Igloos and Bird Feeders

Well, we accomplished another two items from our winter bucket list this past week. And if you read last week's day in the life post you probably already know one of them.

We finally built an igloo! (# 3) OK, we made two actually. One we built and one we sort of just hollowed out. And today, almost a week later, my back is still out of whack from all the snow I lifted and moved with the shovel. When I'd take a break from using the shovel I'd snap a few pictures of the kids in action...

First we cleared the center and stacked the snow to build the walls. Between the shovel work and hands those walls went up rather well...

We made it kind of long instead of tall and round because Peanut wanted a "front porch" where they could play out in the sunshine. When we thought that the walls were high enough we put a roof over about half of it.

YCJ volunteered to go inside under the roof and smooth everything out...

Peanut even got into the shoveling a little...

 ECJ took a break while his sisters were working hard to pose for a picture with the sled that I'd finally remembered was hidden under the snow behind the house. It'd been sitting there since this past summer and while I was looking for materials for the base of the roof I stumbled over it. He spent a good portion of the rest of the day using that sled to surf down the snow "mountain" at the end of our street.




When it was all done they posed for a few pictures for me before deciding that they wanted to go sledding and snow ball fighting while the sun was still out. I think the girls were tuckered out a little from all the hard work building the igloo (yeah, I know more fort looking) was.

While I took a couple of shots of the completed igloo to remember it by... It was supposed to rain the next day (and it did) so I wasn't sure how long it would last.

We also made a small igloo type shelter in the "mountain" just by shoveling out a nice cavity that they could all fit into while sitting...

 The other thing we got around to (on Sunday) was to make our outside bird feeders. (# 20) I went for simple here and was only spurred into action because there had been some wild feathered friends hanging out on our porch early in the afternoon.

Single serving Pringle container with yarn to hold the food.

We filled them with a mixture of wild bird seed, stale bread crumbs, and millet pieces. Each of them held about a half cup of the mixture and we topped them off a bit with more wild bird seed. As you can see in the picture we were eating our snack right before we started this (Peanut's still not sure she likes celery).



Then the campers went out by the ditch to hang them. I was very careful to let them know exactly how far they could go because you can barely see where the ditch is with the snow still on the ground and when there's no snow it's higher than my waist! It took over half an hour for Peanut to find just the right spot to hang her feeder. They kind of look like bleached Easter eggs hanging out there but I've already seen a bird or two investigating.

I'm still confident that we'll complete our list before the first day of spring!

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