Woods Wind Wander

Wow, it's been since January since I've had the opportunity (and the emotional energy, to be honest) to update the ol' blog.  We have gone on some mini-adventures the first half of this year: a spring trip to Chincoteague, VA; Deep Creek and Cambridge, MD; and small visits to West Virginia and Pennsylvania.  I hope to write mini-posts on those excursions at some point, but I am happy to report that we are currently back in New Hampshire!  Yaaaaay!  I'm just a little excited to be here 😉 We got up at 3:30am back at home, left at around 4:15 to make the trek north.   Someone actually slept Honestly, we had a great trip up.  Traffic on the George Washington Bridge in New York City was fine and we didn't experience any major slow downs, so we arrived here in New Hampshire at about 3pm.  Being true to ourselves (and in desperate need of movement after being in a cramped car all day) we decided to go for a small hike.   Last f...

It is currently the middle of the winter here and has been a while since our last post.  We are in the full throes of the school year with both boys at home.  While our oldest is pretty independent in terms of his schooling, I, understandably, have had my hands full with a boisterous second grader.  While we have continued to walk around where we live and go hiking on the weekends, it has been challenging to find the time to post anything on the blog (I'm already longing for spring break 😉).  It has also gotten downright cold.  Right now it is 28° and very windy, and sadly, we have had only one snow day. A big highlight lately though has been a pair of bird feeders that we received for Christmas from Nonni and Pop Pop.  My parents came over to help us set it up and show us how everything works.  We were warned it could take weeks for the birds to find the feeder and/or feel comfortable enough to use it.  We were thrilled when it took the birds 1 ...

The Wild Ponies With our summer winding down quickly, the next week full of meetings for my husband and meet and greets for the kids' schools, we decided to have one last "field trip."  I wanted another adventure and I had recently stumbled upon a beautiful copy of Misty of Chincoteague that my mother had given the boys, and that sparked an idea:  why not go to Chincoteague?  I had never been to Chincoteague before, only to neighboring Assateague with my mother and grandmother over a decade ago.  Since Chincoteague is a National Wildlife Refuge I figured my sons (and I) would be in heaven.  It is a 3 1/2 hour drive, making it 7 hours of driving in one day, nothing to sneeze at, but with all of the wildlife we could potentially see, I reasoned it would be worth it. Both Chincoteague and Assateague have wonderful websites.  Chincoteague has all of its brochures available online (specific ones on birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians), so I started to hy...