Spring!

It's been an especially nice week so far... The weather has been beautiful and we've been spending lots of time outside each day. I've been raking up the last of the construction garbage... little bits of rotten wood, insulation, screws, pieces of lathe, and lots of cigarette butts! (blech!) R has been riding her bike or playing with the neighbors horses while I work, and M has been enjoying just sitting and reading in the far back part of our minivan. He opens the hatch, and settles himself in and seems very happy there. He says he feels "safe" tucked back in there. I'm noticing more times when he seems anxious and almost a little paranoid... I hope it's just a temporary thing and not a sign of things to come.   R and I took a break from raking (me) and pretending to be a horse (R) and went searching for owl pellets yesterday. We went to a wonderful class about owls a few weeks ago, and part of the class was getting to dissect owl pellets. R and I were both fascinated by all the tiny bones we found in the barn owl pellets that we dissected. Since we have plenty of owls around here, we thought it would be fun to see if we could find where they perch and maybe even find some pellets. After wandering around both pastures looking underneath utility poles and trees, we finally found some pellets up on the hill under one of our big evergreen trees. The pellets are much smaller than the barn owl pellets, and we don't know what kind of owl they came from. We aren't dissecting these (they went straight into our little "natural history museum" in the classroom), because we have no way of sterilizing them...the ones we dissected during the owl talk had been autoclaved. I understand you can bake them in the oven to sterilize them, but it tends to fill your house with a really disgusting stench... so I think we'll pass. I can just see dh coming home from work, wrinkling his nose as he walks in the house and asking "did you burn dinner?" and having to tell him our house is full of the tempting aroma of owl vomit baking in the oven! R also found an arrowhead on our walk, which was cool. M found one last summer, so I'm glad that R has one of her own now too.  Although it feels like gardening weather, I'm holding myself back for a few more weeks. (I'm sure we'll have more snow before spring is really here...) I've got plans for a small kitchen garden just off the back porch...hoping that the deer will be less likely to think of our garden as a buffet, if it's right next to the back door. I think I'll use the garden area in the little pasture for pumpkins, zucchini, etc.