We've been in upstate New York for the past couple of days. We drove up to help Nate's mom get her house ready for sale. All of his siblings are here, too. Nate's been basically painting from breakfast to dinner for the past couple of days, while I've just been watching kids. The house is basically empty, so we (the entire extended family) rented a farmhouse to stay in. Before I got here, I thought that was just a term, not that they rented an honest-to-goodness farmhouse, but that's really what it is, complete with a huge barn and several other outbuildings. There's a huge hill in the back, which has been great for entertaining the kids. Keeping the kids occupied has been a chore, to say the least. There's Bethany (4 years), Meagan (3), and their cousins Simon (5), Jonah (3), Evelyn (5) and Brielle (4), plus the two babies Sean (2 months) and Clark (10 months). That's a lot of little kids with too much energy and lots of desire to be entertained. Of course they've watched a ton of TV, but even that will only get you so far. So we've come up with things for them to do outside, like playing with a soccer ball and sidewalk chalk. Someone gave them cups the other day to go catch butterflies. I kind of scoffed when I first saw it, but to my surprise, they actually caught some little moths with the cups. It's quickly become an obsession for the kids, but they never knew what to do with them after they'd caught them. Yesterday Bethany caught a pretty white one, and was just walking around with it stuck in two cups shoved together end-to-end. I needed to get out of the house anyway, so I took my kids to Toys-R-Us and we got a butterfly habitat to keep it in. The horrible thing was that Bethany opened her cups with the butterfly just as she got buckled in the car, and just before I got the habitat out of the package, and it flew away. She cried and cried for her white butterfly. I tried to tell her that we could catch another one, but that didn't really help. Oh well. I'm sure she'll get over it. In the meantime, we did get more butterflies, and she's been carrying the habitat around the house looking at the butterflies, and even asked to use my camera to take pictures of them. She actually got a couple of decent shots, too.
The farmhouse we stayed in. It was orginally built by the owner's great or great-great grandparents, or something like that. It's really old. Fun to stay in, but not to live in permanently. It's settled enough over time that most of the doors didn't really close anymore, and the floors creaked, etc. I'd love to build a new house with and old house's architecture, but I'll leave the originals to someone else.
One of the barns with the house. It was off limits, so I don't know what it was like inside, but we peeked through some of the windows and saw some really old cars stored there. On a side note, why are barns always painted red?
Bethany and her butterflies. Unfortunately, she squished them all trying to get them to go to the top of the habitat.
Bethany coloring with sidewalk chalk. You can see the blue "H" she drew over the top of the house. I think "H" is her favorite letter.
Meagan drew a spider with her sidewalk chalk.
Bethany and Simon trying to catch butterflies with their cups.
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