Pole Climbing

Thomas is a monkey. He always has been. I am still surprised sometimes, though, at the things he climbs up. This was a football goal post.

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

Jackson and I got an urge to fly a kite one windless Sunday afternoon. We headed to his parent's house and borrowed his old kite. We took it across the street to the field and did a lot of running trying to keep it in the air. If we ran in the right direction it would fly as long as we didn't stop. It was really fun.

Great Soccer Coach

These are a few soccer pictures I forgot to include with the others. These are from Nicholas' last soccer practice. Jackson is such a great coach. The kids love him and he does a great job teaching them the skills they need to learn while still making it lots of fun.



Estella can't wait to play. She has such a natural run. It looks so easy and free. I think she is really going to enjoy sports.

Lincoln Logs

These pictures are from a month ago. It is amazing how fast babies change. When I look at these pictures, Alexander looks so different. The biggest difference is that he now has 4 teeth on the top.

Child Labor

I'm pretty sure this would be classified as child labor, but it isn't forced. He wanted to try mowing the lawn and we weren't going to turn down a willing mower! He mowed most of the front lawn, did a great job, and was very excited about getting paid for it.


He had a hard time not leaving strips and tufts of long grass in between rows, but got much better as he went along. We have worked out a deal...$3 for the front lawn with tufts, $4 for the front lawn with just a few tufts, and $5 for the front lawn with no tufts.

Owls

For our last date, Jackson and I went rollerblading on the river trail. It is a paved trail that follows the river. On our way back we passed a group of people who were all staring up into a tree. We stopped and bladed back to them (it takes us a while to slow down enough to stop :) ). They pointed out a mother owl with three babies. We found some landmarks to help us find the same tree again and planned to bring the kids out to see the owls.

The next Friday we packed a picnic lunch, picked up Jackson from work, and parked ourselves under the owl tree. We spotted one adult and two babies. They were sleepy...this one is giving a big yawn.


The adult wasn't sure if we were worth opening his/her eyes for.
We rummaged around underneath the nest and found bones...
...and a pellet!
We were so excited to find a pellet.
We ate our lunch and compared the owls to a book we had brought to try to figure out what kind of owl they were. We decided they were great horned owls.


This little one woke up a bit and peered down at us intensely.

Once we got home we used toothpicks and tweezers and carefully broke apart the pellet and separated the bones, feathers, and fur onto different plates.



Essie just picked her teeth with the toothpicks :)




We looked at the bones we had and compared the skull to some pictures online. We decided that our owl had eaten a mouse. I lucked out and found a life-size picture of a mouse skeleton. I printed it out and we matched all the bones we could. We weren't sure if we got some of them in the right places, but they looked pretty close to us.


Then, the boys drew pictures of one of the baby owls using one of the pictures we took as a guide. We also happened to have a "Wild America" video that had an episode about owls, so we watched that too. This was by far our favorite home school day yet!