Summer Fun

We found a second rat snake in the quail coop!! This one killed two quail before we found him. Jerk.

We didn't leave the house for a few days, I needed some downtime to recover from all of our going/vacationing. On the third day the boys begged me to go to the beach, they said that I didn't need to pack bathing suits or anything, they just wanted to play in the sand with their boats. That lasted two minutes and then they were off! They were the only kids with regular clothes swimming in the water, but they didn't care.

They found a group of boys that were trying to catch tiny fish from the surf and put them in a bucket. James jumped right in and started catching them with his hands from the ocean! Tiny Anthony!

I saw this sign for sale and I had to send a picture of it to Anthony. So true!!

The boys have gotten pretty creative with what they want to play now that they are spending so much time together each day. They decided that they wanted to get inside the coffee table and hide out, so they had me close them in it. Once it was closed I heard James yell, "Rett!! Stop tooting!! You are stinkin' it up in here!" and Rett would just laugh and laugh. It was such a brother thing!

James has started meeting with a reading and math tutor once a week at the library. She is a brand new teacher, just out of school and is about to start her first year teaching kindergarten. She is soooo great with him! She has all these great activities and ways to make what they are working on interesting. For example, they were working on word problems and she made one out of what he is interested in, "Harry Potter had 14 beyblades. He gave James 10 beyblades. How many beyblades did he have left?" James loved the word problem so much, he had to stop and come show it to me!

They usually sit at a table and do his tutoring while I play with Rett in the kids area. It just so happens that the time we picked for his tutoring is the same time as one of their summer library programs, so there is always a lot for Rett to do. One week they had take home craft kits with all the materials and instructions to make harmonicas out of popsicle sticks. They loved it!!

James coordinated a "performance" with their "swords" and Rett on the popsicle stick harmonica:

James has been really into gems lately, especially after doing gem mining in North Carolina. So we checked out a local university's gem museum. It is totally free and has so much for kids to do! All the displays are hands on with different types of rocks and minerals. They got to dig for tiny gem pieces and they each got to keep 5. It was so hard for them to choose just 5!

This huuuuge amethyst they have on display was really excited to James, since amethyst is his and my birthstone.

Checking out gems/hands/bugs in the microscopes:

They have a little library/craft table and James picked out a few gem books to evaluate. He is determined to find a book on gemstones that has pictures of gems on every single page. I told him that it would be really unlikely to find one since books have title pages, explanations, etc... but he doesn't believe me. He is certain the one he wants is out there! While James was looking at gem books, Rett picked out a Florida spider book to look at.

If you complete this little scavenger hunt around the gem displays, you get to turn it in for a prize: more gems!

The university had a really neat fountain so we had to go throw a few coins in for luck.

A robotic boat competition was held at a local park, so we went for their community day to see all the boats and the exhibits. It was so cool!! James got to test out a riveter (?), it was very exciting to get to use a loud power tool.

Rett went right to the painting rocks table. This boy loves painted rocks!

They had kid friendly robot cars that kids could test out. The remote for them is an app on a phone and it made it very easy for them to steer. They could have played with them all day! They had little challenges for them, like picking up cones and moving them across the table and James had so much fun trying to do that. Rett just kept trying to ram James' car with his. Goals, people.

They also had remote control submarines built with pvc pipes and motors. It was hard to see them in the water since the water was so dirty, but that didn't stop James. He never wanted to leave!

The event staff left painted rocks all around the park you could turn in for prizes, so we did a lot of searching around the lake. We walked around this tree and found a mother duck and her babies. They were sooo cute!!

Disney Getaway and Father's Day

The week after getting home from North Carolina, the boys and I had a three day getaway at a disney resort hotel! Since my nephew was visiting my mom from Ohio, my mom booked the room months ago. I suggested that I come and bring the boys and then we could split the cost of the room (soooo crazy expensive!!). I tried to talk the hotel up a lot to the boys, we are trying to convince them that going to a disney themed hotel and playing by the pool is all there is to a disney vacation. I wonder how long we can keep that up!!

We had a suite with a bedroom, living room, and two bathrooms in the lion king section of the hotel. There were so many cool life size decorations everywhere you went!

We walked around a little bit to explore the different parts of the hotel, and when we walked through the Little Mermaid section the boys were so confused by the decorations. Then I realized, they have never seen the little mermaid!!! Terrible parenting! :)

We saw two bunnies just hanging out next to the sidewalk:

Playing at the splash pad by the pool with their cousin Savino. He was such a good sport and let them pull him around and put him in "jail" on the different jets of water.

Then it was pool time! They wanted to swim in the pool at all times, all day. There were so many other kids there to play with, they loved it!

James wanted me to get a video of him pretending to give birth to a beach ball. Okkkaaaay then.


Later that night, they set up an inflatable tv screen to have disney movies by the pool. That night it was Tarzan. We stayed for the entire movie! Sometimes the boys got out to eat the popcorn the staff was passing around, the rest of the time they got back in the pool to swim.

The hotel had a big arcade, so the next morning we spent some time in there.

They both got really into all the driving video games.

After the arcade, we boarded the shuttle bus to take us to Disney Springs! (Just a very large disney themed shopping center). It was pretty hot and the boys really just wanted to go back to the pool, so we didn't stay long. The bus ride was half the fun!

We visited the lego store where the boys got to make their own mini figures, then we had lunch at a restaurant inside a large paddleboat. Instead of crayons and paper, they give kids these bendable straws called wikistiks and we had a lot of fun with them while we were waiting for our food.

This is how Rett gives thumbs up. He was approving of the chicken :)

We also stopped by Planet Hollywood to buy some light up cups we saw someone else with and James was very impressed to see the real life R2D2 they used in the movie!

We got to swim in the pool a little bit that night, but they ended up closing it down early because of a lightning storm in the area. I promised James that we would come to the pool the next morning as soon as they opened so that we could get a few hours of swimming in before going home. They both loved swimming in the morning, but Rett quit early because he was staaaaaarving (as usual). I asked my mom to bring him a snack since I couldn't leave with James in the pool. She brought him some Cheetos and it made his day, he was so happy!

It was only an hour and half drive home, so once we got back I went to go let all the animals out and check on everyone. After being gone for a few days, I was welcomed back by a fat rat snake in our quail coop! He didn't hurt any of the quail, but he obviously ate at least three eggs. James helped me get him out and put him in a temporary cage so that we could relocate him (if we just let him go he would come right back).

Father's Day started out great for Anthony because they cancelled all the early morning meetings he usually has to go to before church. So we let him sleep in and made him french toast for breakfast (his favorite). The boys also had cards for him and filled out questionnaires about him.

Opening his cards:

Group hug!! Baymax always jumps in when he sees that we are excited about something.

This is the tshirt I bought him for Father's day. It is so true!! Bees are all he ever wants to talk about!

The next day Anthony really wanted to take the boys to a boat ramp down the road to try to catch small creatures in our seine net. We realized pretty quickly that the net wasn't working right, so we gave that up. Anthony caught some bait fish and put some fishing poles out while the boys played around and explored in the water.

Seriously. This is my life every day.

James is getting pretty good at using the cast net!

We did catch one fish while we were there, this is Anthony reeling it in with the boys:

A catfish!

He seriously made this face just for the camera. As soon as I stopped holding up my phone he was back to looking normal. Crazy kid!