The clubhouse

My children are growing up, and with the growing up comes a lot of opinions expressed to mom about how she could do things better.  One thing that these big grown up children can hardly bear is that I let the little kids build things in our yard.  They must have forgotten some of the things they did as children, because I haven't changed my "mommying" much over the years.  They had free run most of the time.  Once Gage built a GIANT bird's nest, and it was an amazing work of art, which, if you know Gage, isn't surprising.  We built rickety pens to hold animals.  We built baseball fields in the side yard - okay, that was much neater, because daddy helped with that.

But my philosophy has always been that these are the things that make kids smart, and I have some really smart children, if I do say so myself.  There's not a slacker in the bunch.

So let the big kids weep and wail, but I intend to keep letting the children be creative and build...although I have made one concession for the sanity of the older kids, I make them do all their building behind the chicken pens so they won't be visible from the front yard.

This weekend I have grandchildren visiting, and they have spent days working on the tree house that brother Max started a while back and Luke's big sister took up one weekend.  I think it's going to be a ongoing project.  Look at the intensity of these builders:

My kids are so smart, they even build their own tools...

The outcome of all this work is something else...

As you can see, this isn't just any old tree house.  This is a whole village.  It's got rooms inside of rooms.  Our whole large family could just move into this place and have plenty of space, right?

These kids are proud, and they should be.  They've worked hard, and not only that, they've worked hard and STAYED OUTSIDE while I got lots of stuff done INSIDE over the past few days (mommy is no dummy, either!)

And they are cute:

And so is our photographer who had to get in on the act, of course, even if she is one of the ones protesting my child rearing skills:

These guys dragged scraps and trash in from all over our twelve acres, including the old stop sign that used to be at the end of our road to keep people from driving off into the ditch:

There's even a welcome sign:

(Bears are Tommy's obsession these days)

And while Grandma is in the house happily and unencumberedly doing her thing, these smart kids do dangerous things that make her hair turn gray when she sees the pictures:

So don't be surprised when you hear their names in the future.  They are destined for big things.  They are learning every minute, and they are having a good time doing it.

And me?  Well, I love living in the country where my kids and grandkids can build and make terrible messes, and as long as they do it behind the chicken pens, no one is the wiser!!