We’ve been biking to the library, playing games, taking care of our pets, playing with friends, going to the water park,

celebrating three friends’ birthdays in a week’s time, listening to Polly Horvath’s Mr. and Mrs. Bunny– Detectives Extraordinaire! and Lord and Lady Bunny– Almost Royalty! We loved both.

We’ve been visiting an elk ranch where we fed elk and learned about them and saw lots of beautiful elk plus a blind lamb that loves to eat weeds,

making dinosaur paper dolls for one of our friends.

We’ve had long conversations about big news stories with the kids, trying to give them information about the world we all inhabit together. We watched a short video about consent as explained by cups of tea. (You can offer someone some tea, but if they refuse or can not answer or don’t answer positively, then you must not make them drink the tea.) We’ve been talking a lot about the presidential election and candidates and process of choosing a president. We had a great conversation about vitamins, what they are and where they come from and what they do for our bodies and conversely what happens to us when we don’t get certain vitamins.

We’ve been hiking,

picking strawberries from our garden,

watching hummingbirds collecting spiderwebs and drinking nectar.

Gavin went to a birthday party with biking and water play while Lilah, Chris and I decorated stacking dolls. Lilah’s are two cats and a mouse, Chris’ are aliens and a human and mine are a bear, a bird and a cat.

They played in a big tube that my sister found for the kids. Grandpa helped them explore possibilities.

We talked about the fact that it’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the kids asked when the light started and stopped so we looked up sunrise and sunset and calculated how many hours and minutes of light (sun up) there were: 15 hours and 7 minutes.

That’s a brief and very truncated peek into our last week or so. There’s always something to explore, enjoy, wonder about!