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

 

why crawl when you can do this:

and now he does this.

Ben and I had a morning date on Thursday after we dropped the kids off with a friend. He was finally able to sneak me into a hospital and show me what he does these days. This was not our first date at a hospital but luckily this one was much more pleasant. I got a tour of the operating rooms that Ben is working on at the new (and huge) Fort Belvoir hospital which opens this month. Cool and a little creepy. So many gadgets and machines. Ben will be busy finishing installations at Fort Belvoir for the next month before finally getting into his project at Johns Hopkins. In case you were wondering.

After the hospital, we made a stop at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Why am I just now discovering these stores? They're great. Lots of old junk from houses. (If you ever need a big metal file cabinet, they are abundant and cheap.) A great place to find inspiration and materials for some upcoming d.i.y. projects around here...

8mm

This is it. The final post related to this past weekend. Ben downloaded the 8mm app on his iphone and we had fun playing around with it over the weekend. Here are the results.

(music is Hummingbird by Imaginary Cities)

because animated GIFs amuse me.

corcoran

We ended art week with a trip to the Corcoran (free on Saturdays in the summer). The kids really enjoyed looking at all of the art. Art museums are a great place to be in the summer because tourists don't usually pay attention to them so they remain uncrowded. After wandering the museum for a few hours, we headed to the Shake Shack for burgers and yummy shakes. 

The girls were really into this gruesome bison painting.

Elsa was excited to find this "E for Elsa" painting...just how she writes an "E."

Amelia's look-alike statue.

family portrait.