Museum of Natural Science

Our last official field trip was to the Museum of Natural Science in downtown Raleigh.  I feel like between Ben and me, we drove to downtown Raleigh 5-7 times in a week.  It's ridiculous.  It causes me so much anxiety driving there with all the one way streets and skinny lanes and parallel parking in the middle of traffic.  Ugh.  I hope the kids know that I do this because I love them.

Even though there are so many amazing things to see at the museum, it never stopped Ella and Thad from yelling "COUCHES!!!!" before running and collapsing on them.

Two of our CC families met up with us.  The kids love any excuse to get together.

With Joshua and Rebekah.

Not only did we get to pet a rabbit but also a dove.

We however did not pet the copperheads...

Although Ella desperately wanted to pet her favorite animal, the beloved turtle.

Lily, Rebekah, and Maddie.  So cute.

We are officially done homeschooling for the year.  We did it!

Normally the last day of school is a day where I commend Lily and Skyler for all their hard work throughout the year.  I truly am so proud of them.  It has been amazing to see how much they have learned in just one single year.  It blows my mind a little.

Not trying to toot my own horn, but this year has been a huge accomplishment on my part, too.  I actually enjoyed putting lesson plans together and sitting and teaching them.  But there were days, OH THERE WERE DAYS, when we all just needed to go to different rooms and take a break.  There were days I was frustrated because no matter how many times I would repeat a lesson, Lily wouldn't pay attention.  And there were days when Skyler would be doing an assignment, get confused, and convince himself that he was stupid, which is of course ridiculous since he's one of the smartest kids I've ever met.  But not one of those days made me ever regret choosing to homeschool.  While I still firmly believe that it's not for everyone, it has been a huge blessing for our family.  It has taken away so much stress, time conflicts, and the ever-annoying fundraisers, and has given us personalized education, more time for kids to be kids and play, and more time as a family.  How many families do you know where every single family member is home together 5 days of the week?  It's pretty amazing.

While Lily and Skyler learned new spelling words and how to do multiplication, I learned how to become better organized and how to best manage time.  It has been a learning experience for all of us and I'm thankful for it.  I'm excited for next school year which looks like so much fun already.  But first...

SUMMER BREAK.

NC Museum of Art

For our third field trip, we visited the NC Museum of Art.  It is a fantastic museum, although it isn't very child friendly and so I was a little worried.  The kids surprised me by how good they were but I will admit that at one point we lost track of Thad for less than a minute and a guard found him standing on top of a mosaic art piece.  Ugh.  I'm going to have nightmares about that forever.

We had two other families from our Classical Conversations group join us.  It was fun to be with friends but it was a bummer that it was raining and we couldn't have our picnic afterward.

This was Ben's and my favorite piece in the museum.  It's like an adult version of I Spy.  There are glass versions of items found in famous paintings and you had to look closely to identify them.  We were able to find the dead rabbit in a painting and I'm pretty sure the bouquet of flowers was one of Van Gogh's.  It was a really fascinating piece.

Our art museum has a really big section dedicated to paintings of Christ.  Ella wanted to stare at them forever.  I was holding her in my arms and she wouldn't let me leave when everyone else moved on to the next section.  She was really serious about it, but then when I pulled out my camera of course she turned into a cheeseball.

I'm pretty sure Ben's favorite part of the museum is the section with ancient Roman and Egyptian artifacts.  Although some of the artifacts in a different section were over 4,000 years old.

Of all the pieces of art he could have had his picture taken with, he chose this one.

My friend Catherine is getting ready to throw a '90's party at her house and gave me a mixed cd with '90's music.  This is Ella singing to The Cranberries.  I don't know why she has always loved Zombie but she has.  She started loving this song when she was 2.  She's gone several months without hearing this song and suddenly it was on in the car again and she said, "This is my song!"  While we were driving to the art museum Ella sang her version of Zombie.

Marbles

With our trip to Hong Kong in the plans for our current school year, I was really hesitant to take any other time off school so that we wouldn't be finishing up the school year too late.  As it turns out, we have done really well on time and have less than 2 weeks left of school.  We have finished up our end of year testing and have already finished up a few school subjects.  But legally we have 8 more days of school left so what do we do?  Go on field trips!

Marbles is our local kids museum.  The last time we went was when Ella was about a week old and I remember carrying her around the whole place.  Lily and Skyler have come here on field trips also while they were in public school.  They've been begging to go so we went!

For the record, Ella had this beautiful bow in her hair before we left for Marbles.  As we were walking from our parking spot into the museum, I noticed she was wearing this Burger King crown.  "Where's your bow?" I asked her.  "I left it at home."  

I have no idea where the crown came from and I haven't been able to stop laughing about it.

My kids have an obsession with all things Peter Pan related.  The #1 thing they were looking forward to was being pirates on the ship!  I think I heard the word "Arrrr!!!" about 21622656 times while they were swabbing the deck.

I admire kids so much because they can randomly meet another kid, ask them to play, and instantly be temporary best friends.  Why aren't adults like this?

Thad quickly figured it out and actually became great at hitting the puck!  Maybe he and Skyler are Carolina Hurricanes in the making!

Thad has a love for Classical Music.  Last week we went on a field trip to see the North Carolina Symphony.  I knew sitting still would be an issue for him so I gave him a notebook and pen.  He held up the pen and swung it around with the music and yelled, "I'm a conductor!"  At Marbles, they had buttons for dancing to different music genres.  He kept hitting the "classical" button and kept yelling, "It's Little Einsteins!!!"

He was so proud of his car.

It scared me how much Ella and Thad enjoyed sawing.  Yikes.

With the symphony and Marbles under our belt, we have a few more field trips to go on.  Brace yourself for more posts!