School’s Out For Summer!!!

Nina’s last day of school was Thursday of last week!  School is over and summer break has begun – we’re all happy for that! It was quite a week.  The Williams family arrived in Virginia, so we got some cousin time, and Nina had a fun last week of school complete with field day, a first grade party, and a last day of school party with some friends.  We can’t believe we have an almost-second grader and an almost-kindergartener in the house!

  

Speaking of the almost-kindergartener, Lyla had the “brilliant” idea of trying to catch a bird last week.  She washed out an old jelly jar, put her Virginia Cavalry sticker on it, then enlisted my help in filling it with some bird seed.  She made a trail of birdseed that she hoped would lead the birds into her jar, at which point her plan was to go out and put a top on it and catch a bird (specifically she wanted to catch a Cardinal).  Surprisingly enough, a female Cardinal actually did come very close to getting in the jar. She pecked the bird seed around the jar but never got all the way in.  Only one small bird got all the way in, briefly, but the experiment made for fun bird watching for Lyla on a rainy afternoon.

    

Since being out of school, we’ve hung out a lot with the cousins – bowling, swimming, and just hanging out.

   

Today, the Williams family actually got to close on their Virginia house, so while Shen and G were doing that, the girls hung out with me, Nina, and Lyla.  We decided to walk over to the pond to feed the turtles, and the girls had a great time inventing ways to fish and feed turtles.

They got reeds and put balled up pieces of bread on the ends of the reeds, then held them stilly on the surface of the water.  They were all so excited because the turtles actually swam over to them and ate the bread right off the end of the reeds.

After feeding the turtles, they tried catching some of the small catfish in the pond with some poles they made out of sticks, reeds, and pinecones. They weren’t able to catch a catfish, but they had a great time being creative with things they found around the pond.