More snow, bird songs and edible books

The kids were not happy about seeing this weather report this morning. They love the snow but we're all ready to move on.

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But that's how April goes around here. It's hard to believe just this past weekend my family was out hiking to Georgetown Island (more on that later), looking for birds and getting excited about spring.

The kids have been distracted lately with the Birdsong Identiflyer they got for Christmas. They identified some birds while hiking and in our backyard and now they can't put the thing down.

The Identiflyer is a handheld device that has special encoded cards with birdsongs on them. We haven't invested a lot of effort into learning about birding other than the basics (bring along the 'Maine Bird Guide' and binoculars on hikes and see if we can figure out what kind of birds we see). The Identiflyer is a whole lot more fun - and accurate - so the kids can say with confidence what kind of birds they find.

They play with the Identiflyer so much that last night they heard a whip-poor-will in our backyard and immediately knew what it was. Actually I bet our cat Toddy could identify several birds as well since they have spent a lot of time "teaching" him the birdsongs too (useful information for our blind, indoor cat of course).

So last night when they were supposed to be doing something else, they were instead playing with their Identiflyer again and lamenting that snow was on the way.




Today we're off to the Edible Book Festival at the Portland Public Library (yes, we eventually finished making our entries late last night once we put the Identiflyer away).

The basic idea of the event is to make something edible based on a book. Last year the entries were VERY creative and the winner made a rye bread bowl and put a stake in the middle with a picture of a baseball catcher for the book, "Catcher in the Rye." A lot of entries are done by local artists and are really impressive (ours however are not, we do it just for fun).

The Festival opens at 11:30 a.m. today to view the entries and vote for your favorite. It's an annual fundraiser for the library but there is no fee to stop by; it's $5 for 3 voting tickets and a plate for the feast.

We eventually finished our entries for the Festival, which were as much about trying to being creative as they were about tasting good (our entries last year were not so tasty to eat -- G. didn't like her black frosting and L.'s egg roll wrapper hand shadow book needed a little salt). This year it's all about jelly beans, candy and white cake.



Check out Seen Team's home page  tomorrow for photos from this year's Festival.