Cleveland Rocks?

We are strongly leaning towards making the drive to Cleveland over Memorial Day weekend to participate in our adoption agency’s annual picnic and parade at the zoo. It’s certainly going to be expensive - especially with the way gas prices are skyrocketing - but I think that giving my kids the chance to be part of a sea of families that all look like ours (kids and parents that don’t “match” by sight) is worth the price.

So, the question is - if PisecoDad can only take one day off of work (Friday) to drive out, and we’re at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo with the agency on Saturday, what should we do with ourselves on Sunday before driving home on Monday? And where should we go to eat, shop and buy board games?

The only item on our list so far is the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, because JediBoy has been dying to get to a museum with a T-Rex, and they have Jane the Juvenile Tyrannosaur there.

Anyone out there have the inside scoop on Cleveland?

Sick, Sick, Sick

But I think we’re finally on the mend!

I was completely wiped out for all of Thursday and Friday - and the greater parts of Saturday and Sunday too - by a bizarre stomach bug that really only made me get sick once, but kept me nauseous and in pain for a couple days.  All I could do Thursday was sleep - I could barely keep my eyes open!  It was a huge lesson for me in how much Mom really does around the house.

The kids are both sick too - JediBoy is still carrying his cold from last weekend, which has now turned into a sinus infection, and BabyGirl caught the cold from him around Thursday and it has already developed into an ear infection.

We haven’t been doing anything fun at all, besides a quick jaunt to Earth Day on Saturday, so I have nothing to report!  Hopefully tomorrow or Wednesday we’ll start turning things around.

Still Slow

We’re still slow here.  JediBoy is - as usual for him - having a hard time recovering fully from last week’s cold, and today he had so much phlegm in his stomach that he threw up (all over the middle of the family bed, of course!).

We missed our homeschooling playgroup because of that, though we did get out to the thrift store this evening.  JediBoy spent a large part of the day making drawings from the Ed Emberley books again.  We played a game of Pirate’s Cove.  BabyGirl learned how to poke me in the ear when I ask, “Where is Mommy’s ear?”  She also learned how to poke me in the ear long after I stopped asking…

Earth Day: Dr. Seuss and Ed Emberley

After a two-player game of Shadows Over Camelot (in which we were thoroughly trounced by the forces of evil), I thought I would pull out something for Earth Day today.

First I turned to Dr. Seuss and his save-the-Earth classic, The Lorax. We probably hadn’t read this one since Earth Day last year, just because other books have been in higher rotation. JediBoy was rapt and enjoyed the story, and we did talk a bit at the end about the “moral of the story” and what happened if you cut down all the trees.

Next I pulled out the Cat in the Hat Learning Library title If I Ran the Rain Forest - which is done in the style of Dr. Seuss but was not written by the man himself. This learning library series offers some good information in small bites. As JediBoy read out loud to me, we learned about the four stories of the rain forest and how they are distinct, and the book ended with another admonition to stop cutting down all the trees.

After a half hour of reading, we were ready for a break from the books but weren’t ready to go outside because BabyGirl was fast approaching nap time. So I turned to good old Ed Emberley for a little drawing time. JediBoy is falling in love with the Ed Emberley books (most of which are my copies from when I was young) because they help him draw in a very easy, step-by-step way that he likens to Lego instructions. Each step shows beneath it exactly the shapes you’ll need to add, and you check the bigger work-in-progress drawing to see where they should go.

We drew together using Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Animals for an hour, creating scenes with frogs on a log, birds at a feeder, dragons in a castle, gorillas in a forest, and dogs on a walk. JediBoy kept drawing for half an hour after I got up to make lunch!

Recovering

It’s always hard for JediBoy when people come and go… today he’s recovering from a cold and recovering from the loss of his precious Pappy.  We spent the day moving from one activity to another and trying to bring our lives back to center.  We watched the squirrels and chipmunks climbing the bird feeders, read books, watched movies and played Disney Trivial Pursuit.  Hopefully tomorrow we’ll feel more ourselves.

Sharp-Shinned Hawk and Fossils

We are enjoying another glorious day here, weather-wise. We got up this morning and headed out to our favorite park, for the third time in less than a week! On the way there, I spotted something quite unusual in one of the yards we were passing.

It was a sharp-shinned hawk (correct, birding PisecoSis?) with a very recent kill. For some reason that we could not figure out, the hawk was sitting in the yard, only a few feet from the curb and rush of traffic, for several long minutes. We turned the van around and came back to look, and of course I took pictures. We had a very long and up-close chance to observe the hawk before he finally took off, carrying his prey with him.

We continued on to the park, where we spent nearly two hours exploring the stream, and a rocky outcropping in particular. We collected several fossils (crinoids and brachiopods, we believe) and interesting rocks, made dams and big splashes and started teaching JediBoy how to skip rocks.

Boys being boys, JediBoy found a “gun stick” and passed it over to Pappy, who whittled it to make it even more gun-like, and hollowed out a bit of the barrel. Don’t get me started on my nature-versus-nurture gender-roles rant! They had fun with it, anyway.

5 and 5/6

We celebrated JediBoy’s birthday today… just two months early. Today he is five and five-sixths, which we thought would be a cool day to celebrate with Pappy and Nita, who will be in South Africa for JediBoy’s actual sixth birthday in June. We spent the whole morning playing at our house. JediBoy talked Pappy into two board games - Monopoly Jr. Digging Dinos and Pokemon Monopoly - and they played Legos and built a marble run too. Nita kept BabyGirl happily occupied with toys and books.

Pappy, Nita and JediBoy counted birds again for Celebrate Urban Birds. Pappy and JediBoy washed a chalkboard in the driveway - this chalkboard moved with my parents from Virginia to North Dakota in 1976 (moving tag on the back) and from North Dakota to Pennsylvania in 1986 (moving tag on the front) and now it’s here in our home. It’s pretty geeky that we wax nostalgic over a chalkboard!

In the afternoon we went shopping for JediBoy’s big birthday present, and he chose a beautiful blue 18″ bike, with a new helmet and pads (Pokemon, of course) and a new pump too. He had to wait while we rested a bit and let the air cool down during the late afternoon, but this evening we finally tried it out on the Rail Trail.

And of course I baked a 5 and 5/6 cake.

Not At The Table, Dear

My dad and his wife are here for a visit before they head back to South Africa. I’ll be scarce online while they’re here, but I wanted to share this from dinner:

JediBoy and Pappy were playing at the restaurant, having french fries use toothpicks as lances to fight. As tensions mounted, JediBoy called out, “I’ll kill you, Pappy!”

To which PisecoDad promptly responded, “We don’t say that at the table!”

Hm. Where is the proper place to threaten to kill your grandfather?

More Splashing and the White-Throated Sparrow

I fully intended to get some decluttering and basic cleaning done today, since my dad and his wife are arriving tomorrow for a visit. Instead, I found myself pulled down two delightful rabbit trails.

This morning, JediBoy wanted me to sit and watch the birds with him. He added a few treats to the feeders and then got out our Celebrate Urban Birds clipboard and took the data himself! It was midmorning and not the best time for birds at our feeders - local traffic was high - so the only species he saw from our checklist was the American Crow, but he also saw several Juncos and a White-Throated Sparrow.

I had never heard about the polymorphism of the White-Throated Sparrow before, but JediBoy and I found it fascinating. Basically, in the spring, two color varieties of the white-throated sparrow appear - as in the picture above - the tan stripe and the white stripe. But they are not, as we originally assumed, colored based on gender. There are males and females of both tan and white stripes (in the spring). Even more interesting is the fact that white-stripe sparrows tend to seek out tan-stripe mates, but scientists are not sure why.

We read about this, looked it up online, and talked about it for a long time. I realized I’d never really talked about basic genetics with JediBoy. He suggested that when they had babies, the stripes would be a tannish-white mixture of the two. So I asked him what would happen if a man with brown eyes and a woman with blue eyes had a baby, and he said the baby’s eyes would be in between brown and blue. (Then I had him look in the mirror!) We talked a little bit about traits and genetics, and we were both deeply interested.

We saw a white-stripe sparrow first, but later saw one tan-stripe - and then the white-stripe, and then the tan-stripe, so we are guessing they may be a mating pair. What fun!

I really did try to get back to cleaning this afternoon, but Paula and Ben wanted to meet us at the park.

It was such a beautiful day that we couldn’t say no. Besides, how could we turn down the chance to go to our favorite park two days in a row? We all had so much fun playing in the stream. The boys built dams and floated a plastic boat to see how far it would go or whether it would get stuck. BabyGirl learned to throw rocks into the water to make a splash, and then begged me to splash her head over and over! We all had a mini-picnic with fruit flats and honey nut o’s, and enjoyed the gorgeous weather.

I can always clean later. I can’t have a day like this again.

Play at the Park

It is wonderfully springtime here - warm but not hot, sunny with a breeze. We love to be outside! This week the local schools have spring break, so we had a date at the park with some of our friends who go to public school or preschool. It was a fantastic way to spend the day.