Author: Carrie Spritzer

Early Morning Birding

By our front window Miss Leyba and I set up this basket with bird guides and Miss Leyba’s binoculars (more on those tomorrow) so we can easily watch and identify birds together. Through the window we have a great view of the blackberry bushes, a dead tree, and an open field, all areas that the birds love to frequent for food and shelter. Next to the basket, we have a poster of common feeding birds found here in Western America that my mom bought for Miss Leyba.

Some of the bird guides in our basket:
– The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America (containing over 130 bird songs!)
– Birds of California Field Guide (Our Nature Field Guides)
– Birds (Fandex Family Field Guides)
– Field Guide to the Laguna de Santa Rosa
– Western Trailside Birds (Peterson Flash Guides)

Often in the early mornings, we sit by the open window and listen to the birds. We watch birds chase each other, fly about exploring our neighborhood, and care for each other. All spring we watched a pair of robins care for their young living in the birch tree in our front yard.

Together we love observing the natural world.

Biologist in the making?! (Like Mama! It runs in the family.) We shall see.

Pardon Miss Leyba’s pajamas and adorable bed head! I didn’t think you’d mind.

Recycling in Northern California

This weekend at our neighborhood street fair, we saw recycling, trash and compost bins with these fantastic signs and I started thinking about how lucky we are to be able to recycle so many things in our curbside bins. I think I often take it for granted how green our county is! (Shame on me!)

We can recycle a number of things that you typically can’t recycle in other parts of the country including all plastic types, shredded paper, laundry baskets, lawn furniture, plastic toys, bubble wrap, and household electronics such as cell phones, answering machines, stereos, and home printers.

Yes, lawn furniture and stereos. It boggles the mind.

And we don’t need to sort our recycling! Perfect for busy mothers.

Our trash pickup also includes a compost bin that gets collected weekly. In our yard debris/compost bins we can compost tea bags, bread, vegetables, fruits, pasta and rice, eggshells, wood ashe, and yard clippings.

(While this is incredibly convenient, the down side is that we don’t have our own compost pile that we could use to enrich our garden. We end up buying compost instead and that’s a of a financial bummer.)

And in true California fashion, a keen reminder that our trash doesn’t really go away. Evidently we’re all about laying environmental guilt on you. Sigh.

Sorry about that.

Gardening Friday

Today, being Friday, we did something new. After weeding, removing less-than-beloved plants, enriching and turning over the soil (all activities most certainly considered to be OLD), we planted bulbs.

Evidently Spritzer-Leyba’s are not ones for planting ordinary things like daffodils or crocuses. Miss Leyba and I had to choose the three feet tall giant purple allium.

They will look like this:

alliums

Purple sensation
(photos from flickr)

I know, they are gorgeous, gigantic and insane!

I desperately want them to transform the front garden and add a giant burst of color. I think this should do it! (Fingers crossed!)

I just can’t believe we have to wait six months to see if we planted them upside down… ;)

Rainstick Craft Project

We started with a cardboard tube, the type you mail posters in, that has two secure ends and turned it into our very own rainstick:

Miss Leyba first covered the tube with two layers of paint in several colors that blend nicely together. We used Crayola washable kids’ paint in red, blue, pink and purple.

To add a little sparkle to the project, we used glue to adhere glitter and sparkle stars (most of which fell off… whoops!).

After the project thoroughly dried, we applied two coats of Mod Podge to more fully adhere the glitter and to give the rainstick a glossy shine.

Then we filled the tube with beans, lentils and seeds left over from our Earthy Collage Project. Miss Leyba filled the tube one bean at a time. Although pouring the beans into the tube wasn’t an option for our house, I highly recommend you try it. I imagine it would have been much faster. :)

Miss Leyba really enjoyed dropping beans on the floor instead of filling the tube too. “Ha ha! Don’t worry, Mom, we can sweep them up!” (She did when she was done! In fact, she’s still sweeping twenty minutes later!)

It took a while, but she finally got the cup or so of beans that we used in there.

Then we put the top securely back on and…

Ta-da!

Time to make music!