Hurricane Lane
We were very fortunate: While Lane dumped record-breaking
rainfall on the Big Island, it completely fizzled out before it reached us! We did all the prepping we could, then just waited through several dreary, drizzly, windy days. I was especially relieved because Daddy went out of town right before it was predicted to hit us. The girls were a little disappointed--we didn't even get a solid downpour, and Bug had been curious to see what hurricane force winds looked like.

Since it was too yucky to play outside and everything was closed down, we decided to treat them like snow days. Which in our house means baked goods and extra movie watching! Bug decided to take on the baking. We had some delicious chocolate chip oatmeal cookie bars with minimal parental involvement!

"I Love Schnitting!"
Lion has been longing for a crafting hobby, but nothing the rest of the family practices particularly interested her. About a week ago I found her meticulously cutting pieces of paper into teeny tiny bits. For some reason she found this highly satisfying. It reminded me of a German papercraft I'd seen at a festival once. A little Googling and YouTubing and Lion decided she'd found her new hobby! Scherenschnitte! I gave her a spare pair of embroidery scissors, since the her kid scissors didn't handle the intricate maneuvering very well. Since then, she's made a blizzards worth of snowflakes, a few hearts, a castle and princesses, and several landscapes. She's also requested "one of those pencil knives" (X-acto knife), so she can more easily cut the inside shapes.

The girls also dubbed the waste "schnotte," resulting in much hilarity.

Ooooo! Dead Things!
Our homeschooling neighbor, Miss S, was recently inspired to order half a dozen owl pellets for our kids to dissect. (We then got quite excited about all the very reasonably priced dead things we could order to dissect, which our other neighbor found hilarious.) It was a great project. The pellets even came with bone charts, so we could figure out what exactly these owls had eaten--several shrews, mice, and a mole. Bug was definitely our most enthusiastic dissecter and brought home a baggie with several skulls and a leg bone or two.