Of Grasshoppers and Laundry

So, I did wake up today feeling fairly useless. But sometimes the problem with feeling so blah all you want to do is lie around, is that lying around just makes you feel more blah. The weather has been wonderful and today was no exception. I felt that we should go somewhere, do something but I didn't know what. So we went out to the yard, where we found a huge grasshopper.


We watched him in the cricket cage for a bit, then set him free



It was the perfect day for hanging out laundry. I really like hanging the sheets because it really doesn't take that much work, unlike hanging up a load of clothes, but it makes me feel so domestic to watch them waving in the breeze. And of course then they smell so good. Ivy started to have a little tea party with her animals, but she was afraid they would blow away. I am not sure what's made her so fearful of the wind, but she gets really upset if the wind blows enough to move things just a bit. Miranda came out to join her but decided it was too hot.


Ivy is working on her Hamutaro book. It's in Japanese so I can understand about 10% of it, fortunately it's for really little kids so there are lots of pictures explaining what to do. We are still trying to learn Japanese but since I am learning along with them, it's pretty slow. I got the book from Yesasia.com


This are the sunflowers in our yard. I planted them in a circle and you can't really see there is a chair inside. It's supposed to be a little house, but the girls won't go in it because they don't like the bugs. At least the flowers look pretty.


Weeds! Japanese knotweed, ragweed and morning glories. No wonder I have allergy troubles. I tried to keep this area of the yard free and finally gave up. Probably why we had a groundhog in the yard earlier in the summer.


Pumpkins. We have three that I can see, I hope there are more hidden. We wrote Ivy with a knife when it was just little and now it's part of the pumpkin. There is a Miranda one as well.


Our nature table. The Waldorf ones I see in books are nice and neat with little felt wool and wooden decorations. Our's is a bit of a hodgepodge, with fimo animals, pine cones and some rocks, as well as a few figures I made. There is a tiny gnome family but you can't really see them. The two dolls are supposed to be Mother Nature--she's holding a little baby--and a junebug.


All my Japanese books. Only about 1/3 are craft books, the rest are textbooks and kids books. You can also see my orange Childcraft set.


The messy corner of the dining room that is my workspace. It doesn't really look that bad--Miranda had a birthday party last weekend so we had to do a lot of cleaning. There's more cloth, yarn and stuff upstairs in the tiny cluttered back room. It's pretty awful up there, I need to come up with a better solution.