Just before school started we headed over to the Ce-Ment Pond for the last pool day of the season. Thank you Lana, Larry, Maren, and Griffin (and everyone else who was present that day) for tolerating the elevated noise level we bring with us wherever we go!
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I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been to Old Sturbridge Village this summer, but they always have different activities going on so we stopped by yesterday for a few hours. Adlani stayed home with Ben so it’s a girls’ weekend at camp.
The Salem Towne House and barn have reopened, so Aliya tried her hand at milking the fake cow:
As soon as Norah worked up the courage to try milking, a random dad walked into the barn and moo’ed really loud. I don’t think Norah will be milking again any time soon:
The kids got to make marbled paper:
Stagecoach and boat rides are free for a couple more weeks:
It was really windy for flower photography, but I tried anyway:
This is a great blue heron that lives near our camp in Holland. We don’t see a lot of wildlife in Holland, although there has been an unconfirmed sighting of a “big cat” nearby. I saw a photo allegedly taken on the Holland/CT border at Holland Market, and I checked with the local blogger to get the scoop. He said that they weren’t sure what animal was in the photo or where it was taken, but that there had been a black bear in Holland a while back. Not surprising considering that surrounding the congestion of lake homes there’s a whole lot of nothing (see below). Here’s a link to the bear photos.
We were watching this wildlife on our porch at home until a visitor tore down the nest and killed the spider. The kids forced the visitor to oversee a burial.
When we went to Florida last summer we bought a membership to a science museum down there because it only cost a little bit more and the museum had reciprocal agreements with other museums. We have gotten free admission to so many museums with that membership! Most recently, we visited the Children’s Museum in West Hartford, CT. The kids really liked it, and there was a planetarium show which they hadn’t been to before. For a minute, Norah thought we were really going up into space!
It was definitely better than sitting around listening to them bicker all afternoon.
Here’s the slideshow:
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And the same photos in gallery view:
I’ve got a lot of catching up to do so I’m trying out a new method for posting photos. We recently spent a day at Old Sturbridge Village with our friends from Texas – the Steeds. We only see them once a year when they come for their annual vacation in Maine (here’s a post about our 2007 visit), and we missed last year but the kids got reacquainted right away. It was a great day and the kids are bummed that they won’t be able to see each other again until next year.
Here’s a slideshow of our day at OSV:
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And in case you want to see the description (hover over thumbnail) or a larger image (click on thumbnail), here’s a gallery of the slideshow photos.