Day 6 - Pine Cones and Peanut Butter

This will be a post full of pictures and captions.

This post is about something the kids and I did at the end of April. Today was rather boring. I spent three hours doing yardwork. In the afternoon, the kids and I cleaned out the bicycle quadrant of the garage (we have our garage divided into quadrants: bikes and recreation, yard and garden, storage, and 'clubhouse', which is a carpeted play area for the kids. Notice there is no car/van quadrant because we park both vehicles outside.) We also cleaned out the fridge and snack cabinet. It was a productive day, just not very exciting and I didn't take many pictures.

Back to the pictures. So in April I was cleaning out a kitchen cabinet and came across some peanut butter with a 'use by' date of 2009. I wasn't willing to try it, so I thought I would put it to good use and make pine cone bird feeders with the kids. We got the pine cones at our church, where there are lots of pine trees, so that was convenient.

The pine cones. (That almost sounds like a band name.)

Sarah

With seven kids putting peanut butter on pine cones, it was inevitable that I would step on a glob.

Even George joined in the fun.

Group shot. 

As homeschoolers, I always felt bad that my older kids missed out on some of these preschool/ early childhood activities because I was lazy when they were younger. I'm making up for it now and Emily is doing them as a middle schooler. She's kind of like my teacher's assistant. If I had been super prepared, I could have made the activity more educational and discussed pine cones in more depth and gone over the anatomy of them and the difference between male and female cones and where the seeds are produced, etc. But I didn't have that much foresight because I was anxious to get rid of the peanut butter that was taking up valuable space on my kitchen countertop. 

Jason. I was surprise how they really got into it and peanut buttered each scale.

Emily got serious about her peanut butter.

Then we rolled them in the seeds.

George enjoyed playing in the seeds. Some good sensory play.

The finished product.

Wendy thought it would be fun to cover her hands with peanut butter and bird seed. At this point I couldn't help think of the song "Feed the Birds" from Mary Poppins.

Then we put the pine cones on the porch railing and waited for the birds. I had visioned red robins and blue jays and all sorts of interesting birds coming to visit our bird feeders. We waited for an entire week. I never did see ONE bird feast on our feeders. Birds must not like rancid peanut butter either. So it was kind of sad, but a fun project.

While we waited for the birds, we fixed our burst hose.  It burst one night from a weak spot and watered our sidewalk for who knows how long. This is Wendy cutting it just below the spot where it burst and me being extra cautious that she doesn't cut off my left thumb.

Bradley screwed on the hose mender.

I examined it. It leaked. We tightened it some more, and now it works like a charm, It's just about 5 feet shorter than it was.

While we fixed the hose, George was picking blackberries growing by the fence and eating them.

That was fun.