Corn Feed by Calvin

August 6, 2010

In August we visited the Longfellow Community Park Cornfeed. There was face painting, hair painting, bounce houses & slides, and, of course, roasted corn on the cob.

Calvin comments:

Question: Why do you choose to be Spiderman?
Answer: Because I like him very much.
Q: What did it feel like to get the paint on?
A: It feeled like I was flying.
Q: How did you feel about the long wait in the line?
A: Good.
Q: What did you do while in line?
A: Play. Play with my tounge. [He demonstrates an impressive tounge wiggle. Something I never saw in line. I remember we ate dinner and tried very hard to be Minnesota nice to the people who "budged".]

Enoch's Batman and I'm Spiderman. We're fighting.
Enoch's is blue and red.

Emma is red and black.

Uh black. Look at his eyes. He had fun. But he did not ride on any rides. [Not true.]

Question: What rides did you go on?
Answer: Slide.
Q: Did you like the bounce house or the slide better?
A: The slide. Because we slide.
I wanna do that again. That's so fun.

Question: What did Willa do?
Answer: Eat cornnnn... and slide downnnnn. And she went in the big bouncy house...
Q: Who had more fun you or Willa?
A: Me. Willa wanted to go on the slide but she didn't go. She was too small.

Question: How did the corn taste?
Answer: Disgusting!
Q: Why did you eat so much of it then?
A: I think I like it but I didn't.
Q: Do you want to go back next year?
A: Yeah.
Q: What are you going to do next year?
A: Uh, be Batman.

Uncle Lane's Visit by Enoch

August 7-9, 2010

I took this picture at Minnehaha Falls. We were walkin' down the road. Remember that path? We saw water and rocks. I like throwing rocks in the water.
Thank you Uncle Lane for taking us out to eat.

Daddy and Willa eating ice cream.

It was very hot. The ice cream was very, very cold.

This is the Mill City Museum. The flour tour had the flour tower movie that was supposed to blow up but didn't really work. I had a great time watching movies. They were about cooking.

Uncle Lane, Taran, me, Calvin, Willa and mommy. Come back soon Uncle Lane.

Fossil Hunting by Taran

June 19, 2010 Lilydale Park, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Well, first we had to drive a long way into woods, sorta, and after we parked we had someone guide us through the park to the fossil hunting grounds. On the way, we found a mine that you could go in through one way and come out another. It mined stuff for bricks.

After that the trail led to some really good sand. We found a big trail that led us to the hunting ground. Uncle Kyle and Aunt Cheryl were there. The fossil hunting grounds had a cliff where you could dig out the fossils. It was very wet and muddy. There was a tiny waterfall.

It was one steep climb. It was very scary to climb. But not for Victor.

Victor is one of my best friends. We had a sleep over so he also came fossil hunting with us. He liked it very much.

There was so many fossils you couldn't ever get them all. Even in ten years. They were mostly small. There used to be a deep lake there. Victor found a fossilized leaf. We got to use pick axes from Aunt Cheryl. Aunt Cheryl is a geologist. She was pregnant when she took us there.

We ate tuna fish sandwiches. Me and Victor climbed high to a dry part and ate our sandwiches there. When daddy said it was time to go back home. Me and Victor carefully climbed back down.

Fossil hunting was great.

Me and Victor

Emma's hands full of fossils

and You Can't Make Me

I just don't want to do it! I don't want to blog. It turns out that for me, blogging is more of a winter sport. Something to do while trapped behind walls. Something to remind you that there is more than walls. But when the weather is a breezy 75 or even a smoldering 90 with a billion percent humidity, blogging is work. Outside is fun.
Yet blogging is my way of keeping a family journal. Picture proof that we did stuff and lived a life. So, even though I don't want to, and you can't make me; I can make my kids. So here is first in a series of posts written by the audience for whom this blog is intended.

June Berries by Emma

This is the post that inspired the children as blog author laziness in me. Emma wrote this in late June about 2 weeks after school let out.

Today mommy lost her thing that opens the car from a distance and she thought that maybe she lost it at Nokomis Park where we take tennis lessons every morning. We where going to ride our bikes there because Taran needed to ride his bike more. Well, just as we were going out the gate loaded with water and kids, (one trailer bike, a tandem and a boy who just learned how to ride) to find the locker thing mommy stooped down and picked it up. All of us who knew what had happened laughed, and instead we went on the bike trail.

On the way we happened to cross with a nice lady who showed us that we could pick sour cherries. She also told us about a juneberries. We asked her where they could be found and she said that she would be glad to show us if we where heading that way. Well we were. And so she did. We had drunken the water out of two of our water bottles and we put all of the cherries we had picked in one. So we took out the other bottle and we filled that one with juneberries which took a lot longer because they where smaller and where much better than the cherries that we picked (we were sure they were good because Willa kept on eating them!) and they where very small too.
YUM!

Question

What exactly is the point of this life when everything I learn can only be of benefit to the person I was?

(Summer ends soon, so I'll begin to put up our happenings once again. However, the pondering above is an indication of how 3 months with 5 kids for 24 hours a day is going. Hope your summer has been as enlightening.)

Mpls Art: neighborhood doors

Willa after painting Door art project