Time for the Big Frog Release - Clyde River

Our tadpoles had grown legs and were getting closer and closer to frogs.  One morning, Jamie went to have a shower and discovered that one had escaped and was sitting in a pool of water in the bottom of the shower - clearly it was time to release them back into the river!!!!

It was so neat to see how camouflaged they are for their home environment, once we released them into it.  It's hard to see it in the photo two above, but one of the frogs is hidden in the tiny bits of green floating on the water!  After releasing the frogs, we continued to explore our favourite parts of the river, seeing how things have changed, tried to catch some fish and ended the lovely evening with a bit of swimming!  Trying to forget that we'd seen some colour changes in the trees already - SO NOT READY FOR SUMMER TO END!!!!!!!

Medieval Festival

 This year we decided to check out Osgoode's Medieval Festival for the day.  They have an education day that sounded fabulous......and you know, I have to admit that when we first arrived we were a bit skeptical.  It looked rather lame from the outset, but once we started going from station to station, we were thoroughly impressed.  Everyone was so passionate about each of their skills, so full of information and all five of us THOROUGHLY enjoyed the day (though Ry probably enjoyed it more than the rest of us!) :-)

Archery was a big hit, of course - and inspired ideas for our archery set at home

And the jester section was a huge hit with everyone - we all learned some new juggling skills here - 

Historic version of time out:-)

Another huge hit was trying out the chain mail and feeling just how heavy it was - that and the armour for knights.......

and then we picked the brains of the woman spinning wool - trying to get as much information as possible from her for our upcoming project:-)

I HIGHLY recommend checking this festival out if you get the chance......a brilliant day out:-)

Sheep Shearing.....

A friend and I have decided to embark on a few adventures together, trying out some new crafts that we've always been interested in and wanting to learn some of the older crafts that our ancestors might have done.  Soap making is definitely on the list, but so was the idea of taking wool from the sheep, and going through the whole process of turning it into wool to dye (with natural dyes collected from the property, preferably!) and knit with.  So, to start the project off we found a farm that was willing to have us share in their sheep shearing, and willing to send us home with some of the fleece.  Of course, when we were picturing this project, we had big things in mind but in the end we took home one small fleece - probably a blessing in disguise, for sure, as we learn how much more effort is needed to turn this into knittable wool:-)  We've now washed the fleece, and the next stage will be to card it........