The ol' homestead

On Frontier Man's birthday, Little Miss and I made him personalized birthday cards. We decorated them (and enclosed a $100. gift card to Outback Steakhouse that I had won ) and surprised him along with homemade chocolate pie. Chocolate pie is dear to his heart and we wanted to make something special that he would enjoy so not only did we make one , but we made two!

On Sunday we went for a nice bike ride to Davis -which has Turner Falls and has some surrounding picturesque roads that we love to go on a Sunday ride on. We have done this a few times but this time, I seen something that caught my eye. Along the route, in a little town called Hennepin, there on the side of the road, in the middle of a well kept field was a pear tree that had fruit, but a lot of the fruit littered the ground underneath. Having so much fruit under it, I could only assume that maybe the owners had no plans on using it.

Today, after Little Miss was done with school, she and I drove over to that tree and decided to inquire about it at the closest house. A young man told me that I could have all that I wanted and so Little Miss and I picked a bushel...or maybe a peck (?) anyway, it was a big tub full with plans on going back in a couple weeks to pick again. The plans I have are to make strawberry-pear honey, pear butter, but today it is fresh pear cupcakes with chocolate glaze. Mmmm...

Little Misses prized "weird pear"

Full House Mom and I were out and about (which is a very rare thing these days) the other day when she happened to mention that Pauls Valley has put in a little fabric shop. So we had to go and have a little peek. This is what we found:

Is it not the cutest material ever???

It is called Fruit Ladies and the female fruit "bottoms" are so true. What shape are you? We have plans for it to be a tote purse. Full House Mom wanted something made with it, and I wanted to sew on such a cute fabric (we are weird like that) and so she purchased a yard and we are going to get some deep red to match and we can't wait to see it finished.

Little Miss and I are doing a new science curriculum this year and we are loving it. Little Miss mainly because it has a lot of hands on experiments. We are studying the solar system and so far we have melted chocolate and burned holes in leaves with a magnifying glass (Sun)

We have made lava out of flour and butter (here Little Miss said it smelled so good she was going to have a taste of our lava ) (Venus)

Here we are dropping "asteroids" into our flour to make craters (Mercury)

And now we are on Earth. Tonight we will make a compass for the magnetic pull. I have learned one thing this last month. If the word "flour"is used in the experiment, you best be preparing for a bigfluffycloudypowderywhite kitchen.