Easter Eggs Northern Baby Style

After Northern Family spent some time at the library on Saturday, we decided to color some Easter Eggs. This was kind of a big deal for the Northerns, because last year we had the PAAS kit and two dozen eggs ready one Saturday morning right before Easter, and that was when Northern Baby decided it was time to arrive on the scene. No eggs last year...so this year we were going to color some eggs! So, by now, some of you are looking at the above picture and thinking, "if they were so gung-ho to dye some eggs, why do those Easter Eggs look like s***? And why are there only NINE eggs?!"

Well, the answers to those questions are: Northern Daddy and Northern Baby. Northern Daddy is the one who forgot that his normal eggs from the store are brown eggs. Brown eggs don't color quite as well as white eggs. So Northern Daddy screwed that one up! Northern Baby is the one who decided to conduct a few physics experiments in our kitchen. I'm not real sure what his hypothesis was, because he still doesn't use words as much as he just points and says Da!, but I think his basic theory had to do with fragile ovoids impacting dense surfaces at perpendicular angles at high velocities. (In other words - hey, let's see what happens when I drop this egg on the kitchen floor!) So Northern Baby screwed that one up! (and two others in his quest to verify the results of his first test)

Hmmm....fragile...tall perch...wonder what'll happen if I just give this egg a little toss?...

Wow, Mommy, that looks like a real mess to clean up....

Tune in next year to see if Northern Daddy buys WHITE eggs, and whether Northern Baby stops chucking eggs to the floor.

A semi-related topic that will be covered shortly: just how much food can a one-year-old toddler manage to eat? You won't believe the answer....

Story Time at the Library

All right, boys and girls, it's time for an update....let's find out what Northern Baby did on Saturday!

Saturday, Saturday, Hooray for Saturday!

A Day of Fun, Time to Run

Run, Run; Dance in the Sun!

Saturday, Saturday, YAY for Saturday!

Why the rhyming verse above? Well, this past Saturday, the Northern clan was particularly excited to have a fun event to attend. The library in our town square hosted a reading of the newest book by Anna Dewdney, Llama Llama Misses Mama. The story was read by none other than the book's author, who also read other books in the series, such as Llama Llama Mad at Mama and Llama Llama Red Pajama. Obviously, to be a successful writer of books for children, you must be able to rhyme a few words. (I've tried, and it's fairly easy, but I have a hard time illustrating my stories! I have more fun and a great deal of success with rewriting kids' songs to include adult-themed verses. Don't like that idea? Try listening to the same stinkin song four hundred and twenty-two times in one car ride! Northern Baby can't even sing yet, but he insists on listening to the same song over and over. Actually, I think I had Levi singing along with me and Garth Brooks in the car today..."It's the ropes and the reins and the joy and the pain and they call the thing rodeo". He's gonna be a great cowboy someday: I can see it now, he'll be famous and they'll make a movie about him called 'The Only Vermont Cowboy'...)

Where was I? Hmm...Hmmm...oh! - We had a reading of Llama Llama, and the main draw was that there would be REAL LIVE LLAMAS to hang out with after the story! Northern clan loves some llamas - well, we like alpacas much, much more, but llamas are pretty darn cool! Some of y'all know that the deal presented to Northern Daddy (when he was just Northern Hubby) was that we get a pack of alpacas or have Northern Baby - and N.B. was cheaper, so that's the road we're traveling....any how, we like some 'pacas and llamas and such.---Do I need to put some pictures in here to keep you people interested? Hold on, they're coming up---- So we beat feet down to the library to hear the story and see the llamas. Only disappointment was that there was only ONE llama in attendance. (but, hey - if you squinched your eyes up a little, it looked like two llamas standing real close together!)

Here's a shot of Anna reading one of the llama stories.

Here's Northern Baby saying Hi to the llama!

Our friends Kari and Marcello came by to see the llama. Marcello wasn't so sure about getting close to the big ol' monster, but eventually gave him a quick pat hello.


Apparently, when the weather gets a little warmer in Vermont, kids grow on trees! Don't believe me? Look at the crop on this tree! The ones way up near the top were a little small and not too ripe, but the ones on the lower branches were pretty big!

So we had a good time at the Llama Llama event, and then headed home to work on Easter Eggs!

Maple Sugar Weekend!

Right after Northern Baby's first haircut, we took him on a tour of sugar houses. Every mud season, there is a weekend of tours at maple sugar operations. This means different things to different people: for the residents of Vermont, it is a chance to get out of the house and stop staring at the walls. For out-of-staters and pure city folk, it's a chance to slop around in the mud while wearing totally inappropriate footwear (no kidding, we saw quite a number of people emerging from cars with out-of-state license plates wearing bright white shoes - HEY! The mud is at least six inches deep, what the heck are you thinking? Put on your boots!) But for everyone, it is a chance to watch the amazing art of creating maple syrup.

The above picture shows N.B. trying to figure out why we woke him up from his comfy car seat to stand next to a shed with smoke shooting out of the roof.

Not a good picture of Northern Daddy, but it proves that he does indeed participate in these adventures...and you'd be frowning too if you had to hold on to HEAVY Northern Baby!

For those who don't know how maple syrup is made, here's the short lesson. First, gather the sap from the trees. Stick a tap into the tree and collect it somehow - some use traditional sap buckets, others use plastic tubing. You could even hold it in your mouth and run it down to the collector - but I won't be sampling your syrup if you do! After you have a whole lotta sap, start boiling. It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. In the picture above, that's not smoke from the fire, it's steam evaporating from the sap as it is boiled. (Have you tried to explain the difference between smoke and steam to a one year old? I mean, he can't even talk and I'm trying to tell him that the shed is NOT on fire and that we're going to walk over and into that very shed...meanwhile, he's waving his little arms around telling me that only an idiot would walk into a burning building! The good thing about him being little is that I can just pick him up and take him wherever I want regardless of what he says - just scoop and we're off!) That's a real short version of how maple syrup is made. If you want to know more, Wikipedia it.

After oohing and ahhing over the bubbling sap in the evaporator, we headed outside to walk the tractor paths through the sugar bush (for the Southerners, "sugar bush" is the term used when referring to a grove of sugar maples used to produce syrup). In one area, there was a campfire burning, and Levi spent some time waving sticks and leaves at the flames (from fifteen feet away - he was safe, Grandma!)

Northern Baby investigates a sap bucket.

That's all I have to report for now, because Northern Daddy got a cool new cell phone that does all kinds of whiz-bang things, and I gotta go figure it out!

Northern Baby's First Haircut

After a full year of growing hair, Northern Baby got his first haircut. (He was getting a little shaggy - looked too much like a bum.....but if you consider that he has no job, is supported by others, and spends most of his day begging for food, maybe the bum look is right for him....)We went to a little place in Williston called the Hairy Bear. It's tucked inside of a big-people salon, and in place of the regular barber's chairs, they have ride-on toys mounted on pedestals. There is a Jeep, some kind of Barbie car, a real-life kid's motorcycle (if you took it off the pedestal, it could drive around)(Levi's going on that one as soon as he learns to hold on!), and the little race car that Levi sat inside.

Levi didn't really know what to think of this new experience...he was well-behaved for the most part, but there was a cute little girl getting her hair trimmed in the car next to him, and he spent a lot of his haircut time trying to spin around to gaze upon her beauty. (I think that if he could talk, he'd be using pickup lines on every girl he meets! --Yeah, baby: this sports car is mine...wanna go for a ride?!)

Isn't he just adorable?

After the haircut, Northern Baby got a balloon that he proudly carried around. As a side note, N.B. loves helium balloons. He will spend all afternoon commanding the adults around him to retrieve his floaty balloons from the ceiling...and as soon as he gets his balloons back, he forgets to hold onto the string and they float back up...if he keeps it up, I think we're going to get a huge bundle of balloons and see how many it takes to lift N.B. off of the ground!

After such an exciting, busy morning, a snooze is in order. Little does he know that he's already on the way to another new experience. Join us on the next installment of Northern Baby when we visit Vermont sugarhouses and find out how maple syrup is created!