Theme Week #5: Nature, effects of

Nature week has pretty much been a fail thus far. Amelia and Elsa both became sick at the beginning of the week. Some kind of stomach bug. Amelia was down and out for much longer and finally felt better today. No more moans and groans and sounding like she was in labor.

Quotes from sick Amelia, said in a very sad, pathetic way:
"It must be hard for you when I'm sick because I'm your helper. Now you and dad have to do all the work."
"Mom, can I tell you something? I don't think I'm going to survive."
"I can't do this. I feel like I'm going to die."
Amelia is just a tad dramatic when she's sick.

So we spent almost the entire week inside. Barely any contact with nature. Except for that whole earthquake thing. I was in the living room with all the kids when we felt the house start shaking and rumbling, then swaying. A few things on shelves tipped over and we had one picture frame fall and break. Definitely a crazy feeling. (After the earthquake we could see where our foundation had shifted away from the dirt.) Ben was in Baltimore and I had a hard time reaching him. All the phone lines were jammed. He didn't feel it but everyone around him started yelling and he thought there was a gunman. He left right after it happened and got stuck in awful traffic. My mom was in Philadelphia for work, on the 26th floor of a building which started to sway. She had to walk down all 26 flights. It was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake and the epicenter was about 80 miles from here. An aftershock woke me up last night.

We'll make up for our week indoors with a weekend of camping in the great outdoors. Hopefully traveling west will keep us from getting too wet from hurricane Irene. Ahhhh, nature.

 

ocean life

In honor of ocean week, we ventured out to the Chesapeake Bay Saturday morning. Not quite the ocean, but it was salty and full of jellyfish. We always encounter little stings from tiny jellyfish when we swim there, but this time we spotted some big jellyfish swimming in the water. One that swam past me was as big as a cantaloupe. The kids thought it was pretty cool. I found it a little unnerving. We love this little hidden beach because there are never many people there and you can search for shark teeth. We ended up spending five hours just relaxing on the beach and playing in the warm water. The water stays one or two feet deep for a long time so it's great for the kids. Oliver loved floating out in the water, especially where his feet could touch and he could jump up and down in his floaty. He also loved eating sand. I managed to make good progress in a new book (although a Holocaust book isn't really great beach reading).

We managed to squeeze in a trip to the small National Aquarium in D.C. at the end of the day. Since it was near closing time, we had most of the aquarium to ourselves. Much better than the crowds at this aquarium.

jellyfish.

Theme Week #4: OCEANS

Last week's theme was oceans. We read a lot of ocean books from the library and watched plenty of ocean nature movies (and Atlantis) during the week. We went to Pirate's Cove one day which was kind of an oceany activity. There were 8! busloads of kids from day camps so it was a little overwhelming. Unsupervised kids everywhere. But we finished up the week at a very uncrowded beach (more on that in the next post).

peaches with a view.

We drove out to Hollin Farms on Friday (about an hour away in Delaplane, Virginia) to pick peaches with friends. It was absolutely beautiful. The Virginia countryside is so green with lovely rolling hills. This farm sits up on a hill and has a great view. The girls loved picking peaches. Amelia quickly filled a bag by herself. Oliver liked playing on the ground and putting all kinds of gross things in his mouth (like rotten peach pits). Elsa had fun until she rubbed a peach all over her face and became very itchy from the fuzz. After filling our bags with peaches we decided to pick some raspberries. Amelia loved searching for raspberries (the bushes were pretty picked over) and filled most of our pint. Elsa and the other kids were pretty worn down by this point and just wanted out of those raspberry bushes. We ended our visit with a picnic.

photo by Amelia