The Soule Homestead

This was yet another totally awesome field trip we went on with our home school group. The kids had a lesson on the difference between dirt and soil, farming organically and had a workshop on carding wool and making bracelets out of it.

Carding wool

Each kid got to plant some squash

Farmer Frank showing the kids how to properly sow a row of veggies

Ever wonder what a potato bug looked like? Well, here you are.

Mia with her seeds

We all got to sample their delicious, organic greens. The best butter lettuce ever!

Planting beans

Checking out the farm animals

We got to see several different stages of dirt being composted and turning into fertile soil

Two More Fun Field Trips Long Past

With a home school group we went to The Saugus Iron Works. It was the first Iron Works in North America. There were lots of mills and machinery, so Lennon ate it all up.

Mia, Ella and Diva being sworn in as honorary park rangers.

Inside the blacksmith's shop where he would have made all the tools and nails they needed for working on the factory. We learned that the size of nails today are still named by the price they would have been sold for hundreds of years ago.

Wrohohohoh...Machines!

These were definitely the largest bellows we have seen anywhere. They were used to get the fire going and to maintain a fire that was something like 3000 degrees almost all day every day with only one short break each day to change shifts.

When Granmommy was in town we went to The Boston Children's Museum. They had a special Wizard of Oz exhibit on, so we went to check it out.

Before going in though, we went to this outdoor food festival that occurs once a year. We have just happened upon it twice now. It is a ton of local restaurants who come out, set up booths outside the museum and give away free food. Hello Lunch! Here, Mia and Mateus are enjoying some canolis. Yummy!

You probably didn't notice, but we have just come from that field trip to Belle Isle Salt Marsh, and I will tell you, Vickie and I worked hard and used up an entire package of HandiWipes cleaning off Mia's boots and legs to be presentable to the public. That was some of the blackest dirt either of us had ever seen.

My little man, hard at work.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Checking out the turtles from below.

Aquarium School

Last spring Mia took a class through the New England Aquarium. She loved it! Unfortunately, they changed the program up this year and she's not interested anymore so we won't be going back. They went on three field trips and had three classroom days over a 12 week period. I didn't go on the first field trip, but I got some pictures from the last two. We went to a fresh water marsh and a salt water marsh and it was amazing how different the two habitats were. Lennon got to tag along too and we all had fun.

These first pictures are from a place called Belle Isle Salt Marsh. It is way out in East Boston. They told us that 20 or 30 years ago it was a run down drive in movie theatre in a bad part of town and some people got together and had it turned into a state park. It was amazing how beautiful it has become in such a relatively short time. We had a great time and Mia got completely filthy, which she loved.

Mia with a little frog she found. Her teacher was really surprised that she found him here because he said, to his knowledge, all frogs need fresh water pretty close by at all times and it was a salt marsh.

Mia showing off how muddy she got.

Mateus found this cool horse shoe crab shell

This flower is called a Beach Rose

There were a ton of different types of birds at this marsh. Right at the top of this tree was a Mocking Bird who was making all kinds of noises, including a car alarm sound from the near by city.

Lennon never wastes an opportunity to use binoculars.

Taking note of her surroundings.

The marsh is nestled, almost secretly, in the midst of a big, noise city.

These pictures are from the fresh water marsh we visited. I can't remember the name of it just now. The day was pretty cold, so I didn't get as many pictures. I don't think we were expecting it to be so cold, so we were not very well prepared.

They found a bunch of dragon fly larvae which were really cool looking. The kind of looked like tiny lobsters swimming around really fast.

Mia showing Lennon around.

Mia found the most exciting animal of the day. This huge toad. Everyone was really excited when she caught it. It turned out to be injured, we think, so we let it go pretty soon after finding it so that the many kids with curious hands wouldn't hurt it further.

A Family of Geese strolling through the park.

The Best Birthday Wish Ever

Lennon's Star Wars Birthday Party

We had Lennon's 4th birthday party today from 2-5. We only invited a few friends to keep it small for him. In the end we had 10 kids and 7 adults. Lennon had a great time. He got up this morning and helped bake the cake with Shelby and then Shelby decorated it like a pro, as usual. Mia had offered to do face painting for everyone and they all lined up early to get in on the action.

Mia at her face painting station.

Almost right off the bat, Lennon wanted to get to the presents part of the party.

We stuffed this pinata so full that literally nothing else could fit inside it. The kids each had at least two turns hitting it before it came down and the mayhem began.

The awesome R2D2 cake Shelby made in a cake pan that Granmommy had from when he was a kid. It even still had the decorations and everything.

I cannot believe this little guy is 4 years old! He's such a little ham all the time. At the ER on Thursday, the doctor asked me if he was "always this cheerful?" and I have to say that most of the time, he is. He's turned into a giggly, silly, smart little person who I have so much fun with. Happy Birthday Lennon!

Mia's 9th Birthday Party

We have been having so much fun with Granmommy and Gaga in town and have done so many fun things while I will get around to posting about at some point, but first here is Mia's party which we have spent so much time planning and anticipating. Mia was so excited to have an Ancient civilizations party and we lucked into so many great thrift shop finds. It really is incredible the great stuff we found for as little as $2. We kept the invite list down to just a few girls this year and they all spent the night, so it was also Mia's first multi-friend slumber party. Everything went really well. The girls all got along and had an awesome time.

The awesome evite that Shelby made for us.

Granmommy helped the kids make clay pyramids a week or so before the party. They all seemed to enjoy the process and everyone's pyramids turned out great.

The finished result after I spray painted them gold the night before the party. The sand we made them with was not a satisfactory color to Mia, so we went with a gold finish.

Our other craft project was this faience plate made out of salt clay. We saw one similar to this at the Museum of Fine Art when we went last month and Mia was super excited to try to make one of our own.

We ended up using almost two whole containers of blue food coloring to get the color just the way Mia wanted it.

After mixing the colors in we had to let it air dry for several days. In the end up put it in the oven on low for an hour or so to get it dry before we painted and glazed it.

By the time we were ready to paint it, Mia's first friend had shown up for the party so the two of them, along with Gaga, painted the design on the plate. I think it turned out so cool.

I had planned a hieroglyphics scavenger hunt, and got this great idea of the newspaper mummies from another blog. Gaga and I sat around watching Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra a few nights before the party making these and filling them with the jewels for the girls to decorate their sandals with at the party.

I filled each one with rings and sparkly clips, then tucked the jewels inside the folds before wrapping on top of the jewels and putting the gold bangles on the bottom of each one. I left the bangles off of the mummies intended for Lennon and Mateus. They had a different craft and their mummies were filled with snakes.

Fully wrapped mummies

We found this ash tray with Egyptian characters on it at a thrift shop and I made a little clay pyramid to hold incense for the party

Again, we found the golden chargers which we used as party platters and the Grecian looking jug at a thrift shop for next to nothing. I think I paid $1.40 for all four chargers.

We saved toilet paper rolls and cut them up and spray painted them gold so that everyone had lots of golden bracelets when they first showed up at the party. We put out a couple of Egyptian themed games as well for playing while everyone was filtering in.

We had several books on both Egypt and Greece set out for the girls to look through

The first official activity was applying Egyptian eye make up to all the girls. Only one didn't want it.

Posing like Egyptians

One of the clues for the hieroglyphic scavenger hunt. They started in the house with a clue taped to Egypt on our wall map and it went a few places before landing them all in the sand box which they had to "excavate" to find the 10 clues, or puzzle pieces, which told them the final place to find the missing tomb with all the mummies in it.

"excavating" the sand box

Uncovering the mummies from the tomb.

Then we took them all upstairs to unwrap them before heading to the kitchen to do our crafts.

Mia with her friend Niamh and her gift

Shelby helped the boys make clay Ankhs. An Ankh is an Egyptian good luck charm

Mia picked this activity out of a book months ago. It called for regular flip flops spray painted gold, but Granmommy spotted these fantastic bamboo flip flops at the dollar store and they were even better!

The girls all did a totally different job on their sandals and they were all very pleased with the outcome.

Just before the feast was served

Cleopatra's Feast.

Mia read lots of books and helped me figure out what to serve. We had chicken which more likely would have been duck, melon, grapes, dates, honey barley flat bread which we made, cucumber, celery, hummus and "wine", sparkling juice.

Here they are toasting to themselves

I had the toilet paper set up for the girls to do the mummy wrapping game and the boys had another idea of what would be the most fun...

Bowling them down!

Mia has the sweetest friends. At one point while they were watching Fern Gully later one friend said "This is the best slumber party EVER!" That's pretty much the best thing I could have heard. I hope Mia feels the same way.

When it came time to brush teeth and get in bed it turned out that only one of the girls had even brought her toothbrush. After a good laugh, most of the girls brushed their teeth with their fingers and they were all asleep by about 11:30. They didn't sleep long though and were back up by 5 AM! Again, they were so good though. Shelby got up and started Jim Henson's Storytellers Ancient Greece for them and they watched that and had Greek yogurt for breakfast and I didn't get up until 7:30 with Lennon. I can't currently find my camera and all the pictures from Saturday are still on it, so those will have to wait. We made Greek peplos, which are sort of like togas and they did some "Olympic Games" and had lunch and cake.

P.S. I found two giant, gross boogers on my wall today. I know I have sufficiently freaked my kids out about boogers, so I know it came from one of our little friends. I literally almost threw up when I cleaned it off the wall. Eww! Boogers are so icky!