What a Character!

I like to take pictures of things that look like they have a personality. Non-human things that look human. "The hills are alive..." literally. I found this guy at the zoo this week. One day I'll have a whole showing of all the creatures I've collected!

Birthdays

Celebrating 17 years. Happy Birthday J! X has just turned 13 too. Now we have more teens than not.

Zoo Field Trip

We are having fun with summer field trips. This week we went to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It's our favorite because they have so many hands on activities. We love to start by feeding the giraffes and the birds. The walk is beautiful. We always end with the gorilla house. There is always some sort of baby there. This time we saw all the orangutan art on the walls. I want to do that. We've always wanted to do a Monkey Dinner theme party. We saw them once hiding the food all over the place for the monkeys to find. How would that be?...Your dinner is hidden all over the house--go find it!

Garden Alphabet

We took another trip to the Botanical Gardens. This time I took pictures of things that looked like alphabet letters. It was a lot of fun. I wanted to collect the word "sisters" to hang in the girls' room. I started getting as many letters as I could after that because it was so fun. It's interesting to see what you see when you start focusing in on something!

Upside Down Planter

We made an upside-down planter. It's our "salad" bowl--lettuce growing on the top and cherry tomatoes growing out the bottom. We've seen versions they are selling in the stores and there are many instructions to making them online. We went with this one pure and simply because I couldn't find the supplies for the instructions I got online and this one was fabulously easy. It also blended in nice on my front porch where a hanger was already installed. I just cut a cross at the bottom of the planter because this wire frame had a mesh type bowl in it. It was tricky getting the plant through--we had to tie the leaves together. It was definitely a two person job! Once you get that plant in there you can't set the thing down either... It was a fun, easy project and we're excited to see if it works.

Spectacular Science

We have been reading the Story of Science series by Joy Hakim this year in school. It has really been a fascinating read! We have learned a lot. We have learned that the universe is expanding...like fleas on a balloon being blown up the galaxies are racing away from each other. And that gravity is not an apple dropping from a tree but that "gravitation is caused by mass curving spacetime and also responding to that curvature." That we are really freefalling through space. The more we learn the more excited we are to learn more. I am now reading the book SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR FEYNMEN about a Noble Prize winning physicist because of Joy Hakim's books as well as a stack of others. One of my goals is to take the time to study the book PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE by Michio Kaku this summer. This one my son, J, has been studying this year and he came home from the new movie Star Trek so excited. The part that made him the most excited about the movie? "I understood what they were talking about!" He could follow the science jargon and science storyline in the movie. And that is just plain cool.

We Are Doing a Great Work and Cannot Come Down

My son, A, has less than 50 days before he returns home from Mexico. He had mentioned that he was getting told by the other missionaries over and over that he was going home soon. We could tell he was bothered but didn't know how to support him in these last few weeks. And then we ran across this talk by President Dieter F. Uchtdorf called "We are Doing a Great Work and Cannot Come Down"

He tells the story of Nehemiah in the Old Testament and how he rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in 52 days. He stood firm and did not let himself get tempted away from the work. (See Nehemiah 6:15) We told A that we would see what we could accomplish in the days he had left and he could too. This will be our theme for the rest of the 6 weeks to keep us focused!