Warning: Cuteness Ahead!

This morning as I was trying to do my Bible study, I had a bit of a distraction. Little Kure was very interested in ferociously attacking my fingers and anything else that moved. It was pretty hard to concentrate! As all little babies do, he began to get tired and ready for his nap. It's so adorable because he thinks that we are collectively his mommy and he always comes over to one of us to snuggle up and go to sleep. Finally crashed....

Life is good at the beach

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air," and that's exactly what we did.

We had 3 1/2 glorious days at our favorite beach in North Carolina last week. It's a longer drive from here (7 hours!) but so worth it. Fort Fisher is a little Air Force recreation center on Kure (pronounced "Curie") beach. We found it when we lived in Cary, and it's sort of become "our" place. It's not fancy, but it's comfortable. The houses are little military-housing style units. 2 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, a full kitchen, living room, and a washer and dryer. Even a garage and a little charcoal grill! There is a cafe on the base that sits right on the river and a rec center with ping pong and video games. The kids rented bikes and fishing poles, we took a canoe trip up the river, and we thoroughly enjoyed being away from "real life," taking long walks on the beach, and napping in the sun....

Ft Fisher lies between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River, on a little stretch of land called Pleasure Island. Kure beach is not commercial--you have to drive 10 minutes into town to find a restaurant that's not on the base. There is no boardwalk, no tatoo parlors or 3/$10 t-shirts. It's just the sand, the ocean, and the pelicans. A little bit of peace in a crazy summer. Here are the pictures:having dinner on the porch of the Beach House Grill:We went looking for ghost crabs after dark. This year we remembered our flashlights! We also were delighted to discover lots of bioluminescent microorganisms buried in the sand. They were really cool-after the waves swept back into the ocean we would dig up the sand with our hands and we could see all these little tiny glowing dots. We had a successful day fishing: Joshua snagged 2 crabs and we caught three fish. Size does not matter, by the way.....it's the merely the fact that we caught them that counts!Hurricane Bill stayed far away from our little beach. We kept hearing about all the closed beaches and flood warnings but the only sign we had of any unrest in the ocean were the spectacularly big waves at high tide. We had lots of fun watching the surfers!
We made time to eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant in town.
Dessert was at Squiggly's, a landmark institution in that part of the country. Jarrett and I are sporting our "I've been Squiggled" stickers.
One more picture before we left for home:

Some people bring home sea shells or hermit crabs from the beach, but not us!! Take a look at our newest family member: Kure. He is approx. 4 weeks old and we are having lots of fun bottle-feeding him and snuggling......

Tomorrow is Alyson and Nick's first day of school. Thank goodness we have those beach memories to dream of when the alarm goes off at 5:30!

Homeschool Mom Failures...

I am afraid of moths. And I hate them.

There I said it.

I realize it's a huge admission to make, coming from the homeschooling mom of 3 boys, but it's true and it's about time I faced the fact.

It all came to head because of a luna moth.

Someone (I don't remember which boy) captured an enormous, hairless, lime green caterpillar. He looked like he could make something really cool so we dutifully stuffed him into the overcrowded bug house. We forgot about him for a few days and when we looked again, he had made a giant cocoon. Remember, of course, that cocoons are made by moths not butterflies, so it was a bit of a disappointment, but we figured we'd stick it out.

Somehow (I KNOW someone is to blame for this, I just haven't figured out who yet...) his cocoon got wrecked and split open a bit. Inside was this repulsive, disgusting giant brown worm thing with a hard shell.

I am not particularly squeamish, as most of you know, but this was gross. What made it even worse was that the thing would writhe and twist in there. Ugh. I am feeling sick just thinking about it. It could have been fascinating, I suppose, but it was just sick.

It got put on top of a tall cabinet because I got spooked one too many times by coming in to the room when it was dark and hearing all this rustling and movement. Yesterday the thing was making a lot more noise than usual so I decided we'd get it down and look at it. Well, much to my surprise, it had hatched from its cocoon!! Inside the box was this HUGE, hairy, white body with big legs, feathery antennae (another characteristic of moths), and crinkled-up wings. It was moving fast-crawling over the top of the bug house, looking for a way out.

The thing is, I think it didn't completely finish morphing into the moth. It seemed frantic, disturbed. Nick said it was like Frankenstein's monster.

Here is a regular luna moth:

Here is what ours looked like:

To try to calm it down a bit (why do I calm down bugs? I. do. not. know.) I dumped it out of the bug house, into a tall glass vase. When I did, all this disgusting brown stuff poured from the remainder of the brown shell in the cocoon. I almost lost my cookies.

We left it in the vase overnight. It kept flipping over and getting stuck and he never stopped moving. When I got up this morning there was all kinds of dusty fuzz on the inside of the vase-evidence of its frenetic movement all night.

We dumped it outside this morning. It didn't have much life left in it and it moved weakly for a little while. I'm sorry to say that I didn't really have any sad feelings for it. The whole experience was just too disturbing.

A little while later, Lily meowed at the door to come in. She was licking her lips and when we glanced outside, the ruined homeschool science experiment was lying lifeless on the cement, missing half of its body.....

A failed experiment. A shameful effort for an experienced homeschooler.

We came inside to salvage the experience with an art project and made this guy out of Sculpey clay:

I like him much more.

Beach Bums

Yesterday the kids went with some of their friends to Sandy Point State Park. They had a great time and came back with pink noses and big smiles. That's the Chesapeake Bay Bridge you can see in the background....

Legos

We have had a fun occurence in our house this summer. After a little lull of a few years, Legos are back!! As Dave put it, "G" boys have been playing with Legos for about 35 years so it's about time Joshua got into the mix.
He's played with Legos now and then--especially when the big boys are building--but hasn't had much real interest in them until this summer.
This summer things changed. He started wanting to get the huge tub of Legos out to build, he looked at the new lego sets online, and he spent a lot of time in the Lego store at the mall, dreaming....
He got a couple of Star Wars Lego sets for his birthday this year and that did it--he was hooked.

The Lego store in the mall has a fun promotion. Every month they give away an exclusive set to build at the store and keep. We just found out about it and decided it would be a fun thing to do on a Tuesday evening. The event was to run from 5-7. I figured we'd go closer to 5 because although they were supposed to have around 250 sets, I didn't want to take the chance. We arrived at the mall at 4:45. I had to return a couple things, we did a little shopping, then headed over to the Lego store at 5:30. THE PLACE WAS PACKED!!! There were even 20 or so kids sitting outside the store building on the floor. Who would have known that on a Tuesday night hundreds of people would flock to the mall to get a little Lego lobster? To make a long story short, after two people gave up (can you imagine??) we got the second-to-last set and the fun began.

Here is Joshua getting ready to start:
A view of a little of the madness:

Someone CAN'T STAND not having his hand in building:

The finished product:
We spoke to the guy who was running the event and learned that next month we had better be there no later than 4:45 to get in line. They went through all of their sets in 10 minutes!
One other note: we found out about a group of Lego lovers who call themselves AFOLs. That stands for Adult Fans of Legos. Know anyone who might be interested? I have a couple in mind....

visitor

Dave's sister, Bec, was here visiting for a few days last weekend. We had a fun time reconnecting with her. We didn't have a lot planned-mostly just a time of visiting-but we did get out a bit. She got to go to VBS with us Friday night to see the kids' program. (still no pics.....) Saturday we hung around in the pool and grilled out, and Sunday the girls went to Tyson's Corner in VA on a shopping trip.

Here are Bec and Alyson checking out the comfort level at the Love Sack store:

We had lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and finished off the day at the Cheesecake Factory:

Here is my plate. As you can see, I didn't eat even one bit of it...... (cough, cough):

Monday we took a trip to DC to, guess what, the Museum of Natural History!!! Trip no. 11,437 for us, but surprisingly, it was Bec's first trip ever! We had fun running after Joshua as he dashed between his favorite exhibits. Dave got off work early and came to meet us. We popped ino the American History Museum for a little while, too.

Bec headed home Tuesday afternoon. I'm sure the peace and quiet of her own house was quite a shock to her system after being here! :)

Random Summer Shots

I've been so busy this summer I haven't had time to post many pictures of our escapades. Lounging by the pool is a lot more time-consuming than you would think!



Here are some random shots we took the last couple of weeks:
Hanging out in the poolAlyson and her BFF, Kelley, at the bowling alleyAt the National Harbor, in DC when Jarrett was still here. This is a big sculpture called "The Awakening"

I'm hoping to get some pictures of VBS soon. Alyson and Nick worked all week and Joshua delightedly attended all 5 days (there was a prize for perfect attendance!) and I didn't take my camera even once. :( Hopefully someone will have mercy on me and share some pictures so you can see what a great job they did!