A Trip to the Zoo, Playing in the Snow, and Good Reports from School

Samantha: 101 Months, Week 4
Aedan: 67 Months, Week 2
Owen: 25 Months, Week 4

With Samantha going to play practice every Saturday morning, it has been limiting what we can do as a family, as far as going farther away from home for a day trip. So, we decided to be a little spontaneous, skip out on church, and drive down to Philadelphia to go to the zoo for the day. With it being over 2 hours away, it's a longer trip that requires a whole day of time. So anyways, we got up on Sunday morning and got ready for a day at the zoo. The weather was going to be decent, and we were excited for a fun family day together.

Here are some pictures from our day. We saw some cute little meercats playing inside a plastic bag.

Pretty much every time we passed by a statue of an animal, the kids wanted to take their picture with it.

We started with the part of the zoo that we didn't get to last time we were here, seeing some of the bigger African animals like rhinos, giraffes, and hippos. Giraffes are some of Owen's favorite animals to see.

I love my sweet, silly kids!

One of our favorite places is always watching the gorillas play. This exhibit had a whole family of gorillas where the mom and dad were down on the ground sleeping, a baby was up on the top, and two younger gorillas were wrestling and pestering each other, just like human brothers and sister do. It was pretty entertaining to watch.

Everyone wanted a turn pretending to drive the tractor.

We went into a bird house building with a large variety of birds, as well as a little bird show we could watch about migration. Here are some great pictures of my beautiful little girl. She is looking so grown up these days.

As we were walking around to the other side of the zoo to see if any of the rides were open, there was a huge pile of leaves that they left on the sidewalk, and the kids were really excited to be able to run and jump in the leaves. It was fun to just stand there and watch them race into the leaves and just fall down without abandon.

We decided to buy tickets for the kids to ride the carousel this time. The kids all picked different animals and had a fun time riding around. Samantha and Aedan are getting old enough that carousels aren't too exciting anymore, but Owen still loves them.

After the carousel we discovered an indoor play area for kids with giant objects like flowers, caterpillars, honeycomb, and a tree house. The kids had a great time playing here, and it was a fun area to discover.

At this point it was already around 2:30, and we knew we needed to get on the road to go home soon, so we decided to go to the petting zoo and then head out. All the kids enjoy petting and brushing the goats.

It didn't take long for Owen to fall asleep in the car on the way home. He ended up waking up and crying for awhile after about forty-five minutes, like he usually does, but luckily, he fell back asleep for much of the ride home. He was so cute with his knees propped up and his head resting on his arms.

Samantha and Aedan got to play quietly on their Leap Pad/Kindle while Owen napped.

We had dinner ready in the crock pot that night, which was good, because we got home a little late from our excursion to the zoo. However, I'm glad that we decided to go and have a family day together. It was a lot of fun, and the kids had a blast seeing the animals. We figured we would take advantage of a nicer fall day to be outside.

Samantha and Aedan had Monday off of school for parent-teacher conferences. We decided to go out and run a couple errands that morning because we needed to get winter stuff like snow boots, gloves, and hats, as well as new underwear and socks for Samantha and Aedan. We went to Target and found everything we needed, before stopping at Walmart and picking up our grocery order. It was a fairly productive morning that we had, and they enjoyed being able to pick out their own things at the store.

Here's some work I cleaned out of the kids' folders that day. Aedan has been finishing talking about the letter Ii and the number 9.

Here is a Spelling paper for Samantha, as well as Reading quiz and a poster on Bats. Her cursive is so well done on the Bats poster. She has gotten so good at it from just practicing at school, and I am very proud of her for that. She was really intimidated by it at first when she discovered that everyone had learned cursive in 2nd grade, but she is so responsible and hard-working that it didn't take long at all for her to pick up that skill.

On Monday afternoon we had a conference for Samantha, and even though we didn't have any concerns about her, it was good to talk to Mr. Feinauer. He said he was really impressed with her ability to keep up with her schedule of going to gifted and up a grade for math. Her grades are great, and she has read the most words in the class according to the word counts from the the books that she has quizzed on, which really doesn't even account for all the books she hasn't taken quizzes on. He said a goal he has for her is to encourage her leadership abilities. He said he sees her taking charge and delegating jobs to people when working in a group, being a good leader and setting a good pace and tone for the group. He said it doesn't matter who he pairs her with, she always gets along and works well with them. He also expressed how empathetic she is to students that are having a hard time and will reach out to them to make sure they are doing okay. We are so proud of our little girl, and even though we knew all these positive traits Mr. Feinauer ascribed to her, it was fun to hear it coming from her teacher. It made us feel even more proud of her than we already are.

After a longer weekend at home, Tuesday morning was a little strange because it snowed some overnight, and the kids actually had a two hour delay, which they were pretty happy about. They were excited to see the snow accumulating on the ground, and really wanted to go outside and play in it, so once everyone was all ready for school, we got everyone's snow gear on and went outside.

The kids played outside for about an hour that morning. They were having fun sledding down the hill and crashing into things. They were excited about having enough snow to play in, and enjoying the best part of our yard being so hilly. It was fun watching Aedan be so crazy and carefree with his body, and Samantha was being so sweet in sledding with Owen so that he didn't get hurt. It was a fun way to start our day, and the perfect way to use our extra time with the two hour delay.

Sometimes Aedan drives me crazy with how little responsibility he takes for himself. As we were waiting for the van, he said, "I don't have a coat!" So we had to go back home and get it when the van was coming around the corner. Then, I couldn't get the van to go back up the driveway, so I drove down to the hardware store to get some ice melt stuff for the driveway. Our tires seems to have really bad traction because it wasn't even that bad out.

The rest of the day was pretty easygoing with Owen and I just hanging out at home. He took a good nap, and I had a quiet, relaxing afternoon sitting on the couch, watching the snow fall outside. It was very peaceful and beautiful.

Here is more work the kids brought home that day. Aedan is working on the letter Bb, some new sight words, and they also sent some fall/Halloween artwork home with them.

I love how much Aedan loves Samantha. She is still so much of his world, and I love that he wrote this on the back of his paper. It makes my heart happy.

Here is some work Samantha brought home: her painting of the witch's feet, a spelling test she got 100% on, and another spelling paper.

And here's more work from Aedan in math, talking about the number 9 and putting numbers 1 through 10 in order.

This was a pretty normal week in most ways, so I don't have too much to write about. Thursday was our friend Miss Linda's birthday, so I had the kids record a little video of them singing her "Happy Birthday" so we could send it along to let her know we were thinking about her.

That afternoon as I put Owen down for his nap, I took this cute little video of him as we read his construction book together. He had every page memorized and knew exactly what the next word was. I just love hearing all the words he knows. He loves being read to, and he definitely has an interest in books about trucks right now. It's pretty cute, and I'm glad I captured this on video.

Here's more work the kids brought home from school on Friday. They did an assessment on Aedan's knowledge of letters and sounds, and this was the report he got back. He knew the names of all the uppercase and lowercase letters, and then missed the long vowel sounds because they haven't learned that in school yet, and then the short E, I, and U sounds because I think he has a hard time distinguishing the difference between them at times. Nevertheless, we were really proud of the great report and how well he is doing. He is a hard worker and really loves going to school.

Here is a science quiz that Samantha got 100% on. Way to go, girl!

And here's some work of Aedan's work on number to 9 and the letter Bb.

We invited our pastor's family over for lunch on Saturday, so on Friday night we decided to join together as a family and make buckeyes to share with them. (Pastor Tim is a Michigan fan, so we were trying to play on that fact since Ben is an Ohio State fan.) Here are the kids helping Ben roll the balls for the buckeyes. We ended up dipping them in chocolate ourselves after getting the kids to bed, but they had fun scooping out and rolling the mixture.

Saturday mornings we usually just sleep in until the kids wake up, taking it easy, and making pancakes and eggs for breakfast. Then, Samantha had her play practice, and we did some work around the house on laundry and getting things cleaned up before the Walkers came over for lunch and time to hang out. The kids were having fun playing together, and Owen was excited to have Lucy at his house again. It was nice being able to talk with Heather again as the kids played. Then, once Ben and Tim got back from picking up Samantha, we had tostadas for lunch and just enjoyed each other's company talking and sharing. It is nice that our kids are finally getting old enough that they can just go off and play and allow us to have adult conversation.

We decided to let Owen stay up instead of having to take a nap while people were here, so once the Walkers left, we let the kids watch TV for awhile before going on a walk around the block. We figured it would be good to get out of the house for awhile, and Izzy definitely enjoyed being taken on a walk. She doesn't get to do that very often anymore now that it is dark and cold in the evenings.

After eating dinner we did our normal bath time and bed time routine. I took this cute video of the boys playing together in the bath tub. It's fun to see them bonding more and having fun together.

I was pretty tired that night and just wanted to take a break and relax. Ben suggested we watch one of his favorite childhood movies (Rookie of the Year) on Disney+. I promise that I planned on staying awake and watching it with him. It wasn't my level of interest in the movie, but more my level of tiredness. I fell asleep on the couch for about 20 minutes, and apparently Ben took a picture of me. We will have to try watching it another time!

(Blog about November 10-16, 2019)