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| When your sled is being used for work, you have to come up with other ways to slide down the hill. |
Remember the parable of the ant and the grasshopper? All summer long, I feel like the ant, working hard and preparing for winter. By the time the cold weather rolls around–especially around February where I’m absolutely over the cold, snow, and dark–it seems like I was a lazy grasshopper who didn’t do quite enough to make it through the summer. Sigh. At least some things I can make right, even when we are halfway through winter.
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| Jack chopping up one of our downed ash trees. |
Like wood. Thank goodness we have a nice sized forest out back, and of those trees, a lot of them are ash trees that have since died and have started falling. I was wanting to cut them up and turn them into firewood next spring or summer,(waste not, want not, right?) so I guess I could look at it as getting a jumpstart on next season’s chores…except we’re probably going to use the firewood THIS winter since we’ve already burned through our insufficient supply. Whatever.
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| Found a praying mantis pod on the sledding hill! It was relocated to a safer spot, so it didn’t get trampled. |
While Jack used his mighty chainsaw to cut them into moveable bits, the kids and I put them on the sled, drug them up the hill and over to the woodpile where they’d be chopped and stacked.
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| Zoey only wanted to “help” by being drug in the sled. |
Without machines, hauling wood can be a terribly tiring job. By the fifth or sixth load, we were all getting breathless and sweaty. After a break for lunch, the kids could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Struggling through challenges is good for character building, right?
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| Claire using a walking stick to give her traction, stopping every once in a while to gobble at Pip. |
After a few hours of work, everyone decided to call it quits (I was already inside, putting kids to bed…at least that was my excuse, teeheehee). Jack and Kate took a break on the pile of logs that still needed to be moved before slowly dragging themselves inside.
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| Everyone taking a break. Except Raven, because when she’s outside, she doesn’t sit still for an instant. |
The same sled that had been used for hauling wood, pulling Zoey, zipping back down the hill to the wood, then drug the chainsaw back in, though there’s hardly a flake of snow on the ground after the weather warmed up nicely.
