to share.

The back of our house from the other side of the pond.

Bird nest in a tree next to the pond.

Baby lambs and chickens - they are buddies.

Transplants.

Me. Trying not to get stung while changing the sugar-syrup.

Rugby, trying to figure out the concept of 'pet' rabbit and how that relates to the kind he eats daily.

The family on our bike ride. Bet you didn't know we had our very own Paris Hilton!

Me. Planting onions. We usually plant around 1000 onion plants. 250 down, 750 to go.

Onions.










If any of you remember this post, there seemed to be some like-minded sentiment about women/moms having a space they could call their own. Not because we don't love you family, but because we would love you better if we could give ourselves a 'time-out' now and then to our own corner of the world.

Well, tomorrow I'm leaving on a trip to Grand Marais, Minnesota (5 1/2 hours North of me, if you can believe that) to take a class called Build Thoreau's Cabin, based on Henry David Thoreau's Walden cabin & book. The link to the class is here. For 5 whole days, my friend Julie and I will be learning how to build a 10 x 14 cabin with a loft. There are 11 people in the class and supposedly we will be able to walk away from this class with the ability to come home and build our own cabins. Julie and I are going to start at my house, build my cabin and then off to her house to build hers.

Since there are so many women who have indicated they would like to do something similar to this, I am going to attempt to do kind of a video diary of sorts about our experience. I won't be able to video tape the entire class obviously, but will keep in touch through photos and videos to let you know how it's going.

I broke down and bought the kids a Flip. This thing is pretty awesome and I'm stealing it back from them to take on my trip. We'll see if I figure out how to use the damn thing correctly. Actually, it's the easiest thing in the world - you just push one button and you're good to go.

So, as any of you with kids know, trying to prepare for a trip for 5+ days is no small feat, which is why I must stop blogging long enough to get my bags packed, all my electronic gear ready and sufficiently drive my girls nuts by hugging and kissing them to death to get me by for 5 days without. Of course, all they see is that mom will be gone for 5 days and that means, all the TV they want to watch, no chores and basic anarchy, when dad is left in charge.