Homeschooling Fun!

Wed. AM we spent the morning trying to come up with creative ways to get Naomi's first tooth out of her head. She wouldn't go for any of them and wanted to do it herself. She worked it and worked it and finally out it came. Naomi did get a visit from the tooth fairy and received a 1oz Troy silver dollar (Freja knows better than to spill the beans). My Grandpa had given me some and I wanted to do something special with them so the girls each got one for their first tooth and it went directly into the safe deposit box so they wouldn't loose them.

Thursday we took a trip down to the cities with some other homeschooling friends to the Dodge Nature Center. We took two classes...Meet the Milk Makers, and Bee Ecology. They were excellent. The girls got to see lots of farm animals, make butter, and milk a fake cow. On the bee class we got to see a bee keeper collect honey from a hive and then we got to sample the honey comb. YUMMY!

After our classes we headed over to Mom and Dads to see them, Amber and Ronan, and Grandma was there too. We visited for awhile before we went back to our hotel for the night.

The next morning the girls, Amber, Ronan and I went to the Minnesota Zoo for the day. That was lots of fun and we saw a lot of animals that the girls had never even heard of before. The highlight of the day though was actually the "Farm" where we got a continuation of our lesson from the nature center. We actually got to see a cow being milked with modern equipment, and the girls got to hand milk a goat! After the zoo we went to my Aunt Judy's for a great dinner and then back to the hotel.

We came back on Sat. night and had a pretty uneventful rest of the weekend. Bubbles (who is doing great) got her new kennel. I also learned a new trick from Shila on how to make a dog puke it's guts out, along with whatever foreign body she may have swallowed, which worked quite effectively on the most recent of Dusty's tube socks. Between the two hopefully this will be the end of her ER visits.

Monday was a pretty typical school day, but today we had our first day of Community Bible Study which is a very well established and organized international organization. The girls were very excited as they have an excellent kids program. I was very excited because it is nice to be around other grown ups.

Afterward, we were on our way home when we unintentionally found ourselves at Hawk Ridge, which I have since learned is the 3rd biggest hawk migratory station in the world. We didn't realize that today was actually one of the best days to see migratory birds and it was a gorgeos day so it was just abuzz in activity. There were naturalists on hand teaching about all the different kinds of hawks. We ended up adopting a Sharp Shinned Hawk which I got to hold and release after it was banded. They brought out several other kinds of hawks to be released and they were so impressed by Freja's answers to their questions about hawks that they invited us to the "catch station" (a rare treat) so that she could have her own adopted hawk to release. She had been skittish about them earlier so I didn't know if she would chicken out or not, but she did great. She held her bird for about 5 minutes before releasing it for it's long flight to Central America. We will get a profile on it and every time it shows up at a station we will get an update as to it's travels.

This is one of the days that I am so happy I homeschool. It actually was our science day, but on one of the last beautiful days of summer we quite accidentally took our lessons outdoors and learned more about raptures, migration, thermals, aerodynamics, and conservation in a much more real-life, hands on way than would be possible at home or in school.