A Museum + Salt Ornaments + Star Gazing = A Busy Day

I did something a little different today.  I pulled Dave and Lizzy out of school two hours early so we could join two other families for a home school field trip.  When we were homeschooling last year, a few families started a home school field trip group so our kids would have a chance to do fun things with friends.  While we aren't homeschooling at this point this year, I still think field trips are fun and educationally important so we go along when we can.

Today's adventure was to a museum that my kids have wanted to visit for a long time because they have replicas of dinosaurs--an Allosaurus and a Stegosaurus.  They thought the dinosaurs were pretty cool, but the skeleton of the Bull African Elephant won for coolest skeleton towering in at 11 feet with the bones alone weighing over 1,000 lbs--a full grown Elephant would weigh around 13,000 lbs!  We played the game Would You Rather... at dinner last night and Daddy asked the question: Would you rather run under the legs of an angry elephant or run across the backs of 3 hungry alligators.  At the time we all agreed we'd rather run under the elephant.  After seeing the size of that African Elephant, we were seriously reconsidering our decision.

This afternoon my mom brought over a smaller Christmas tree for our bay window.  This prompted the kidlets to sit down and make ornaments out of paper.  Lizzy's were very creative.

Dave's...well, Dave's is SUPPOSED to be a bagel, but Daddy thought it was something else.  I admit Daddy was spot on with his assumption, but we'll stick with Dave's original idea:)

Joy didn't quite grasp the assignment and decided to make an Easter Bunny ornament.  Hey, I'm just glad she's finally learned how to draw and it's not one big scribble.

At dinner Lizzy asked if we could all make ornaments tomorrow, but Daddy had a better idea.  He pulled out a salt dough recipe and got to baking.  Tomorrow we will paint them and put some shellac on them to make them shiny.  We've all agreed our new tree will be reserved for homemade ornaments only.  Judging by our first attempts at ornament making, it should be a very interesting tree.  Do you notice the elephant ornament on that cookie tray?  I think the kids were inspired by the African Elephant.

After ornament making Daddy and Dave decided to take a walk.  Of course the girls wanted to go along, too, but I said no because Joy is on the tail end of a coughing illness that gets much worse in the cold.  To appease my sad girls, I decided to try out binocular stargazing to see if it works.  Daddy decided to pull out our telescope and focus it on Jupiter for us before leaving on the walk.  We got to see Jupiter and 2 of its moons which was very exciting.  All in all it was a very good, busy day.