Travelling to Grandma and Granddad's
Mommy bragging moment: My kids are great travellers! We made the 6 hour trip to Grandma and Granddad's house this week, and the girls spent the drives there and back playing with the toys they packed in their backpacks, singing along to a selection of kid's CDs (chosen for their ability not to drive me nuts on repeat listening), looking at puzzle magazines, and reading books (Bug was ecstatic! She succeeded in reading her the first few pages of One Fish, Two Fish all by herself. This was the first time she had tackled sounding out a book that wasn't a designated basal reader.) They also watched Tarzan on the way there, and  Finding Nemo on the way home.

In addition to the specific activities described below, the girls just had fun bonding times doing things like reading books with Grandma, watching classic Leave It to Beaver with Granddad, and dressing up in costumes and dancing with Uncle N.

Into the Woods

Intrepid explorers crossing the creek!

Grandma and Granddad live on 45 acres of woods and fields, and no visit is complete without heading "into the wild." We got to see some of the first flowers that have come up, watch a dozen crows chase off a hawk (pretty impressive battle), climb down to the sandy beaches on the river, examine tiny clams a heron had opened up and eaten, and watch Granddad skip rocks (the girls tried to see how far they could just throw them). We headed back to the house to watch the fish in Grandma's pond, and they also got to help Grandma and Granddad refill all the feeders and learned about how different birds like different seeds and different kinds of feeders and how birds help plant seeds. The girls had plenty of time to play on the play set and draw with chalk on the driveway too.

Children's Museum!

On this visit Grandma remembered a children's museum in the next town over, and it was awesome!
Organized along a "Main Street," it included a child-sized theater, bookstore, doctor's and dentist's office, construction site (with massive Legos), early 1900s house, art studio (with projects laid out to work on), post office, grocery store, pizzeria, indoor toddler playground, campsite, train station, and an indoor parking lot that contained an actual Volvo big rig, fire truck, police car, race car, mail truck, and the cockpit of a commercial airplane. Not to mention all the stuff outside: climbing trees, fairy garden, chicken coop, rabbit hutch, teepee, a mud pie "restaurant," and lots of vegetable and flower garden space where not much was actually growing this early in the season. We spent the whole morning there, and I cannot even begin to detail all the learning that happened!

The girls cooked breakfast in the kitchen and lunch in the campsite

Bug drove the train (the engine actually has a video screen showing them
going down the tracks; the lever controls the speed of the video)

Goose and Bug found fancy dresses to wear for a theater performance!

The garden had amazing climbing trees (that's Monkey in the background).

Back to the Routine

Bug's first real sewing project!
She picked the project (felt quilt),
cut the pieces, and sewed it together
with embroidery floss. I just threaded
the needle and tied knots.

We got home Thursday afternoon, so Friday I grounded us firmly back into the normal routine with a trip to the Y and grocery store. We did all the usual lessons: Monkey and Bug each did a brief reading lesson (no new material since we hadn't done them in so long), they did a numeral/number of objects matching worksheet for a math lesson, and we had a quick, fun history lesson (we read the section about Roman theater in the DK book and made our own theater masks).

Bug's pink lady (hard to see, I know), Goose wearing hers,
and Monkey's man with a blue beard