Nature Hunt

 This morning we went on a nature hunt.  The boys had a lot of fun with this activity!  I handed them each a set of paint samples (in fallish colors) and asked them to find items outside that matched the color.  We walked all over the acreage finding lots of things.  Those items that we were able to haul with us we did (including the orange caterpillar) - the gray cement blocks and big hay bales we left where they were.

As you can see we collected lots of items.  It was also a good way to explore our new home.

Often Grant will say he doesn't know a color but today with this activity he had no problem matching real items up with the color samples.

 See our orange woolly bear caterpillar.  Luckily it was happy with the marigold we picked in the same color scheme.

We then proceeded to paint with pine branches.  Clark worked on mixing red and yellow to create orange.

This is his "sunset" picture.  It's nice to have a big ol' front porch where we could spread out and enjoy the outdoors.  Note: those are baskets of drying walnuts holding down the paper.  With so many walnut trees we hope to have some walnuts this winter.

Even baby Addie enjoyed time outside with us!  She truly seemed to enjoy sitting out on the porch with us today.  (And on a side note we're going with Addie as the spelling when we use her nickname - thanks to her aunt for catching my mistake yesterday!).

In other news today, I managed to clean out everything from the dining room.  I still need to clean off the table filled with dishes but the boxes are all emptied or moved to the room they should be in.  This allowed me to set up my sewing machine and organize some of my sewing materials.  Yes - I am going to be working on the machine a lot in the evenings I hope.  My goal is to sew up at least 2 new children's FFA jackets, make a Halloween countdown calendar and put together a black skirt for Addie.  We'll see how far I get.  With all that sturdy corduroy going through my machine in the next few weeks I plan to pick up some heavy duty machine needles while in Ames tomorrow (this of course means a trip to the quilt store - hooray!).