Crowder Park

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The kids and I went to Crowder Park today with Madi and her mom, Christine.  It's been gray here and misty at times for what seems like going on weeks now.  I would love to have taken pretty flower pics or autumn leaves but this was all the light and color had to offer.  PP'ed with Photomatix.

Fun in the Corn Crib

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I couldn't help but take a few pictures of this cute little guy entertaining himself in the corn crib at The Vollmer Farm yesterday.  His mom was beside me, and I bet she took 500 shots of his cuteness.

A Day at the Vollmer Farm

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We made our anual trip to The Vollmer Farm on today.  I looked back at my photo albums, and we first started going in 2007.  Wow!  We've made six trips in seven years only missing last year, 2012, due to bad weather, health issues, and weekend conflicts.  We enjoyed this year's trip as much as ever, and Donnie got to go for his first time.  I know everyone will look forward to going again next year as well.

I love it when Donnie and the boys give me great photo ops, and they were really into it today:-)  I've put my favorite shots of the major things we did on the farm into my daily collage.

If you've never laid in a corn crib, you are missing out.  The cool and heavy feel of the corn is very relaxing.

This year, I suggested that we all do the corn maze on our own and compete to see who exited with their 5 finger colors first.  Good choice!  I won:-)

Although it's quite a hike up to the top of the big 'mountain' slide, it is a super thrill going down and we each went 5 times.

I was so sad to hear last year that the giant orange jumping pillow was damaged in a bad storm.  They have replaced the original pillow with a new one, and we enjoyed jumping our hearts out several times during the afternoon.  It's harder than you think!

Although it was a gray day and it misted on us one time, we had a fantastic time finishing out the day with homemade ice cream including pumpkin pie.

Greensboro Science Center

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The boys, Madi, and I went to the Greensboro Science Center today.  This was our first trip to this museum/zoo/aquarium.  It was kindof a combination of the NC Zoo, The Museum of Life and Science in Durham, the Natural Sciences Museum in Raleigh, and the NC Aquarium at Fort Fisher.  Wow!  We really enjoyed our day!

 By far, the newly opened SCIQUARIUM was the kids' favorite part.  Johnny and Madi were fascinated by the stingray 'touching area' at the Hands-On Harbor.  Joey loved the dome that allowed kids to be 'inside' the otter habitat.  We all enjoyed the Fishing Cat which we initially thought was an ocelot.  And it was super exciting to see the penguins swimming about with their little name tags.

We also thoroughly enjoyed the zoo area outside.  The tigers tried to mate while we were watching:-)  The wolves were active.  We got to see gibbons which are a near extinct species that we'd never seen before.  The kids were excited about the petting zoo too.  It was a casual 90 minute stroll on a cloudy but lovely fall day.

I was impressed that we were allowed to carry in a small fabric cooler wtih no harassment and that there were plenty of picnic tables in the zoo area to eat at.  The museum has a Fresh Market Cafe, but there was no pressure to eat there.

For some reason today, the kids were not very interested in geology or palentology today.  The older part of the museum has a very nice display of glowing rocks, fossils, and dinosaur bones, but I guess at this point, my kids have seen one dinosaur too many.

The only con to our visit was all the school groups there in the morning.  Just a bit crowded and sometimes large groups make any museum hard to navigate.  For any museum, I think it's worth seeing how many field trip groups are planning to visit on the day you're going.  Lesson learned although I think we would have gone anyway.

 We got in for half price today at about $6 a person.  The museum coordinates with our NC Zoo membership.  Cool.  The museum also has it's own membership which I'm sure is a good deal if you live closeby.  As it was, between a tank of gas and admission, our visit was a tad pricey even with bringing in our own food.

As we left, the kids were saying how much they'd like to go back.  I'm sure we will some day.

Future Scientists

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The boys and I went to the Nature Research Center, part of the Museum of Natural Sciences, in Raleigh on Tuesday.  They have several lab areas in the building where the kids can do hands-on activities.  In this lab, the students get to do various experiments.  Pictured, they are trying to decide if liquid A in the red container or liquid B in the blue container is iodine.  One is, and the other is just purple water.  They are told that iodine will turn cornstarch purple.  To do the experiment, they used a fancy mixer to mix cornstarch and water in two small vials.  Then they added liquid A to one vial and liquid B to the other.  Next, a centrifuge was used to separate the cornstarch from the water again.  Vial B still looked all purple, but in vial A just the cornstartch was purple indicating that liquid A was iodine.  Pretty cool!

Minecraft Creeper

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Let's face it, Joey is a Minecraft addict.  He talks about it at breakfast, on the drive home from school, and before bed.  Geez.  I do wish he was that excited about something more useful in life, but he's soon to be 11, and Minecraft is what excites him right now.  I don't know all the lingo, but I do know who the Creeper is.  Hey, why do these kids love this game of poor quality pixelated images?  I digress.  With Halloween coming up, I decided to help Joey make a Minecraft costume, and he chose the Creeper.  We found  a Kleenex box at Wal-Mart that was roughly a square.  I trimmed it down on the open end as needed.  Unfortuntely, it was about 13.75 inches wide and deep.  The Creeper has an 8X8 grid.  I decided to put a .75 inch border of black around the edges and then use 1.5x1.5 inch squares.  I tried to explain the math to Joey.  He did get that there were 64 squares per side.  I used my Creative Memories small paper cutter to make the squares, and Joey laid them out on a template and then affixed them to the box.  We used double sided tape and glue dots.  So far, we have done 2 sides.  3 more (including the top) to go.  We will be done in plenty of time for Halloween.  I'd love to get him a Minecraft foam Sword, but at $25 on Amazon, I think we'll be trying to make that too!

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This is a screen shot of Joey's Minecraft world.  He changed his skin to a Halloween theme today and was all the talk about it.

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M is for Mom And Maryann

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Taken for Donna's Alphabet Challenge for the letter M.  M is for Mom and Maryann at our house.  Donnie took these shots at Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park on Thursday.  The kids always enjoy playing on this playground and in particular on the m-shaped play structure.

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Neither the SX40 HS or my iPhone took a very sharp picture.  Wishing I had put the camera into auto face detect mode for both shots.  The iPhone does that automatically.  Didn't seem to help much.  I guess the focus was just difficult for these shots with all the trees in the background.