Museums & Mountains

 What an incredible day! We spent almost 5 hours at the Denver Museum of Art. It is wonderful! It's so child friendly - lots of hand-on activities. And, this was the weekend of spring break, so they had some extra things going on.

We were excited to see an exhibit of the Impressionists!!! And, I could take photos! Wish I would have taken 2 photos of each as some turned out and some didn't. Above is a Mary Cassatt.

Alexandra was thrilled to see Andy Warhol's soup cans. She LOVES the soup cans and seeing what types of soup he's painted. I love that now she has a picture of herself with the cans!

I loved this photo of Alexandra and the sculpture she made of colored pipe cleaners and straws. They had little paper monkeys you could hang from your creation. Alexandra played here for a long time and could have stayed a lot longer.

Next, we went to the Colorado History Museum. We particularly liked the Native American exhibits as Alexandra is Cherokee (from her dad's side) and is very proud of that fact. We were pretty tired at this point and went pretty quickly through the museum.

Lastly, we went out to Golden, CO for dinner and then drove up the mountain. This first photo was from the parking lot where we ate in CO. The sun was just starting to set behind us.

The highlight of the day was running across a large herd of deer on the mountain! There were at least 30 of them and they were so beautiful. We saw the deer both as we went up and came down the mountain. I took a video of them and will see if I can figure out how to load it.

I will try to post more pictures, especially of the Denver Museum of Art, when I return. I'll leave you with this last photo of the mountain.

Driving to Colorado

Alexandra, my mother-in-law, and I are on vacation now! We drove through Kansas to Colorado today. The weather was great, unlike yesterday.



We stopped at the Limon Heritage Museum & Railroad Park in Coloardo. This is our 3rd year to take a spring vacation - just the 3 of us. One of the things we love about traveling together, is just stopping whenever and where ever we want to stop.



We also stopped at Burlington's Old Town Museum which was built like a city from the turn of the century. One of my favorite buildings was the barber shop/beauty salon. Can you imagine getting a perm with this contraption???


I also enjoyed the one-room school house. My grandmother used to teach at one in Kansas!

I was also excited to see some tumbleweeds... and... some wild turkeys!!! I know this is not a very good picture, but I got so excited when I saw them that I had to stop the car and get out and take a few photos. There was one male (I think - he was all puffed up) and 5 or 6 others (females?). They were actually going "gobble gobble gobble" and running around. I was just so thrilled!

Driving North

Alexandra and I made it north through Texas and Oklahoma up to mid-Kansas. It was beautiful in Texas and we enjoyed the wildflowers along the road - especially our state flower, the Bluebonnet. If you're not from Texas, you might not know that it is traditional to take your kid's photos in the bluebonnets each spring. I did it faithfully for 3 years, I think, and now I've missed a couple. I'll try to get Alexandra's photo on the way home. I just took these photos from my car after stopping & rolling down the window.

It was rainy and then stormy in OK and KS. In fact, there were tornado warnings following us and my wipers were having problems, but thankfully we passed through before the worst of the weather.

Tomorrow, we're off to Colorado!!!

Prairie Dogs & The Polar Express

Yesterday, we drove to Kansas to spend Christmas with my in-laws. Today, us "girls" (me, Alexandra, and her Nana) drove to go see an IMAX film of The Polar Express. Alexandra & I actually saw it for the first time on our TV a few days ago. I wasn't very excited to see it - it didn't look very interesting to me, but I loved it! So, when I saw it was at the IMAX theatre near here, we had to go and see it!

Near the theatre, out in some fields near Lowe's, are lots and lots of prairie dogs! I had seen them years ago, but Alexandra has never seen them. We watched these cute little guys that act so much like meerkats. And, when I got out of the car, one of them sounded a high-pitched warning that sent the others scrambling towards their holes. They were so cute!

Pictures from Galveston

I scanned in these photos from Galveston last week. I might try to scan a better quality.

This first photo is of a large hermit crab Alexandra found. After she found it, we realized there were lots of them crawling around on our mud "path." I've never seen a hermit crab out in the wild before, and this was really neat!

This photo is of Alexandra holding a periwinkle - a type of snail. If you look closely, you'll see lots of them on the tall grass.

This is a photo of Alexandra being carried by David, the man who carried her for so long. You can see our guide (light blue shirt) pulling the net we used to collect whatever we could find.


The above photo is of a blue crab we found in the net. It was neat to open the net each time and see what we'd caught!
This last photo was taken in the much clearer water near the sandy beach. The kids really enjoyed wading in the water and looking for shells.

Salt Marsh, Sand Dunes, and a Beach at Galveston

On Wednesday, Alexandra and I went on a field trip with some other homeschoolers to Galveston. We were in a class that visited a salt marsh and then went to a beach that had sand dunes. It was a long day, but it was a lot of fun.

We went to the salt marsh, first, and discussed the purpose of a salt marsh (home for marine life - especially babies, protection, filters the water, holds flood waters) and discussed that estuaries are where salt water mixes with fresh water. Then, we headed off through the mud after being taught the stingray shuffle.

The first thing Alexandra found was a large shell - with a hermit crab in it! We were very excited as we noticed these hermit crabs everywhere! Then, we saw periwinkle snails on the grass - 100's of them! They are about the size of a shooter marble and they were climbing up the stalks of grass.
The mud was hard to walk in even before we got in the water. The first few steps into the shallow water were hard to take - it made you feel like you were just learning to walk. As we got into the water, Alexandra was scared (the fact that we had to learn the stingray shuffle and that they said there was a 99.9% chance that you'd fall in the water didn't help). It was also cold and sprinkling. A kind homeschooling dad offered to carry her and his son gave her his jacket. I was amazed that this gentleman carried her for over an hour!

Some of the kids pulled a large net behind them while another child walked in front of the net to "kick up" whatever was at the bottom of the marsh. We caught: lots of shrimp, lots of small baby fish, a few pike fish, some tongue fish (a lot like a flounder), lots of small baby crabs, one large blue crab, and lots of sea snot - which looks like just what it sounds like.

Again, I was amazed at how hard it was to walk around while shuffling in the mud. There were lots of holes - at time I'd step into one and the water would go up to the bottom of my shorts. Also, at times my foot would get trapped. They warned us not to pull our foot out of our shoe or you'd never find your shoe again. We saw evidence of this - unclaimed shoes that washed up on the beach. A few times I got stuck in mud that came to the top of my socks. You have to wiggle your heal, then pull your toe up first to keep your shoe on your foot.

After the marsh, we went to the beach. At the beach, they discussed the importance of sand dunes - both to the animals that live in it and the people who are protected by it. We looked at some of the different types of plants that grow on them - some are not native.

Then, we combed the beach for shells and whatever else we could find. We found: lots of shells (there'd been some flooding about 9 days earlier), a man-of-war, a dead hawk, lots of pieces of oyster, pieces of sand dollars, and our best find: horse manure. Actually, this was kind of funny. I found it when Alexandra and I were by ourselves. I asked her what she thought it was - it was mainly in little round balls. She said she didn't know and picked some up and it broke up in her hands. I called over the gentleman, David, who'd helped us before. David is a farmer and knew immediately that we'd made a wonderful find: horse manure. Yuck! Thankfully, our guides had hand sanitizer.

Photo #1: a piece of oyster on the left and a piece of a large lightning whelk shell covered in worm tunnels on the right side (we learned to identify some shells and things, too!)Photo #2: top 3: shell (I don't remember it's name), piece of lightning whelk piece, piece of sand dollar; bottom 3: piece of sand dollar, piece of shark's eye shell (what's really neat about it is the little hole at the top - we learned that when you find a shell like this, it's because the organism had been eaten by a snail the uses its tounge and some acid to "drill" a hole and then eat the organism!), a piece of an angel's wing shell

Here's a great site I came across to help identify shells and other things found in Galveston:
http://www-bioc.rice.edu/precollege/k12resources/fieldguide/resources/shell.htm

I did a little more research online about shark's eyes also known as moon snails. The teacher told us their tongue has little teeth - the teeth are called radula. These types of snails are predators called "drills." They drill a tiny hole in the shell of their prey. They can also be cannibals and I'm guessing our little shell of a shark's eye was eaten by another shark's eye or some other type of "drill."

Galveston Photos

My friend just sent me some photos of our recent day-trip to Galveston, so I thought I'd put a few here. She has some amazing photos! My favorite was of a pelican - I think it could be on a calendar! So, I don't want to "steal" it and put it here. :-) Thanks, friend!!!


This is the turtle we got excited about watching. We even saw him eat some squid! And, we could tell it was a "he" from the time we spent at the turtle barn earlier in the day. You can tell it's a "he" because only the male's tails extend past their shells.