To Valhalla! (A Zucchini Boat and The Farm.)

Last weekend Daisy and Jesse turned the large zucchini Mike’s mom gave us into a Viking ship. (I assume that was what it was intended for. ...)

Luckily we happened to be heading up to the farm that very day so their boat was able to take its maiden voyage on the pond.

Mike intended to have them light it’s sail on fire so it could drift off in glory to Valhalla. (Which is where the pond leads. ... I think. At least for a Viking zucchini ship in flames.) But, it met a much less glamorous end when, a few days later, noticing it looking a bit moldy on the floor of my bathtub (where the kids had placed it—certain of more conquering voyages ahead), I picked it up to carry to the outside garbage … only to have it split into three large chunks, slip from my grasp, and splatter into a mucky mess of mold and rotted zucchini in our entryway.

Perhaps we should have skipped the ship and gone for zucchini bread. …

But! Back to the farm. Mike had been wanting to get up there to make a big burn pile out of the broken willow branches that had been needing cleaned up for some time. And Saturday looked like a good day for it, so the rest of us decided to come along.

When we got there, we discovered that the wind/snow storm that hit Logan the week before meant that it was not just the broken willows anymore. Tons of huge branches had broken off of the three big cottonwoods Mike’s dad planted years ago. (Which was a sad sight to see. Dear trees.)

But that certainly didn’t stop the kids from having their usual fun riding 4-wheelers and playing on the pond.

And since Dais and Pen were doing an excellent job keeping Starling and Hans happy (Goldie was at work and Abe in Provo), I even helped Mike with collecting broken branches to create this enormous pile. It was hard, but strangely satisfying work. And I don’t think the photos do it justice. There were so many branches! Some of them too heavy for me to lift.

But! It will make a pretty great bonfire on the next burn day!

And now for a few more farm photos:

And a few non-farm things:

The other day, as we drove to school in a wet drizzle, Mette began complaining that part of her umbrella was broken. From her car seat little Starling immediately soothed, “Daddy can fix it, Mette. Daddy can fix it.”

I love that she, at two and a half, knows that Mike is where we turn for all things broken, not working, or needing figured out.

Also she has learned to build with tinker toys. She only builds one thing. The same thing every time. She sticks a long tinker toy in the center hole of a round piece, two other long tinker toys out the sides (it should probably be three, but I'm not saying anything), and then says, "Mom! I made you a chicken leg!" She's quite proud of her chicken-leg Tinker toy skills. And so are we.

I really like this picture Penny took of Summer recently. (She’s been borrowing my camera for various assignments for her yearbook class at school.) I always say that my kids are all blonde-haired and blue-eyed, but that's only because we have no brown-eyed kids, and because I'm accustomed to speaking of eyes as only having two variations (brown or blue). In truth though I don't know what exactly to call Summer's eye color! It's its own little shade of greens and yellows and hints of browns and blues.  

Also, I often think how my youngest kids don’t truly recognize, because they’ve never known anything else, what a marvelous and unique thing it is having practically-grown-up siblings! All these other people that adore them and take care of them like second parents.

And to end, a few pictures of a little walk I took some of the kids on at a park in Willard. (Or Perry? I’m not sure where one little town stops and another begins.)