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… and it is my lower back.  But Jen and I got this one back into shape this weekend.

Also getting into shape: Sarah, who in the past week has learned to skip rope:

and also has made an excellent start on riding the bicycle without training wheels.

Many flowers were in bloom.  Here are some hyacinths, blue and white.

We also had violets, which Sarah gathered and put into a vase.

Even the holly was blooming.  Who knew that it could?

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And, of course, the bleeding hearts, on which my mother once commented favorably.  Sarah took this picture herself.

Nature really does burst forth in the spring.  We returned to the farm after a two-week hiatus — a Saturday-to-Saturday visit to Sanibel Island, Florida — and found things much changed.  We had a spectacular weekend, with sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies.  The lilacs are budding, and the daffodils have gotten an early start.

Here is the deer salad bar that is our small assortment of crocuses.

I believe these blue flowers to be wild hyacinths:

Here is an exotic and fortunate surviver of the predations of the deer: a greigii tulip that grew underneath an Adirondack chair in front of the cottage, getting just enough sun through the slats of the chair to survive.  I hope the deer are not reading; next year they’ll lift the chair.

Of course, they don’t all make it through the winter, and we do not grieve excessively.

We also had lots of returning birds.  This turkey wandered around Saturday afternoon.

Here’s a tufted titmouse.

And on the pond had we had a full complement of waterfowl: Canada geese (chased away and not pictured), a couple of mallards

and some scaups, greater or lesser:

Today was Easter — which meant an egg hunt for Sarah.  Not sure how the birds feel about this tradition.

Sarah wore an early-seventies vintage Easter frock of Jen’s.  She began at the swing:

Soon, after changing into tights, she began egg-hunting in earnest.

She first gathered the low hanging fruit.

But soon things got harder.

She was persistent, though.

The ball-catching game also was hard!

We returned after a weekend away to find that most of the snow had melted and the pond was more or less clear.  We saw lots of returning visitors, including the Ring-necked Ducks pictured above, a blue heron who flew above me just after I took this shot, looked down at the pond, and kept going, and plenty of Red-winged Blackbirds, one of which is pictured below.  We also spent some time cleaning up from this year’s 30-year ice storm.  Sarah gets her boots from the same place where we shopped when I was a child.

Sarah and Jen spent last weekend together.  Here’s Sarah’s picture of her mom.

This weekend, we surveyed the damage from the week’s snowstorms.

Sarah made valentines for everyone — this is mine.  It says “you sparkle” (or, more accurately, “you sprcl,” which sounds a bit like a Czech insult) backwards on the left.

On Saturday we had our neighbors over for dinner.  Sarah and their seven year-old daughter, Juliet, set up a pretend hair salon and spa in the upstairs bathroom.  This was the menu of available hairstyles. 

I was offered the one on the lower right.

Maria, our housekeeper, often leaves helpful notes for us.  We found this one Friday evening.  It was offputting, although we were reassured by Maria’s use of the past tense. 

Out of an abundance of caution, I checked the sink, and found this:

For the record, it was about the same size as every other bat I’ve seen.  It seemed to be dead.  But when I tried to scoop it into a bag with a piece of cardboard, I found it oddly pliant, possibly reactive.  I told Jen I could not assure her that the bat was dead.  (Jen: “Why not just say that it moved?!”) 

Fortunately, Jen knows a special trick, effective against large spiders — and, it turns out, bats — using only a piece of cardboard and a plastic container. 

The bat was miffed.

Jen spirited the bat outside, and, on Saturday morning when I sent her to check, was able to report that it was gone.