Here’s another one of those little words that I don’t want to forget.
Category Archives: Life
Random Mobile Shots
Clifford is about to take a nap in his dog house, but first he needs to read a little to relax.
Lily has been asking about making homemade lemonade all summer, but every time I offer she isn’t in the mood. Finally the other day she was all about it. But she had to have fancy straws for her drinks. So we grabbed some yellow foam sheets and made a few things. The one on the left is a lemon with a happy face and the right is Clifford.
These are in my brother in law’s front yard. They are breathtaking and I was so happy to see them back this year.
We were washing the car the other day and the Princess had to take a break.
King Puppy on Kitty.
Lily and Big Baby at the park.
The DRIVE part 5
One of the things that we were looking forward to doing most was taking Lily and Olivia to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Lily loves the aquarium in Boise and that’s super dinky especially compared to Monterey so we knew it’d be a big hit.
It’s about a 3 hour drive to Monterey from my Dad’s house so we loaded the girls up with tablets and hit the road earlyish.
This is what we saw for hours. I don’t know how many times the girls asked that infamous questions; “Are we there yet?”
In the middle of nowhere, about half way between Madera and Monterey is Casa de Fruta.
We checked out all the fun stuff that Casa de Fruta has to offer for a while to give the girls a chance to stretch their legs.
We rode the carousal and had a blast. The girls really wanted to ride their little train and we made the mistake of saying that we’d ride it on the way back because we were out of time. As you can imagine they were very upset when we got back to Casa de Fruta less than 5 minutes after they closed the train.
This was our first look at the ocean. We are on the top of the parking garage that we finally found to park at.
We had some lunch and then FINALLY headed to the aquarium.
I tried to plan this trip to the aquarium so that we’d be there on a day when they had no special events scheduled. I failed, big time. It was World Ocean Day and the place was packed.
Even packed we tried to have as much fun as possible.
Olivia succeed a little more than Lily at first.
Lily finally got into it. She still wasn’t thrilled about the crowd, but was so caught up in all the fish and fish stuff that she enjoyed herself.
I believe Lily’s trying to hug the lobster.
I managed to find a way to do crafts. I was so happy and so was Lil.
I became somewhat obsessed with the jelly fish.
Princess Olivia with the Jellies.
Hey a sea turtle.
And more jellies.
Some kind of upside down jelly.
Lily and Olivia in a jelly fish symmetry display.
Insy winsy jellies.
Then we found the sea horse room. These guys are pretty cool.
These are some kind of funky sea horse, I wish I could remember their name.
I became almost as obsessed with this guy as with the jellies. He’s a leafy sea dragon if memory serves.
We finally found the touch pools after looking for them all day, but they were so crowded that even Olivia didn’t want to play with the fish anymore. That was fine with us because we were all pooped.
I had really wanted to go down and play on the beach a little before we headed home, but it was very chilly and super windy so that was out and we headed home. We did stop at Casa de Fruta and like I said we got there right after the train closed. We grabbed sandwiches from the deli and headed home. Both girls fell asleep before we got home, which was really very late, but normally Lily doesn’t sleep in the car these days.
Homeschooling, we’re 1 step closer
We may be one step closer, but it feels more like a huge leap closer.
While we were in Montana a few weeks ago I talked to one of my friends that homeschools her girls and she got me really motivated. When we got home I started researching more of what I had read about in the past. I had heard of K12, in fact one of my friends from California homeschools her kids with K12. Even though I knew a good deal about it I hadn’t given it much thought. Well I went to their site and started to read about it and realized that with K12, you can sign up with a local school, virtual or private in most cases, and once I found this out I started checking out the local virtual school. Well as it happens that very night they were having an in-person meet and greet type of thing. We registered and rearranged our night so we could go. We wavered, well I wavered a bunch on going to this thing, but in the end I felt it was a good thing to do. Boy was I glad that we went. I learned a ton of very useful information and now I’m really excited about signing up for K12 with IDVA (Idaho virtual academy).
Since Lily’s birthday is in December she can’t start kindergarten until next school year, so this year we’re going to do the preschool program that K12 just adopted. Lily and I have been doing learning stuff forever when the opportunity presents itself, I guess you could call it unschooling; nothing too structured, just following Lil’s lead. But I want a more structured learning thing to start happening so that we are prepared for kindergarten.
I’m really excited and will continue updating here with more info as life goes on.
Lilyisms
Lily speaks really clearly, but she still has a few things that she says in her own way and I’m super kicking myself because I’ve missed at least writing those things down and now they are gone. Well my new goal is to get remaining Lilyisms on video.
