Visit to Grandma and Granddad's
Daddy had to leave again on Thursday (for less than a week), and this time I decided to pack up the entourage and keep driving on past the airport to my parent's house. We had a wonderful, relaxing visit. We'd been there recently enough that the girls remembered important things like how to deal with their excitable sheepdog and where their favorite toys were (Little People upstairs and the play kitchen in the basement). They also had fun discovering new things like a small collection of my own "special buddies" from childhood and the fact that they can fit into many more of Aunt K's old dance costumes.

Singers, dancers, fairies, butterflies, . . . so many fun costumes!

Perhaps the real highlight of the trip was seeing all the amazing nature things. Our first order of business while there was to slather ourselves in insect repellent and head for the woods surrounding my parents' house.

The entourage dances down the trail!
(the big white shirts were sprayed with heavy duty  insect repellent)

We saw: lots of wildflowers, spider webs whose owners could be baited out of hiding by gently wiggling the web with a piece of grass, leaves of various sizes and colors, several types of moss, bird feathers, a box turtle, Jesus bugs, raccoon tracks, pieces of quartz, pine cones, a frog, and some really gorgeous moths and butterflies on the butterfly bush in the yard. The next day Granddad helped them dissect an abandoned mud dawbers' nest and explained the whole life cycle. They also found a bird's next on the underside of the playground tower and spotted deer (including a buck) at the edge of the woods. While eating lunch we watched a number of birds come to the feeders on the deck (hummingbirds, cardinals, finches, and a morning dove).

Enjoying the view from the top of Grandma
 and Granddad's playground

I had the foresight to bring our nature journal along on the trip, so many of these things are recorded there now. We collected a few leaf samples, and I took a lot of photos of things that piqued the entourage's interest. The next day I printed them up and Monkey and Bug helped me tape the photos in our journal and dictated what they wanted me to write about each photo. (Our newly completed pages turned out beautifully, and I think this nature journal may turn out to be one of my favorite things for us to do!)

one of the spreads in our nature journal

In my parents' basement is a closet containing everything I left behind when I went to college. On this trip one of my goals was to plunder it for things the entourage might enjoy. Besides the special buddies, craft supplies (yep, those are coming with us!), and memorabilia (sorry Mom, you get to keep the ribbons and trophies), we found BOOKS! What a walk down memory lane. You could trace my life through those shelves from the picture book The Napping House that I was given for Christmas when I was 6 to the lineup of Shakespeare editions I studied in college. The real treasure that got the entourage jumping for joy though was the truly massive collection of Illustrated Classics and Biographies. These books were my gateway to great literature, and I was hooked from the day I found them in the Dollar Store as a kid. I am so excited about passing these books--and my love of reading--down to our girls!

Other fun things we did:

• Help harvest peppers from the garden to eat for dinner
• Watch Granddad build a fire, followed by learning how to perfectly cook a marshmallow, build a s'more, and obviously, eat it 
• Play on a neighborhood playground and experience a porta-potty for the first time
• Listen and watch Uncle N practice his trumpet
• Visit Grandma and Granddad's church on a very tasty Sunday--Sunday school was replaced by a   school year kick-off breakfast and the worship service was a followed by a reception for the pastor's wife (they just got married)

One afternoon we decided to pull out the paints. Notice, at right, that it didn't take long
for Goose to ditch the paper and paint herself instead.