Birthday Weekend

Happy 1st Birthday, Greyson!!

We had a great weekend celebrating the birth one short/long year ago of our littlest homeschooler. We started the weekend off with a trip to the zoo. Greyson seems to have a fondness for large, slow moving, bald, grey creatures. Narcissist tendencies, perhaps? He loved the elephants and the giant desert tortoises the most. Cassia liked the giraffes. Cameron liked "everything." At the gift shop, we picked up a couple decks of Top Trumps cards, Predators and The World. DH picked them out and I thought they would be yet another educational item to sit upon the shelf collecting dust, but Cameron loves them! He plays with the Predator pack all the time and he's really learning about the animals too. The World deck is not as big of a hit because I don't think he can really comprehend the categories: hostility, accessibility, km from London, etc. Even though I can explain the words, the concepts are a little abstract, I think. But I'm learning tons from them! :)

Sunday we started out the day at soccer sign-ups. (Yes, Mary, you talked me into it!) I can't believe my first baby is big enough to be on a real soccer team with a real uniform and everything. They even wanted to see his birth certificate! Yes, my friends, I am now officially a Soccer Mom. While we were in line, we saw several of our homeschool friends from 4-H! They were older boys, not anyone that Cameron plays with, but it felt good to see some of "our people" there. One of my trepidations about the whole thing is that I'm afraid that the kids will group up together in little cliques based on their schools. Not that that's an issue at t-ball, but I've got to be paranoid about something, right? ;)

Anyway, from there we took a short road trip to Calistoga to see the Old Faithful Geyser of California. What a lovely place to spend an afternoon! The kids had a great time running in the spray of the geyser everytime it went off. Greyson just had a great time running around.

Next on our itinerary was a short 5 mile drive down the road to The Petrified Forest. I'd never seen a petrified tree before and I must say that they are fascinating! The gift shop was great too. There were fossils everywhere! They had big tabletops made of polished stone that was just filled with all sorts of marine fossils that I really wanted, lol. Maybe if I'm a good girl this year Santa will get me one? LOL.

Monday I spent the day cooking and cleaning. Exciting, I know. My mom came over for dinner and we had chicken pot pie followed by a very yummy carrot cake to celebrate the Big Guy's Big Day. He got some clothes and some toys and was very happy with the whole affair. He was up until 11:00 with that cream cheese frosting induced sugar high, but he had a great time. DH spent Monday and Tuesday working from home and all in all, it was a nice long weekend doing stuff that we had just never gotten around to doing before. DH said that since he is going to be gone so much now that we will make an extra effort to do fun family stuff when we are together. Yay for family fun!

Today (Tuesday) we have 4-H in the afternoon and then Cameron's first t-ball game in the evening. I'm sensing that no school work will get done again, lol. Maybe we're on summer break already? Funny, we only seemed to get one week of school in after spring break and we're already having summer break, lol. It sure felt like summer yesterday - it was 98 degrees in the shade!