Sunset + WILLOW GIF!

December 7, 2015June 5, 2016 | Allison

The other night there was a really beautiful sunset, but more importantly – WILLOW IS ADORABLE! Ahem. Sorry. It’s just that I made an adorable GIF of adorable Willow waddling adorable over the floor. She usually hops, but occasionally she waddles, and it is… So. Cute.

But first, the sunset pictures. It really was a beautiful sunset, although probably not quite as beautiful as this one. ← That sunset (which was actually about a year ago now) was probably my favorite sunset ever. It was gorgeous! But, not to offend this sunset, it too was gorgeous, just in a different way. Sooo….

Wasn’t that purty?

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. I present…. Willow the rabbit!

Awww, my sweet little flufferpuff! Do you know you’re adorable?!

***Allison***

Mission Christmas Tree

December 6, 2015February 14, 2016 | Allison

We got our Christmas tree yesterday! We always go to a Christmas tree farm and cut our Christmas tree down with a saw, so this post is for you poor unfortunates who don’t or can’t have that experience. *Wink* @ Loren and Mallory. 🙂 (Oh, by the way, I was going to tell you before. Mallory is my friend, and she just recently started a blog where her bunny, Snickers, “posts” about his life. It’s very cute – you should check it out! Just click Mallory’s name above.) OK, down to business!

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We don’t always go to the same tree farm every year, but this year we went to a big Christmas tree place called “Evergreen Christmas Tree Farm.” (I know, very original name, right? ☺) They have quite a large amount of space to wander through, and several different varieties of trees to choose from, including Colorado Spruce, White Pine, and Concolor Fir.

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I think we got a Colorado Spruce (though I’m not sure), but the Concolor Firs are really neat because if you rub their needles between your fingers, they smell like citrus!

First, my brother picked up a handsaw from one of the saw-poles scattered around the farm. Then we began the search for the perfect Christmas tree! We trekked all over the farm, winding in and out of big trees and small trees; young trees and old trees; trees with long, soft needles, and trees with short, prickly ones. We went up and down the hills and along lots of paths. Finally, we ended up where we had started. At last, in a corner of the tree farm, we found our tree!

The tree was a little too tall, so we cut part of the bottom off. The nice thing is, my mom and dad can kind of measure how tall the tree should be – if it reaches the top of their hands when they stretch their arms out, it’s a good size. (My parents are both pretty tall.) The kids like to yell “TIMBER!” when we cut down the tree.

And now we had to drag the tree all the way down the hill to the “packaging” center. The kids started by taking turns, and my dad finished when we got tired. 😀

The people at the bottom of the farm set your tree in a stand and turn on a machine that vibrates the tree to shake all of the dirt and dust on it. As you can see, our tree was pretty dusty from dragging it down the hill!

The next part is really fun to watch. The people working at the farm take the freshly-cleaned tree and set it on a sort of conveyor belt thingy. They attach some sort of hook to the trunk, and p – u – l – l the tree through a hoop with net in it. The tree gets all wrapped up in the net. It looks like a cocoon or something!

The purpose of wrapping the Christmas tree is to make it easier to carry on your car or truck. Dad strapped the tree to the top of our car, and off we drove!

At home we set the Christmas tree in it’s stand, watered it (with just plain water), and adjusted the screws in the stand so that the tree stood up as straight as possible. Then came another fun part that all of us kids love – cutting off the netting! We each took a pair of scissors and snipped off every last bit. It’s fun to watch the tree unfold from its bonds. 🙂

Then we put on Christmas music and started decorating! I love the decorating part. (As you have probably noticed, I love pretty much everything about getting a Christmas tree!)

First we put the lights and star on, then my mom carefully put the glass balls on, then everyone could help with the rest of the ornaments. Finally the tree was chock full of decorations, and we could sit back and look at our work. So pretty!

Here are some more pictures of the ornaments that I took in the dark. They remind me of a Christmas I Spy Book.

And here is one where I moved my camera around while holding down the shutter button.

Did you get your Christmas tree yet? When? Do you get artificial or real trees? Have you ever gone to a Christmas tree farm?

***Allison***

Almost Snow – December Frost

December 4, 2015December 5, 2015 | Allison

We woke up today to a beautiful blanket of… nope, sadly not snow… frost. Even though it wasn’t snow, the frost was still amazingly beautiful – it coated everything in sparkly ice! Of course, I took lots of pictures. Here are some up-close pictures of the ice crystals – aren’t they gorgeous?!

I found some blades of grass that had frozen dew drops hanging to the ends!

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And here are some pretty red Nandina berries with ice crystals on them. The sun was shining on a few berries in the bottom picture so that it looked like they were on fire!

This brown old leaf was beautified by a rim of silver frost.

Which picture was your favorite? Have you had frost or snow yet?

***Allison***

Choco-Peanut-Butter Candy Bark!

December 2, 2015December 2, 2015 | Allison

This is what I made for my brother’s birthday a while ago:

I made up the recipe for this candy bark, because originally I was going to make candy bark from a recipe, but we didn’t have all the ingredients or I didn’t like the recipe or something, so I decided to make up a recipe myself. I call it “Chocolate Peanut Butter Candy Bark.” Or “Choco-Peanut-Butter Candy Bark” for short(er).

Now for a short description. Ahem. This candy bark is delicately flavored with only the finest chocolate and creamiest peanut butter on earth, and sprinkled with deliciously candied pecans… OK, enough fancy language. I’ll translate that for you. This candy bark is made with semisweet chocolate chips, peanut butter, and sprinkled with yummy candied pecans. My family rated it five out of five stars (to add to my meal planner thingy), so it had better be good!

OK, I think the introduction is long enough now, let’s get to the recipe!

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Chocolate Peanut Butter Candy Bark

1 and 1/2 cups of semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons of peanut butter
1/2 tablespoon of coconut oil (or any oil)
1/2 cup of candied pecans (I found a most delicious recipe for candied pecans on Pinterest right here. Seriously, even if you don’t make the candy bark, you should make these. You can do pecans instead of almonds.)

Melt the first three ingredients in a pan until smooth. Add candied pecans. Cover a cookie sheet in parchment paper, and pour the mixture onto it. Melt two tablespoons of peanut butter. (You can add just a few chocolate chips.) Drop the peanut butter in little dots all over the candy bark. Use a toothpick to swirl everything together to get a pretty marbled effect. Place the cookie sheet in the freezer for a couple of hours until candy is hard and brittle. Break into pieces and serve!

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I hope you enjoy this candy as much as we did!

***Allison***

A Close-Up Look at… Mold!

November 30, 2015 | Allison

He-he. I’m doing a post about mold. I know it’s gross, but it’s also interesting, so bear with me! We were supposed to look at mold under the microscope for school, but before we did that, I took pictures (my camera is almost like a microscope it can take such close-up pictures). So now you know I didn’t just randomly pull some mold out of our fridge and take pictures of it – ’cause that’s what you were thinking, right? 🙂 😀 Okay, on to the pictures!

Ok, I’m done with the pictures, you can look now. Hey! I saw that face… 🙂 Well, it was your fault for reading this to begin with. But I’m sure glad you did read this, even if it was disgusting!

Thus ends a weird post about mold. Until later…

***Allison***

How to Blow Double Balloons

November 28, 2015November 30, 2015 | Allison

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. I did! At one of our Thanksgiving celebrations we had a lot of fun watching home videos from years ago. We were hilarious back then, and so cute!

Anyway… moving on. For my brother Jeff’s birthday party awhile ago I figured out how to blow up two balloons, one inside the other! Like this: (although it’s a little hard to see in the picture).

It is kind of hard to explain how I did it, but I will try my best because it looks really neat when you’re finished! It would look especially good if you used really clear balloons instead of colored ones for the outside balloon because then you could see the balloon inside of it better. I sort of learned that the hard way. I tried it once with blue inside and green outside, and another time the opposite way. When I used the blue balloon as the outside balloon, it was so colored you could hardly see the green balloon inside it. So, lesson learned: use the lightest or most transparent balloons for the outside balloons.

Now I’ll stop jabbering and actually tell you how to do this.

Pick two balloons. You will want a light colored balloon for the outside and a darker color for the inside. I, sadly, did not obey this rule for this balloon, so in this case, my darker color (blue) is going to hold the lighter (green) balloon inside it.
First blow up the outside balloon (in my case, blue), to stretch it.
Now hold open the outside balloon with your fingers, stretching the neck as far as you can, while pushing the inside balloon down inside it. I took this picture while doing all of that – aren’t you proud of me? ;D You may need someone to help you with this, but it is possible to do it by yourself because I did! Push the inside balloon down until only the rim sticks out of the neck of the outside balloon. You should see even less of the inside balloon than it shows in the picture. If I unfolded the blue it would be about right. You should just barely see the rim showing.
Blow! Since there are two balloon layers, it is harder to blow, but again, it is possible! The inside balloon will blow up the outside balloon too. Stop blowing when the balloon is still fairly small.
Now tie off the inside balloon by stretching the neck far out of the outside balloon and tying it.
Push the inside balloon as far down as possible and blow up the outside balloon. You should be able to see the inside balloon move around when you shake it by the time you’ve blown it big enough.
Tie off the outside balloon.
You’re done!

I hope you can figure out the instructions because they look amazing when they’re finished!

See you later!

***Allison***

A Lesson on Mushrooms & Fungi

November 23, 2015 | Allison

We learned about mushrooms and lichen in our recent nature study. I thought they were really interesting, so I decided to do a post about them. But don’t worry – I included a bunch of pictures that I took, along with the facts.

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First, mushrooms – A mushroom starts from a tiny spore, which is like a speck of dust. The spores come from the gills of a mushroom (on the underside).

I think the little “dust specks” in this picture are actually spores! It’s a super-cropped picture of the gills of the mushroom above.

The spore “seed” sends out a network of tiny roots called mycelium. The roots are white and extremely thin. Mushrooms grow up from these roots. Sometimes the mushrooms pop up in a circle called a ‘fairy ring.’ Can’t you just imagine the fairies coming out from their mushroom homes and holding a meeting in the middle of this fairy ring?! 😀

An important thing to remember about mushrooms is don’t pick and eat a mushroom from the wild. They are likely poisonous. Yeah, I know, you have probably already heard that at least a million times. But now you’ve heard it a million and one. 🙂

There are a few signs especially that tell you that a mushroom is poisonous:

Scales covering the mushroom
A sac at the bottom of the mushroom stem
Mushrooms with shiny or brightly colored caps

But just because a mushroom does not have these characteristics does not mean it is OK to eat. The bottom line is, just don’t eat a mushroom unless it comes from a grocery store.

Here is a mushroom with a shiny cap – it must be poisonous! But not to the touch – I hope. Hee-hee!

And more mushrooms we’ve found…

Now for lichen and fungi. I mostly have pictures for this section, but there are a few interesting facts about them too.

Bracket fungi – Fungus comes in a variety of different colors and shapes. Some of kinds are quite pretty, and some are deadly to trees. Bracket fungus is a very common kind of fungus. You can see it often on dead trees or rotting logs. Some species of bracket fungi will enter a tree through a “wound,” like where a limb has been chopped off, or where an axe cut into the wood. It spreads its mycelium, or roots, into the wood of the tree and sometimes kills it.
Lichen – Lichen also comes in a variety of shapes and colors. You can find lichen all over the place!

Here is a collage of both fungi and lichen:

It’s amazing how varied and beautiful God made even these lowly plants! I especially love mushrooms. They’re so cute and beautiful and interesting! And the funny thing is, I don’t even really like to eat mushrooms – especially cooked ones. I’ll just take pictures instead. 😛

By the way, most if not all of this information is from the book we use for nature study called – The Handbook of Nature Study. (Click on the link to take you to an Amazon listing. One comment says that it doesn’t include one part of the book, so you might want to check that out.) It’s a pretty hefty book, but it’s very interesting and useful, especially for… well… nature study.

Would you like me to do more of these nature posts? Have a great day! And tell me if you find any mushrooms, fungi, or lichen!

**Allison***

CUTENESS ALERT!

November 21, 2015December 2, 2015 | Allison

CUTENESS ALERT! Willow + Clementine = ADORABLE! Look at Clementine’s expression on the second picture! 😀

I love bunnies!

***Allison***

An… Interesting… Necklace

November 18, 2015 | Allison

This is the rather interesting necklace I made recently.

It is made out of a gall. – Wait, please don’t be grossed out!

Oh. It might be a good idea to tell you what a gall is first. A gall is like a fungus made by an insect as a sort of cocoon for itself. But that doesn’t mean an insect is actually in the gall now.

Now are you grossed out? Yep, I thought so. *Sigh.* Oh well, I started this post so I might as well finish it.

This is how I made the necklace: First, I started with a gall I had found on a hike. It is actually a huge gall, at least from what I’ve seen. I just had to do something with it, because it was so beautiful! It looked like a big wooden bead.

Then I carefully made two holes in it and threaded a string through the holes and knotted it securely. I tied that little string to a bigger, braided one. I then covered the gall in a coat of ModPodge to make it a little stronger.