Bird Ornament Plates

Is there anything in your Christmas storage that makes you giddy to unpack it?  Something so beautiful that just seeing it each year is like Christmas to you?

These plates fit that description for me.


Shaped as Christmas ornaments, they have a beautiful silver finish at the top and a hole which I’ve used to hang some of them on my tree in the past, or on a garland above my entry.

It’s the pattern on them that I love so much.


You guessed it.  Birds.


Red birds.  In four different patterns.  On an aqua plate with touches of white, brown and green.

Listening to the voice in my mind as I type makes me think I must be awfully predictable.  Aqua, red, birds, dishes.

Oh well.  You love what you love.


The pattern above might be my favorite.


Or it could be this one.

I haven’t unpacked these in two years.  Last year I had a 4 month old baby and I did the  bare minimum.  The year before that morning sickness hit hard during the holidays and I didn’t get them out.  As I carried the box upstairs this year I wondered if they were as pretty as I remembered.  I was not disappointed.  Nor was I sorry that I bought more than twenty of them when I first saw them.  They make me happy.

They’re spending the month stacked neatly on my kitchen counter because I can’t bear to put them behind doors.


What is your favorite thing to unpack each year?

Hopeful Homemaker

Nest

Last night we were working in the yard as a family when one of the children spotted something hidden in a clump of weeds…


A bird’s nest, about 8 inches in diameter, on the ground.


The five eggs were lightly speckled.  One guess is quail, but all the pictures I’ve seen of quail eggs are more mottled than these eggs were.  I haven’t noticed any quail in the yard this year, either, although I often see them running across the road about 2 blocks away.   We wondered if it could be a dove’s nest, since they sometimes nest on the ground and are unafraid of nesting around humans.  We’ve seen a lot of doves this year and can hear them all the time.  I’ve never seen dove eggs, though, and all the online pictures I’ve researched show dove eggs to be white in color with no speckles.


So, if you know what kind of eggs these are, please share!  (DAD?)  Lately I have this insatiable interest in birds.  I’m seriously considering purchasing a pair of binoculars for bird watching.

As we all gathered and peered at the eggs, showing them to the children and taking pictures, there were no agitated birds trying to warn us off.  (This was not so for my 11 year old daughter who thought that climbing into a tree to watch a mother bird and her babies would be a lot of fun until they all started chirping at her. The birds were so agitated that it frightened her and she panicked, forgetting how to climb out of  the tree.  She had to be rescued with a ladder!)

We’re starting a landscaping project, so the nest had to be moved or it would be destroyed.  We carefully relocated it with a shovel and are hoping that the eggs aren’t abandoned!


As with the children’s book I shared last week, I love this piece of land we live on.  As we all stood gathered last night, marveling at more of God’s handiwork, I thought, “Where else does a nest filled with eggs make all the difference in the world?”
Isn’t it a wonderful thing to experience things as a family?

Hopeful Homemaker

Love this table setting!

If someone from Martha Stewart would like to run on over to my house and set our table for Valentines Day, or any day for that matter, I’ll happily leave the door unlocked.

I love everything about this!  The gorgeous robin’s egg blue wrapping paper with birds used in the center, the red millinery birds on each napkin ring, the red carnations, and the white.  Oh, how I love white!  Gorgeous!

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