More from last week!

The Home School Fair! It's always on Memorial Day and we've been going for years. This year we had a booth making leather bracelets. We didn't sell much, but it was fun to be there. Here are some pictures of our favorite parts.

Jake waiting for customers

Tom doing his best to be strange.

Our table. It needed more flash, something to attract customers.

Jake putting someones name on the bracelet.

Tom at the races!

Look at them go! Both the boys entered all the other Olympic events, but only Tom did this one. 

Tom spent most of his day with this drummer guy. He helped him move his drums and then helped him pack up at the end of the day. He now has a renewed interest in the drums and when we got home he got his back out and cleaned them up. :)

Here's the awesome drawing Jake left on our dry-erase board!

A roadrunner hunting in our yard. Sorry, he moves too much to get a good picture.

Cousin Natalie came to visit us for a few days and the boys had fun impressing her with their motocycles!

Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center

I've been so busy this past couple weeks that I haven't updated this blog! Yikes! So here's me, in the next few posts, trying to catch up a bit. 

We went to the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center last week. My sons are not all that excited by dinosaurs or rocks, but I AM! They agreed to go with me and check it out. We've driven by the place about a million times. The museum is very nicely done and they have a great gift shop. AND the gardens. Awesome. I even learned a few things about the classification of the dinos. I think we will have to go on a few of their Saturday tours sometime!

Tom reading the sign. Gotta have a picture of that wherever we go!

Some signs and a cute video about the area.

They had lots more dinosaur statues that you have to take the tour to see.

This one is made of metal. 

Awesome cactus garden.

This lizard is sunbathing so very close to danger. Do you think he knows?

A glimpse of the other dinos beyond the cactus garden.

No really. It's an awesome garden!

More stuff from last week...

I've been spending about an hour a day cleaning up and getting my yard looking nice. I place a big sprinkler in a corner of the yard for a half an hour each day and clean up the opposite section of dead things and trash. It's looking very nice. We had two Christmas trees laying in our yard! Now they are in the big yard trash pile I've got going, but I'm not sure how we are going to get rid of that. I'm hoping to find someone to hire to come get it and take it to the dump with a big truck.

I found this under a bush inside the yard (where our dogs are all the time). It was a surprise. I wondered how long it was there because I can't imagine a quail being left alone long enough to lay an egg in our yard. Crazy. It's so pretty. 

Of course, we had to open it up and see if there was anything inside! It wasn't rotten but there was not half formed chick in it, like we had hoped. 

A Mountain Day

We are having our roof replaced! Yay! The roofers arrive at 6:15 AM every day. Boo! Actually it's not bad. Tom says it's nice to have an alarm clock that you can't turn off and go back to sleep. Jake would like to sleep in a bit. I like to get up slowly and drink my coffee, read, and have breakfast before I get moving. But it's totally worth it not to worry about the roof. AND we have a big new swamp cooler going in, with new vents so it goes all over the house from one unit instead of three hodge podge ones. It's going to be very nice. What does this have to do with "a mountain day"? We decided to run up to Big Bear and have some fun instead of listening to the roofers all day, like we did the day before. Poor Dan didn't have the option of leaving though. 

We got up there and went for a short hike to find a Geocache. It was a tricky one with little description to go on, but we found it, thanks to Tom. He suggested it was the box on the pole which I poo-poo'd and then ten minutes later found that was exactly where it was. Kids and their wild ideas! :))

They were very helpful trying to find it...ha! I'm not really sure what got into them, but they were pretty wild while we were searching. They kept finding things like pieces of paper, or lizards, or rocks and saying they found the cache.

Then, of course, we had to spend several minutes looking at everything in the bag and thinking about what we would leave and what we would take. 

Thanks to Grandpa Bob, we had plenty of cool things to choose from to leave there.

We found a great place to have a picnic later in the summer! It's right by the water. 

Cool old tree.

A walk by the lake. Found some cool trash, a daring Robin (which Jake asked of "Where's Batman?", and some dead fish parts.

I love this squirrel. He was accompanied by a blue jay, a robin, and a wood pecker, but they wouldn't hold still for a picture. And then we watched a big dog stalk that squirrel. It was hilarious.

Our walk didn't last long because something about Big Bear makes my sons very hungry and I had promised to take them to "Get The Burger" this time, so off we went.

This is the double burger that was the size of Tom face. He ate it in about one minute.

I swear he swallowed it whole!

Jake didn't want a double burger, regular was just fine. He's working on his cute look. What do you think?

We had to do some shopping in the Village and get ice cream...of course. I found several used books at my favorite shop. And we found this portal to another world in the leather shop.

All in all, it was a great day. It's nice to go somewhere a bit cooler and see some greenery. It's not crowded at all during the week, so it's very relaxed. Oh! And we found another cool place to hang out during the summer. It's called the Funplex and it has laser tag, indoor ice skating, air hockey, pool table, AND pizza. Can't go wrong. It's going to be a great summer!

 

What's been going on?

A whole lot of things! It has warmed up in the desert this past week. The chicks went for their first walk out in the yard.

It was probably very entertaining to watch us try to catch them all to put them back in their pen!

Then we found this guy! Yuck! 

It's a tarantula wasp! He's about two inches long. Nasty things that sting. Don't worry. He went away.

I cleaned out the chicken coop and Dan is doing some work on it to make it easier to clean up. I'm clearing out some old brush and crud, getting it ready for its new residents. I'm going to plant a few cottonwoods for extra shade. Last time my poor babies got too hot!

And a whole bunch of this...

They go out for a couple hours like this and then come back and cool off. They met some guys up the road riding as well and came back even more excited (hard to believe) about motocross.

We had a nice relaxing Mother's Day. Grandpa and Grandma Tovaas came to visit and we all went to Sizzler for lunch. Yep. We went OUT on Mother's Day! We should have waited just a bit longer to go because the line was long when we got there, but by the time we got our seats it was empty again. I guess the whole town chose the same hour to go out. It was still nice though and we had fun. I ate a crap load of fried shrimp and cheese toast. Perfect.

I went out to water some of my plants this afternoon and found my hummingbird feeder invaded!

I couldn't get the camera to focus on them at first. They were all lined up perfectly. When I did get it focused, they had changed position.

I would have waited to see if they would do it again, but I couldn't stand there in the sun anymore. Yuck.

Photos From A 3 (and a half) Year Old Perspective

One more nephew post! He really liked my new camera and wanted to take some pictures of his one, so I put the strap around his head and showed him how to push the button. He walked around and took lots of pictures of grass, trees, and cars. Here are a few of the highlights. 

The Living Desert

We met up with my Sister-in-Law last week and had some fun at the zoo! She had to work nearby, so we met up at the zoo so she could drop off my nephew and then went to work. They spent a few days at our house! I love this zoo, but we have to get there early because it's just too hot in Palm Springs after noon, even in May. 

My nephew is 3 (and a half!) so we went straight to the Discovery Room, mostly because it is indoors and it was already starting to get pretty hot.

This has always been one of Tom's favorite places at any museum or zoo. He could spend hours examining every single thing inside.

There was much puppet play which their cousin seemed to really enjoy. Of course, the puppets were trying to eat each other. They were all predators...but not prey.

I think my nephew enjoyed having the full attention of his cousins. They were happy to have someone to show everything too. I have to say it was pretty awesome to watch.

For the first time, Tom had to stand next to the little guy on Merry-Go-Round. He was pretty proud to be a "practicing dad" for the afternoon.

The playground had a place to pan for 'gold' and my boys are pros at that. They helped their cousin find bits of things and he put them all in his pockets to show to Mom.

And water play is always fun. My boys are getting a little big for this kind of thing, makes mom's of littles nervous with those big boys hanging around, but today they HAD to help their cousin! And they were happy to play right along side him.

The day was long and hot and we were all ready to get out of the heat by 1pm. My nephew is a lot of fun even when he is tired, so we had a great day and my sons got some first hand experience with him they hadn't had before. What's funny to me is that they had so much fun and wanted to go back and do it again, which we did on Saturday!

We had lunch at Carl's Jr. on the way home and the boys had fun playing with cheeseburgers and making faces with french fries. Jake wasn't hungry, so he just had some soda and a few fries from his brother. His cousin was "still thirsty" after his first cup of soda, so Jake ran and refilled his cup with water. He told me he didn't think he needed more soda really since he was thirsty and not really eating and his cousin didn't ask for another soda, he just said he was thirsty. He's going to be a great Dad. And he told me on the way home that he wasn't going to play his regular video games because they had a lot of swearing and blood, it might scare him. I almost died of adorable!