Hand's On Children's Museum

When our four police officers were killed, the Olympia Children's Museum gave us free passes. I didn't know if they'd honor them now because the new museum wasn't even built, but since it didn't have their address on them they did! So I tackled the huge, full of fun museum with the 6 all by myself in June! I don't usually do such big outings alone. The museum was wonderful and so were the kids, except for one Berg melt down. He had a time out on the big ship while the other kids played. The major feets of the day were staying together, building a log cabin, building boats out of wood for the water table, and unclogging the twisty suction tubes.  At one point I let the big boys go upstairs all by themselves while Kivi and I played with the little people in tiny land. Favorite areas for the little ones were the food/garden/house area. The bigs liked the suction tubes, dry ice, and building. We still haven't even seen all of the museum - it's way bigger now! We'll have to go again, maybe we'll take Dada next time!

Our 2013 Garden Year

This year we started our garden in February as an experiment mainly. I thought I'd give the plants a head start. But I'm not sure if it was a good plan as far as getting ahead goes. I think plants just take off in July no matter how early you start them. The plants grew in our sunny window on shelves Peter let me have in the house for about 4 months! They grew, I moved them into bigger cups, then in May we moved them outside, gradually. Half of them were veggies and half were flowers. I could only justify buying annuals if I started them as seeds, thinking they would look like the ones in the garden stores by summer, but I was wrong. They all took way too long or died or didn't transplant well.  So the cool thing is all of my veggies this year were started from seeds (except one early girl tomato I bought at Walmart)!

I will do this window seed starting plan again, but now I know I don't have to start so early. Even though they were ready to be planted outdoors in March and April, I had to wait until the weather warmed up anyway.

Slowly though, our garden is looking like I've always imagined, crammed full of flowers!

These are flowers from all around our house, but mainly from this front area above which welcomes us into the lawn area.

The difference a month makes in a veggie garden:

June left lake garden: tomatoes, celery, swiss chard, cabbage

July left lake garden

June right lake garden: beans, beets, brussel sprouts, eggplant

July right lake garden

Leif Eriksson and Abraham Lincoln

Eben and Kivi worked on their 5 Hero's of American History for the last five weeks of our homeschooling year. They each chose 5 people from 5 different eras and after researching did a different assignment on each one of them. They had to write a report for one, a children's book for another, a poem and illustration, write an autobiography from their hero's perspective and make a movie. Here are their movies of one of their chosen heroes. 

Eben chose Leif Eriksson:

Kivi made her movie about Abraham Lincoln:

I love these pictures of Lincoln. She got this idea from something Eben and Kivi used to do together called Tall Man.

Baby Gives Dada Back Rub

Mama thinks it's hilarious. Dada doesn't.