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!!