one for the birds

when we moved into our new house one of the things i noticed right away was how many birds (and squirrels) there were in our backyard every morning. so after two weeks of an "autumn" theme in our home-forest-pre-school, we decided to do a bird exploration this week. so far we have not done much other than buy a bird feeder and make bird food. aaaaannnnndddd it turns out that none of the birds wanted the bird food we put out. but evie did! i was laughing so hard when i was stringing up the little bird food shapes that we made because she was reaching for them on her tip-toes as i was doing it, like it was a piñata. i love this age and how evienne is not at all put off by what people around her think about what she's doing. if she wants something, she's going for it! so, i think i ended up feeding my children and the squirrels more with this bird food (j was entirely skeptical about my homemade approach and i guess he was right on this one). but! it was fun to make and a good morning's project, so to me: success!
it's not always easy to do this type of project with kids because they are invariably falling off the chairs at the counter or trying to climb ON the counter and knocking over the ingredients or trying to eat the ingredients. evienne did NOT understand or appreciate that we weren't making a treat for her to eat, haha. but i'm willing to put up with some mess and chaos to try to bring my kids more into the kitchen and awaken their curiosity and wonder. i remember as a kid being so fascinated with cooking, and was beyond thrilled on the day that i decided and succeeded in making a veggie soup all by myself. and i was going to do an art project of painting the bird house with the kids before nixing that idea, so compared to that potential mess, this was nothing! ;)
other things on our agenda this week are picking up all the bird books i've requested from our library and maybe visiting a nature center to see if we can spot any birds we're reading about. and we'll probably pull out our crayons and markers to try drawing some bird pictures. mama is not so good in the drawing department, so that should be worth a few laughs. ;)