Icy Sunday

This past Sunday, we had an ice storm of sorts. It snowed pretty hard on Saturday, and sometime in that cold and snowy night, it turned to rain. The temperature was supposed to be up into the 40's by mid morning, but it didn't cooperate, staying stubbornly below freezing for most of the day. This meant a lot of ice accumulation and therefore, no Sunday morning meeting. We had a little meeting of our own, and after that, the kids wanted to break out their paints.

 The three kids saved up their birthday and tooth money, for a total of $42. They had been discussing art supplies and finally decided that was the very thing to buy. On Saturday, we headed to town to make the very difficult decisions art supplies bring up. Cute little markers or the regular ones that are a little cheaper? Construction or cardstock? One of the big purchases ($8) they made was a white board they could write on and play school with. They also found an Open/Close sign in the office supplies that had one of those little clock hand things to show when the shop owner will be back. Delight! For only $2.84, it was considered a bargain and must buy. It hangs on their door and gets carefully turned around at various, inexplicable times during the day. They also got several large bottles of paint. Terribly exciting! 

Orianna and Lily carefully painting and making sure to wash their brushes out to keep their paint neat and orderly.

Elsie and Gilbert on the other hand had no such worries about finesse and stirred things up into a monochromatic purple/grey.

Orianna and Lily's tray...

Gilbert and Elsie's,

After all this hard work, things had to dry for a little, and then Orianna set up an art gallery in the living room. This was the refreshment table, with Grandma's pumpkin bread as a centerpiece. 

They had three sets of these chairs set up with three pictures per pair. It was all very orderly.

Lily's rainbow

I had four itty bitty canvases, so each kid got to do one up. This is Lily's.

Love

Orianna's Love

Canvas

(Minimalistic) Lake at Sunset by Orianna

Hot Cocoa by Orianna

Gilbert's autographed canvas

Elsie's canvas, which used to be Lily's, until Elsie climbed up to where it was drying and took it back to her side of the table to stir all Lily's carefully placed paint up and add a few dabs of her signature purple/grey. Lily got an extra canvas to paint.

The pumpkin bread loaf after Orianna got done cutting it up for refreshments.

My Christmas flowers, which still look nice. 

The proud artistes.

I forget why, but Elsie flounced over here, laid down and announced "I'm just pouting." 

After an appropriate amount of time, she decided to forgive other's grievous trespasses against her and walked with her hands and feet back to where the kids were playing. 

The icy woods behind the house

I came out back to take a picture of the trees and was surprised by the humming sound thousands of raindrops make as they hit the ice crusted snow. 

My Orianna girl who came out to listen to raindrops with me.

The girls scrapping the car off. By this point, late afternoon, it had finally got up to the 40's, so the ice was pretty easy to scrap. 

Justin's truck, trailer, and sky

I love this dark sky! 

Right after Justin and I started dating, we had a pleasant argument about whether the sky could be blue when there were clouds in it. I said it absolutely could and Justin maintained (and still does) that calling a sky blue when there are clouds in it, is silly. It is one of our pet arguments that we pull out at random to irritate the other, mostly because it reminds us of when we were dating. But whatever he says, this sky had some deep, deep blue in it.

The icicles were dripping like crazy

The wind was also crazy, blowing little pieces of snow and ice off the roof of the milkhouse

The ice crust

Tori's Houdini pig who roams free until his brethren are fed and he is enticed back into his pen. It is quite an ordeal watching him climb in and out. I am always sure he is about to impale himself on this or that, but so far, he is unscathed. 

Gorgeous, gorgeous clouds! 

This is Mom telling me not to put this picture on Facebook, while chatting with Jeff and Bonnie and Owen and Ashley.