County Fair

We finally made it to the county fair this summer! It's been on our summer list for a few years, and the fairgrounds are only 5 minutes from our house, but we somehow have never managed to make it there, until this year. Unfortunately, we went on the last day so all the animals and livestock had already packed up and left, but the rides were still up. And a perk to waiting until the last day is that ride tickets were discounted.

Dallin looks a little scared in this picture, but I promise he did have fun. And yes, I did go on several of the rides even with my pregnant belly. None of the ride restraints but any kind of pressure on my belly, and I only went on rides the kids could go on too, so none of them were unsafe for me and baby.

Waiting in line for the next ride.

Connor was just barely tall enough for most of the rides (with an adult).

Several times when we measured him, he stood on his toes to look taller. Smart boy...

This was the only ride the boys were tall enough to go on by themselves. It was a very simple ride, but they enjoyed it. Mostly, I think they liked feeling grown up.

Next we went on the Ferris wheel together and got a good view of the whole fair.

Paying $8 for a junk food carnival dinner didn't sound that great, so we walked across the street to the Wendy's and got dinner from the value menu. Much tastier! Connor took forever to finish his burger, so we let him carry it to finish eating as we walked back to the fair.

He carried it around with him the whole time, taking little bites here are there. It was really entertaining to watch, though I'm not sure why.

We all had a lot of fun that night. And we made it back to our car and home right before a huge rain storm hit. Perfect timing!

Summer pictures

Now that summer is practically over, it's been fun to look back at all the things we've done. Here are some pictures that haven't made it onto the blog yet.

 We made a lot of Thai food using the Thai peppers and Thai basil growing in our garden. Dallin isn't a big fan of rice, so we tried to form his rice into fun shapes to get him to eat it.

We made him "Lego" rice using a mega block as a mold. I don't think he actually ate the rice any better than normal this way, but he was happier about it being on his plate.

Connor loves rice so there was no need to coerce him.

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We had a water balloon fight one Saturday. 

Dallin and Connor really got into it.

(Do you notice the water spot on the picture that wasn't on the previous one? A casualty of taking pictures during a water balloon fight. Luckily, the lens dried up eventually.)

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Yellow jackets built a nest in our propane grill. That made grilling out very difficult for the first half of the summer. Mckay managed to remove the nest into a jar. Then later that day a yellow jacket "hatched" from the nest.

 Good thing we had a lid on the jar! The next day there were two of them. Eventually we had three yellow jackets in the jar before I got tried of this science experiment sitting on my counter and giving me the heebie jeebies, so I disposed of them.

Later in the summer, we found another nest inside the swing set.

The picture is blurry, but you could see about 20 yellow jackets just hanging out on the chain for the swing. Mckay discovered a nest inside the hollow pipe running across the top of the swings... And then discovered another yellow jacket nest on one of the fence posts... And then he found another nest! We've battled four yellow jacket nests and gone through several cans of Raid, but luckily none of us were harmed by any of them.

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Dallin looking sophisticated.

I made these photo booth props for the Walk for William Syndrome in May (that I somehow never got a picture of!). The kids will occasionally find them and play around. 

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Connor wears his super hero cape and mask a lot, even at meal times.

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We took the car seats out of the car to  be able to transport something large, and Connor wanted to be buckled into his seat so he could pretend to be a turtle.

Sorry for the shaking and sniggering while I recorded him. I couldn't keep myself from laughing!

Washington D.C. - The National Mall

We spent a good amount of time at the National Mall. For those who are confused (as I was the first time hearing it), the National Mall is not full of stores for shopping, it's an outdoor national park that houses many famous memorials and monuments. 

We saw the Washington Monument.

And then the boys started break dancing for no reason. 

It was extremely cute.

We gazed up at the tall monument for a while. 

We got lunch from some of the many food trucks parked right by the mall.

 

This was my first exposure to food trucks and I know that's a small sample size, but I was not impressed. The food was decent (nothing spectacular) and way overpriced. Maybe it's just because we were in D.C. where I'm sure the cost of food is way more than Indiana, but that's still no excuse to charge 9 bucks for a simple cheese quesadilla. At least that price included a soda!

We walked from the Washington Monument across the rest of the mall to the Lincoln Memorial.

The Lincoln memorial is that building waaaaay off in the distance.

We passed the war memorials on the way. 

The World War II memorial.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

I think this memorial is beautiful and Dallin enjoyed tracing the letters in the names of the soldiers.

He was busy finding all the "D" letters.

 The Korean War veterans memorial.

It was a very sobering experience to be reminded of the wars and all the people who fought to protect our country in those wars. I felt extreme gratitude for those soldiers, especially when surrounded by other tourists who seemed less than grateful. At the Korean War memorial, we overheard one person say, "Wow, they'll make a memorial for anything, won't they?" Yes, when hundreds of thousands of people go to war (including my own grandpa) to protect the freedom of others, I think that merits a memorial and a little respect. 

The Lincoln Memorial.

Connor seemed less than impressed by it. I think he was hot and sick of walking by this point. He was in the stroller for half the time, and carried on shoulders for another quarter of it, so I had little sympathy for his fatigue.

The view from the Lincoln Memorial, looking back across the mall to the Washington Monument. 

Last stop was the White House. 

It doesn't seem like it in the picture because of the zoom on the camera, but we were about 1/2 mile away from the White House. That is the closest we were allowed to get. (Seriously, I took one step closer on the grass across the imaginary line and was told by the secret service to step back please.) Apparently, they close the lawn in front of the White House for various security reasons at any given time. The secret service officer we talked to wasn't at liberty to say why, but just that it happens from time to time. Weird... 

On the walk back, we stopped to let Dallin get a Spongebob popsicle.

It was $3 (more food truck rip offs!!) but so worth it to see him enjoy it. It only took 5 baby wipes to clean up the resulting stickiness.

That was the end of our trip! Every day was long and exhausting (and hot!) but we got to see some really cool places learn a lot of American history. And we checked some things off our summer list!

Washington D.C. - The Smithsonians

During our trip in June, we went to the Smithsonian National Zoo in DC.

(You can kind of see my 16 week pregnant belly barely poking out in this picture.)

We somehow chose the hottest day of our entire trip to spend outside at the zoo all day. We each brought a water bottle and had to stop for refills about every 30 minutes, but we stayed hydrated! We really liked the zoo. The pandas were really neat to see and the boys always love to see gorillas.

One of the best memories of our zoo visit was seeing the orb weaver spiders in the Invertebrate house. (So memorable that I didn't think to take any pictures of it.) The spider "enclosure" is separated from the rest of the room only by a 2 foot ledge. It is an open display with no glass, nothing to physically keep the large spiders from roaming free around the zoo. We could literally have reached out and touched the spiders, but most people would be too frightened to do that, so the spiders stay safe. Once the female has built her web, these 4 or 5 inch long spiders will never leave their web. They are mostly blind, so they stay on their web and wait until bugs are caught, then they follow the web vibrations to their prey. We happened to be there when the spiders were being fed. A volunteer zoo keeper had a container of small crickets and he would try to gently place one cricket at a time on the web for the spider to eat. He wasn't having any luck getting the crickets to stick to the web, so the spider never made it down the web far enough to eat the cricket, and the cricket would fall down into the bushes and mulch below (The real reason for the 2 foot ledge around the spiders: to keep the fallen crickets contained.) Eventually, the container of crickets ran out and we still did not get to see the spider eat. Mckay saw a cricket walking by in the mulch in the open of the enclosure, so he reached down and caught it quickly, I think intending to give the volunteer another shot at feeding, but by this time, the volunteer had already walked away. Now Mckay was standing there with his hands cupped around a cricket, wondering what to do with it. So he threw it into the web of one of the spiders. The cricket stuck and the spider instantly slid down the web and began to eat the cricket! It was amazing to watch! Several fellow bystanders cheered, quietly applauded Mckay and patted him on the back. He finally gave us the show we had all been waiting for! And then we quickly got out of there before Mckay tried to catch another cricket. 

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 Another day, we saw the rest of the Smithsonian Museums. There were a few we were interested in seeing in a short span of time, so we planned an hour in each one. That's not nearly enough time to really see each one, but it gave us a little taste.

 The Air and Space Museum was a hit.

 The boys really liked all the "skeletons" at the Natural history museum.

The American history museum was also really cool. I wish we'd been able to spend more time there.

 This Spongebob mail box we found was definitely worth photographing.

Inside the Smithsonian Castle, there was a replica of said castle on display made from Legos.

An otherwise uninteresting building was now very interesting to the kids.

We also stopped by the Library of Congress.

This is as close as you can get. This picture was taken from the viewing room, which you can enter and see into the library from behind a thick glass wall. We really thought we'd get to go in and see shelves and shelves of books, so we were a little bummed. The movie National Treasure is suddenly seeming very unrealistic. (The plot was still totally plausible in my mind until now. :)  )

We did go to the gift shop thought and Mckay tried to steal the Declaration of Independence.

More on D.C. and the national mall to come. I'm almost done blogging about June!

Summer Break

School is out and summer break has officially started! Summer weather is here too. We've already had several hot, humid days and I've already turned the air conditioning on, which is way sooner in the year than I did last year.

I made our summer bucket list for this year. I didn't stray from from the layout I used for last year's summer list. 

I left some room at the bottom in case we want to add more. There are a lot of repeat activities from last year, as well as some new ones. I added new travel goals like "See the White House." My goal for Connor is to potty train him. We'll see how that goes.... My goal for Dallin is for him to recognize all 26 letters of the alphabet (his recognition right now is spotty, with about 10 letters regularly recognized). I also want to work on a few other things like writing to get him ready to start Kindergarten in August.

During this summer, we're going to have 20 minutes of "school" time each morning. It will really just be games or activities to help learn the letters. Yesterday, we started with the first letter of the alphabet: A. 

We practiced tracing and drawing the letter 'a' and then the boys got to cover the outline of the letter with cereal pieces. Dallin was the one who gave me the idea for this when he was playing with his Apple Jacks that morning said, "Look! I made a T!" Of course, they got to eat the cereal after they made the letter. Connor started eating his cereal right away.

I tried to take a second picture to give Connor another chance to smile.

He just grabbed more apple jacks to shove in his mouth.

The local zoo is open now, so I'm sure we'll go there a lot this summer. I love having a small, free zoo only ten minutes away. It's right in the middle of town and it's really easy to just stop by for a little bit after running errands.

The recently born baby goats were out so we got to play with them

Connor is so sweet with the goats. He would walk up to the big goats and say in his high, baby voice, "I'm just petting you, I'm not going to hurt you."

Our summer is off to a good start so far!

Gardening

One of my goals for this year was to plant a garden. As a kid, I would help my dad in the garden, but haven't really done any gardening on my own since. I thought it would be a fun family activity and a great way for the boys to see where we get our food. We wanted to start small this year to see if we could get the hang of it.

We started our garden earlier this year in May. We bought some garden soil.

Then we built and filled in our 4x4 garden box and started planting.

Dallin and Connor loved digging in the dirt.

A few days later, we decided that one little 4x4 garden box was not enough for all the things we wanted to plant. So we tore it up and started over. We were able to successfully transplant all of the plants that we had already planted, even some of the "from seed" plants that had begun to sprout tiny leaves. 

We added 2 more 4x4 boxes, lots of water, sunshine and a few of months. And here is the finished product!

I'm surprised at how easy it was to grow a garden.  Every thing we planted took off and grew like crazy with very little effort on our part. There was a big start up cost, so it certainly wasn't cheaper than just buying the produce at the store, but there will be less to buy for a garden next year.

 We grew cantaloupe (below) and strawberries (not pictured) from seed. 

Dallin and Connor got little seed starter kits for Easter so they could each grow their favorite fruit. (Can you guess which fruit goes with which boy?) The strawberry plants were too small to produce anything this year, but we've gotten several cantaloupes from the garden so far. Dallin is so excited because he LOVES cantaloupe. Also in this cantaloupe/strawberry bed are some cucumber plants.

This bed has carrots (front of the picture) with green beans and snap peas behind them. We also planted lettuce here which has already run its course and been replaced with a second lettuce crop.

The third box has mostly tomatoes in it. It makes me so happy to be able to go outside and pick tomatoes for my dinner when ever I want to. I'm the only tomato eater in our house so I get them all! I'm also going to make pasta sauce and such with the tomatoes so everyone else in the family will appreciate them. Next to the tomatoes are bell peppers (which didn't produce much) and cilantro (which REALLY didn't produce much, but now we know to NOT grow that next year).

 Perhaps our favorite plant of all in the garden is the Thai basil plant.

It's a little different from traditional Italian basil. The leaves are smaller and have a slightly different taste, but it still works in cooking Italian food and makes our Thai dishes taste perfectly delicious. It grows beautiful purple flowers on it. We've been pinching the flowers back to promote more leaf growth, but I think it would make a beautiful "flower" bush in a yard.

 We gotten a lot more food from our garden than what is pictured below, but this is what was available at the moment and I want you to see what we've grown.

There are usually a lot more tomatoes ripe at once, but I had just canned a bunch of them. More about our adventures in canning in another post...