A new month has begun!

May first and one of my favorite kinds of days: all of us at home all day together!  We enjoyed a pancake brunch and due to the rainy weather outside, Jason is now making lots of noise progressing on the bathroom renovation (Alida is not impressed with how loud his drilling is; I'm happy for the sounds of forward movement!).  I just finished up the monthly property pictures and am always amazed by the transformation in the outside world between April and May.  It's so green outside, mixed with all the other colors of blooming things.  

We've made it through the end of April without too many battle scars.  The girls amazed me last week as I was on for about 8 days in a row and didn't have a lot of extra energy to spare on the home front.  As you can see here (taken at brunch this morning), Alida is a bundle of fun energy and hard to catch still enough for a non-blurry photo. I was very grateful for friends who spent fun times with them to help make the week special for them, despite my absence.  Whenever I put in a 50 hour work week, I wonder how people do that on a regular basis.  I could easily see putting in 50 hours of work on our homestead (probably on a good number of weeks I do), but putting in 50 hours away from home, most of those in front of a computer, would not work for me over the long haul.  

Here's a few other snippets from recent days:

We finally caught the groundhog making its home under Mom and Dad's 3-season room.  The hole is now filled and there is groundhog sausage in the freezer.

We calculated last night that Jason has about 5 full days of work to finish stage 1 of the bathroom remodel (the only stage we hope to finish for now).  So our current target completion date is the end of this month.  We'll see if it needs revising yet again...

Our solar panels are up and running!  Jason was pretty happy to see that on a very sunny day the panels were actually producing slightly more than both of our houses used.  The system should provide on average a little less than 50% of our overall usage.

The girls wondered what Spark thought of a chick sitting on top of him/her.  We'll never know! 

It's looking like a pretty good fruit year. We aren't out of the woods on the possibility of a hard freeze but so far so good.  This could turn into a whole lot of currants - though we always share a good number of these with the birds!

I'm pretty impressed with winter cress.  It is delicious to eat and then when it goes to seed it makes for a sea of beautiful yellow flowers.

Yep, we've still got happy spinach!

Just got out the last container of strawberry jam.  Our mouths are watering as we see the flower petals fall and the little tiny fruits start to swell.

And finally, some of the delicate beauty in Nora's garden!