Collaborative Art with a Child

This piece was a collaboration between Gibbie and I. I was working on a small piece Paul's mom commissioned, and Gibbie was so enamoured of it he wanted me to make a copy for him. I said I wondered if he wouldn't rather choose a favorite animal, and that launched this simple project.He drew the landscape and the sky, and told me which animals to put and where they should go. He brought his stuffed animals as drawing models and set them up for me on the dining room table. I drew the animals and painted in the colors, with consultation and discussion about the Antarctic. This is a painting of the time of year when it is dark all the time--we don't really know what that looks like, so we surmised, and we will learn more about it later.

We talked about painting snow. At first, Gibbie said it was white, and wanted me to use white paint. I suggested he look out the window at our snow heap and asked how he can see the shapes in the snow. He decided that there are blueish parts, so we put those in.

For the sky, I just used a watercolor wash, sprinkled with table salt . We both signed it. The most challenging part of this painting for me was keeping my admirers from sliding the tablecloth off the table and bumping my arms in their excitement while I worked.

I love working together with my kids! We will both treasure this painting.

Urban Owls in the Woods

I have discovered a Wonder not far from our house. There is a beautiful park, Reservoir Woods, just up the road from us. No one talks about this place, and I had never heard of it until last summer, but it is so lovely! There are wetlands, buggy lowlands, butternut woods with currants, a sunny vineyard of sumac, and lovely tall piney woods.
It is in the piney woods that we have seen owls. Or rather, an owl. I don't know if two owls would ever sit together like that--it is a fanciful rendering for a nursery wall. I think I could have been more realistic if it weren't the dead of winter--so this picture shows all the gaps in my memory of one of my favorite forests. I did try to show the forest floor, sparse of plants, and covered with a thick mat of orangey needles. A fallen log with that bright orange fungus spotting it. Sunny greenness and sky showing farther away. I wish I could depict the feeling of depth in these white pine stands. The trees are so tall, and the woods adopt a stillness. It is like a chapel.

I first saw the owl high in the trees, far off, with that distinct shape. I have seen him close up too--covered in fluffy grey feathers, as wide as my car when his wings were spread, silent as the woods when flying, even from very close. It was a gift, one that I treasure. I do hope this owl
has little ones to nurture in the spring?

Perlieu in June

We went to our beloved spot in Dunn County again last month. It had been over a year since we'd last been there. I'd say that it was one of the most relaxing cabin trips yet. We even had some friends visit us.

Here's a set of pictures from the trip, including digital and film photos.

Fall Vacation

It was a few weeks ago now (ok, so almost a month) but here's some pictures from our fall vacation to Battle Lake, MN.



(If your flash isn't up to speed, here's a link to the album.)

Menomonie Weekend

We just spent a wonderful weekend both in my home town of Menomonie and at the Perlieu land. We got to see both of my parents, go to my 10 year high school reunion, and relax at the cabin. Probably the highlight was a stretch of about nine hours on Saturday that Libby and I got to be around Menomonie without the boys. It turs out that, given the chance, we still really enjoy hanging out together!

Here's a small album of photos from the trip. They're not regular family vacation photos, since some are things we found interesting (signs, Menomonie's green algae-rich water, graphitti) as well as the normal cute kid shots. As always, I recommend the slide show option for viewing them.

Look Close

Have you seen the inch worms?
Inching up the trees?


This little caterpillar has little sets of legs, in front and in back, and his middle humps up as he draws his back legs up to his front legs.

You can see the legs even better with a magnifying glass. (a great tool for a little one's expotition rucksack!)

Now is the time to find these little guys, if we keep our eyes open.
Paul found this one on a tree trunk.
Last week Gibbie found one in mid-air, suspended above our path from a silken, unseen thread.

One dropped in my lap during a recent picnic outing!

Some of them turn into lovely moths, others eat all the leaves from the quaking aspens. (I wonder if the aspens quake for fear of the tent worm!)

Perlieu in Spring

We recently got back from the most wonderful trip to the woods of Western Wisconsin. We love this place. It's the landscape I grew up in and Libby grew up visiting. Now our boys can enjoy it too. We may have more to say about specific adventures from this trip, but for now enjoy a slide show.
(Click here if you're Flash disabled.)

It's Getting Warmer...

Last week it didn't hurt to be outside. Being outside as a family, which was once such a regular part of our time together has been impossible for such a long time because of the extreme cold of our bleak midwinter. Last Monday, though, it was time to go back to Crosby Farm Park.Gibbie just wanted to sit in his stroller and watch the river for a long time. (A park officer had earlier looked on in wonder as I plowed our little stroller through the snow!)
Ezra was snuggly wrapped onto Mama. We wonder how many more times we'll have of an Ezra small enough to do this with.
It was a short visit, but hopefully a foretaste of much to come.

More Beard Frost

Libby said that my last beard frost photos didn't capture the full effect of the phenomenon. I took this picture when I arrived at Amore on Thursday morning. It was about 8 degrees F.

Knowing the plants

It was a great moment for me when Gibbie, seeing staghorn sumac with it's drying flower clusters pointing up all over, said, "hey, that looks like fruit!" What kind of fruit, we asked? And he said, "Sumac!" I was particularly proud because the sumac flowers we have gathered looked very different from these, because these had all lost their leaves. Yup, we've been making a tasty juice from the flower clusters, and he's even developed an appreciation for licking the sour fuzzy flowers.
I do hope the kids grow up knowing how to read the land and plants. In the above photo, you can see dozens of different plants. I don't so much care if he knows all their names (I sure don't!) but I'd like to teach him, and learn together, and I'm sure eventually learn from him, all about them. Know how to make baskets from the bark of the white trees, as he calls them. Know how to eat the different parts of the milkweed plant during different seasons. We can dig the wild parsnip, and look forward to the raspberry and blackberry seasons in their turns. We will look around for the jewelweed when we get a nettle's sting and pop the seeds out at each other in the late summer when the pods are spring-loaded.
Here Gibbie is enjoying the tactile beauty of the ready milkweed seeds. Soon he will scatter them in the breeze, as any happy person will.

Fall is a great time for gathering basket supplies; we collected willow and cattail. They are drying on the porch, if one can call it drying with all this rain! I look forward to weaving them up into beautiful and useful things when we are stuck inside later in the year. That's the great beauty of this world; In the plants, seemingly dying back in the fall, are the stores for new life, promises of fresh vigor and growth next year, and abundant material for wild and artisinal beauty. This world is so made that in a deeper sense than I can grasp, dead things are always and everywhere coming to life, greater and better than before they fell. I am thinking of the food we eat, the seeds we sow, the troubled lives we live, and Christ himself.

Our Fall Vacation

Here's a look at our fall vacation. I took last week off from work and we went to the Perlieu cabin, and then Libby's grandparent's place near Battle Lake, MN. We'll write more about the trip itself when we can, but for now just enjoy the photos!


(If the slideshow doesn't work for you, here's a link to the photo album.)

Battle Creek

After a quiet start to our Sunday afternoon (which included some jumping) my father-in-law Doug introduced us to a park in St. Paul called Battle Creek. The drive to get there is almost as great as the place itself. I love Shepherd Road by the Mississippi with it's water, trees, and trains. Gibbie especially loves the trains. Feel free to look at the small album of photos I took of our outing. (I like the slideshow feature.)

Libby and Gibbie played a game which I think is called "Pooh Sticks." Libby can comment on the literary reference, but I believe the game involves dropping sticks from one side of a bridge and seeing whose stick comes out the other side first. Gibbie thinks it's a lot of fun.

Purlieu Weekend

It's been a busy couple of weeks and we've got a lot of back-blogging to do! Two weeks ago we took a long weekend in Wisconsin. It started around a close family friend's graduation party and turned into a good excuse to spend a couple of days at a cabin in the woods. If I've got the history of the place right, it goes like this: Libby's dad and some friends decided to form a sort of farming co-op back in the '70's and bought some land in Dunn County Wisconsin. The whole farming aspect didn't much take off, but they built a couple of cabins and have had various projects going on the land. We've been spending time there on and off for years and love the rustic (no electricity, pluming, etc.) accommodations. Libby would come here in her childhood and thus learned to love the same landscape that I enjoyed growing up just a few miles south of here.

This was our first time bringing the boys to Purlieu (as it's called). We thought Gibbie would love it, since he so much enjoys the large wooded parks we frequent in St. Paul. Some aspects he took to right away, like the large field with a hill to run or roll down.

There was one unexpected obstacle to his nature enjoyment, however. Bugs. I guess we just have a lot fewer bugs in the city. For the first day Gibbie went around with his hands over his ears trying to block out their buzzing.
Eventually, after talking with him about it for a while, I figured out why he was so scared. He's really good at taking a concept and generalizing it. He knows that bees buzz, therefore he figured that anything that was buzzing around his head must be a bee and could hurt him. No wonder he was freaking out. He didn't completely get over the bug thing until our last day out there.

On Sunday morning we decided not to drive back into town for Church. Instead, we went down the highway just a mile or two to the Hay River Lutheran Church. I had expected this little country church to contain a handful of old people singing feebly and slowly after listening to an old pastor preach feebly and slowly. I was wrong. It was a small church, but it was full, and full of people of every age. The pastor had a wonderful conversational style of delivering a message true to Jesus' character. He also had quite an accent. Someone said he was from Colfax (another small WI town). We later learned that came from Australia before serving in Colfax! When we went downstairs after the service for coffee we met people who lived all around the Purlieu land. They knew about the land, and a little about the people who owned it. They were impressed that we knew the old farming couple who used to live next to Purlieu, in fact one of them was their niece. It was a joy to see some life in that little place, and to meet many of the friendly folks who live around the cabin.

On our way back to St. Paul we stopped for lunch at that very farm once owned by the old people I mentioned. After they moved into town for health reasons one of the Purlieu members bought their land. It's a beautiful little valley with a creek running through it.
Looks idyllic, doesn't it? What you can't see in this picture are the wood ticks. Hundreds of them. All over us. They weren't bad at the cabin, but here there was a steady crawling stream of them. When we sat down for lunch here Libby said, "Oh Paul, you've got a tick on your pants... and one on your shoulder... another on your shirt... here's one on Ezra's head..." and so on. She didn't mind it so much (that's the ex-wilderness guide in her.) It really bugged me, though, and I was already in a bad mood because the Mercedes was running funny and I was worried about making it back home. So Libby pulled out one of her tricks from camp counseling: the Tick Stick.
See that brown mass on the diaper pin? That's a stack of impaled wood ticks. They still wiggle a little like that. It's great for grossing out Junior High campers.

We did make it home in the Mercedes. It was a good trip, but I think the next one will be even better because the boys will have already gotten used to the accommodations. I forgot to mention how much Gibbie liked the "potty house"!
This last picture has no significance except that I think it's a good photo. (Check the texture on the wood and old chair.) Gibbie is being a bird in his nest on the porch of the cabin.

Monday Adventure

I'm not bloging about anything too serious today- just a photo tour of our day.We stepped out of our front door for our usual Monday morning outing. This week's adventure had an added twist caused by our recent car trouble. (Don't worry, it's nothing too serious. I just need to get around to it! I'll blog about it later.) We took the bus to Swede Hollow!
We had to transfer buses in downtown St. Paul. Gibbie's did pretty well with the waiting.
We finally made it to Swede Hollow. Much to our surprise, as well as their's, the power was out. Gibbie had a cold chocolate instead of hot, and I had a drip brew instead of Macchiato. The shop has such good natural light that, apart from the slight drink differences, we didn't miss the electricity.
Then down into Swede Hollow park we went. Libby and Gib had a great time playing by the water.
Look at the strange flowers Gibbie found. He said, "They're sticky."
Ezra needed a little snack in the woods.
He felt much better afterwords.
Here we all are. It was a difficult self portrait to take with such a squirmy family. Another freeing, relaxing day off.

Mondays

Mondays are my day off, and they've become a very special time for our family. We usually start off at the Swede Hollow Cafe. It just goes to show how much I like coffee shops that, after working for five days in one, I want to spend the first part of our free day here.

Spending a good amount of time at a cafe takes a little more forethought than it did before our two boys. Coloring with crayons on note cards was today's activity for our two-year-old Gibbie.




Gibbie also made up his own pretending activity which consisted of lighting crayon candles with a match made out of the ripped-off top of his Crayola box. He just turned two last week, so a lot of his imaginative play is birthday themed.






The next part of our day is often spent outside and as much in nature as our urban life allows. This week, with the weather being so accommodating, we explored the Swede Hollow city park. It's an area that used to be a kind of shanty town for immigrants (Swedes being the first) and has been a city park since the 70's. As you can see, it's pretty close to being in the woods for being in the middle of St. Paul.
By the time our long nature walk is over, we're all ready for a warm bowl of Libby's home made chicken noodle soup and a good nap. All this, and it's not even quite noon. That's a good day off.