Time and passions

Wow, a week since I last blogged. O.O Time really speeds by, I think my life must be good. :)

We've been doing a variety of things the last week. Swimming being one of them. I picked up a new pool a couple of weeks ago and that's been a big learning lesson for me. Wow! Talk about a learning curve. ugh,,,There's a bit of maintenance to figure out when one gets a big pool that you can't dump out! Doh,,,

So, we've been looking up ph stuff,, chlorine levels, algae stuff and learning that well water isn't the prettiest when you add chlorine :P~~~~~ OK, so it looks like pee water right now but its clean. :D We did figure out that if we put in a bit of clarifier the iron and minerals look as if they've gone away! Yay,,, well it looks like it anyway. *g* Gotta love chemical reactions.

Alec continues to be fascinated with Yu-Gi-Oh and figuring out ways to get more cards. He and his dad are having an awesome time dueling,, soooo complex to me. I'm so glad I have a husband who balances me so well. He loves and understands all the strategy games; I'll play them but it is really hard for me to *get* them.

We also seem to balance each other out quite well when it comes to calmness and peacefulness. About the time I start grumpin' about buying more cards for them, Tim reminds me that it is his passion right now, and it really isn't that much money. I examine my feelings.

What if his passion was the cello still? How much would lessons be each week,, what about needing a new, bigger instrument? Adding those up would put things in perspective. Its funny how if its what you think is worthy, the money isn't a question. If its not,,,, well,, that must be why I started stressing out.

Reminder to me: I'm NOT going to dismiss his important interest in this card game. I am going to see it as VALUABLE and just as AMAZING of an interest as playing an instrument.

Sure I can spend $2.00 on another booster pack. :)
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An on again off again interest for Abbi, well I suppose practically her whole life, has been horses. Just the last month or so she's been talking more and more about them. I think it became more evident to her when she saw some in the 4th of July parade. She came home from that wanting a pony really, really bad. :) Ponies,,,,hmmm,, we looked them up on the internet. They sometimes can be mean, from the inbreeding, and you aren't going to be able to ride them as you grow into adulthood. Maybe a quarter horse would be better?

We can't have a horse at our house right now but we could board one. Yet,, they really are very expensive and a very big commitment. I really don't feel like I have it in me to take care of another pet,,let alone a horse. So we talked about it and thought that riding lessons might be a good idea. She could maybe go and help take care of a horse, see all it entails,, learn all about them---during all that we could think about purchasing one.

This morning I finally got a call back from a lady I know who does riding lessons. She said Abbi could start next Monday.

Abbi is psyched!

Our butterfly

Here's a link to the video of our butterfly coming out of its chrysalis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDbb8LLXc7M

I tried to post the movie right here but couldn't get it to work. Hopefully this will. :D

Butterflies :)

Yep, those caterpillars did turn into butterflies. And oh, was it fun! :D

It was cool that we had 4 of them to watch because if we missed one,, we still had the others to view. So good thing. :)

The Twins, Margaret and Jeff, (Kyra named them) hatched first and its just amazing how quickly the hatching,, or getting out of the chrysalis happens. Before I went on a walk they looked like this:


The dark ones are the ones that about ready to burst out.
After my walk they looked like this:


They are so amazing.

Here's Kyra with them on some flowers in the front of the house.


Then we went over to Fargo-Moorhead for 1 night, came back and Saddi our dog found the 3rd one under the table. It had come out while we were gone but it was ok, Saddi just stared at it and we released it outside.

The last one hatched a couple of days later, it was the runt of the bunch. Bob, as Kyra called him, was her favorite, and she was pretty sad because she stayed in Moorhead and missed it. We did take lots of pictures and even got video of him coming out of his chrysallis. I'm going to try and put that at You tube and I'll link it here later.

This whole process is so amazing and a couple of things happened this time that I'd never been able to see. First, I had never seen the chrysalis actually form. When the caterpillar gets nice and fat (a couple of weeks old) it turns into a J shape, then a day or so later loses its outer skin. Ours pretty much bursted out of its skin at the bottom and wriggled its way out, losing it from the top. Then you have the light green chrysalis. It stays as a chrysalis for about 2 weeks then at some point starts turning black and you can see the wings through the now transparent chrysalis. When its at that point, its going to come out soon, when it starts coming out, the actual emergence only takes maybe a minute.

Here's Bob with Abbi:


I'll post more pictures at my flicker account. I think you can access those pictures by clicking on the Flicker ad box on the sidebar of the blog.

Our days, as of late..

Boy, Tim sure looks happy on the picture below. A lot happier than he's been the last week. Unfortunately, he's been sick. We think he was probably bit by a deer tick around the 4th. He's been sick for the last 6 days or so. Went to the doctor on Monday of this week and they think its Lyme's. So he's taking antibiotics and we're hoping he's gonna feel better soon. Such a bummer. We so love the outdoors up here, but you really do have to be careful. I'm just so glad we got him on something right away. He should be fine, just getting through this rough part right now is a challenge.

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Some kid stuff for you. :)

Alec has been Yu-Gi-Oh crazy again. I'm so glad Tim enjoys strategy games. They've been dueling a lot! And Alec is now waiting for some new cards that he found on the internet to make a certain kind of deck. I can't remember what its called now but it has one feature that it follows and he's really psyched to try it out. He went online and researched all the different types of decks and builds of decks. (Builds are the ways you can put decks together, different cards will give you different advantages in a dueling situations. You can also give your characters that you play in RPGs different builds. RPG=role playing games)

So, after he researched the different builds and what sounded good, he then went online and found the most resonably prices cards. We also checked pawn shops and different card shops to see if there were any around. We did find a few, and really good deals, but most of the ones he wants we are ordering off the internet. He's excited to get these, probably in the next day or so. And he's super excited to bring them to the Live and Learn Conference, where he'll be hosting a Yu-Gi-Oh funshop. :)

Another passion for Alec right now is weapons. Different kinds of guns, rocket launchers, swords, etc. Yesterday it was guns. He loves discussing different kinds as he sees games or movies. I'm currently looking for some books that might have nice pictures of different ones. He'd really like to see everything that is out there and also possibly historical ones too. When he sees one in a game or movie, he's always interested to know if its a real one or just fantasy. If anyone reads this and has a title of a book, please let me know.

I'm really trying to support him in this passion but its a challenging one for me. I'm not much of a blow it up, shoot em up type of girl. But for some reason he's just fascinated with it. He so wants to use one, a real one, so were looking into that possibility. We don't own one, neither Tim or I have ever wanted to hunt or shoot one, (although I guess Tim did use a beabea (sp?) gun a few times.

He walked around yesterday with a big squirt gun, spinning it around Western style, like you would spin it on your finger and back into your holster. He also loaded it and proceded to squirt my geraniums. lol,, (which they really needed, thank you Alec! ) and was very light on his feet in doing it,, making sure to dodge any incoming bullets. ;) I love the imagination I see flowing so freely within my kids. Very cool.

I'm thinking he may like some old western movies or maybe other current ones with gun scenes. I'll have to google that too, anyone , again if you have ideas for this passion, please let me know.
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Now Abbi. She's still into role playing with several different characters on World of Warcraft. Its amazing the different themes and storylines she comes up with while playing that game. Most recently it was a bit boring in Goldshire (the town that she hangs in in the game) so she decided to create a character that's a thief/pickpocket. They actually have to write out most actions because the characters only do certain things, like laugh, or cry or wave, stuff like that. Nothing like-- Raine (her character) brushes up against Blaine, bumping her. "Oops" says Raine. [That was the pickpocket move ] Then the other character might say,,"Blaine checks her money bag to make sure its still there". And Raine dashes out of the inn, down the dusty road. [Then Abbi will move her character around appropriately to act out what she's typing.]

Another thing that Abbi is really interested in right now is horses. We are waiting to here back from a lady here that gives riding lessons. We're hoping she'll let Abbi take care of a horse and learn all about the care and details of horsemanship. She really wants one but we're going to do this first and see if she likes it. We can't have a horse around our house right now ;) or even outside. But we can look into boarding one and we are also somewhat considering moving from our current house. I won't go into that subject right now,, too long of a discussion, but we are open to looking for a place that we could have a horse. :)
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And Kyra.
Kyra has been over in Moorhead the last few days. She opted to stay over there and hang with some friends, cousins and Grandmas and Grandpas. She is coming home today with my mom and dad and of course bringing Ben and Matt with her. ;) Ben and Matt are her cousins, Ben loves to play with Alec and Matt and Kyra are true soul mates. :) They'll stay here with us for a few days. Yayyy!

She is still into Bratz big time and is planning out her funshop at the Live and Learn Conference. She's going to host one for kids to come and play with their Bratz and also remember Hannah. Hannah is who introduced Kyra to Bratz. So its a very special love for her.

She is also still painting quite a bit and always up for making stuff out of the most creative things. We have quite a savings of tp rolls and paper towel rolls,, not to mention Altoid boxes now because we've been enlightened on a new altered box idea. :D

That will be our next project.
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Here is a link to the Live and Learn Conference that we'll be attending in Sept. This is our 4th one and we love it. :D

http://www.liveandlearnconference.org/

Have a great day everyone~

The 4th

We had a really nice 4th. We went for a bike ride at Lake Bemidji State Park.

While at the State Park a butterfly found Abbi. We decided that the butterfly got tricked by the henna flower tatoo. ;) It stayed on her hand for about 5 minutes, a tiny little tongue licking her.

We also learned some new things about erosion and sluice ways. I never knew what a sluice way was; its a man made waterway path made for logs to travel from one place to another. Right within Lake Bemidji State Park there's an old sluice way that is believed to have been used to transport logs from a smaller lake to the mill on lake Bemidji. The Bemidji area was/is a huge logging area.

Then we relaxed at home. Jumped on the tramp, enjoyed a fire, played some Yu-Gi-Oh and discovered that we have raspberries growing all around our yard! We are so excited,, we love raspberries!

It was a good day.

This is a tiered garden I've been working on in the back. If you look farther back in the woods, that's where the raspberries are that we just found.

dum dum suckers and spelling

yeah you can learn spelling with dum dums. We had been to the 4th of July parade and Kyra was eating a dum dum sucker that she had gotten. She comments "I have to save this for Hayden, he's saving them for a backpack". Hmm,, I had forgotten that you could do it. She asked me to find the website and we look it all up: http://dumdumpops.com/

You can save the wrappers and send them in for different things. Also on the website are printable activities and other things to do online. Kyra printed out a bunch of the puzzles and coloring pages. She did a word find that included all the flavors of the suckers and then after she found all the words, she stands up and spells out all the words. Kind of like spelling bee style, she was really proud. But the spelling didn't stop there, then Alec starts spelling different words.

"Give me a word,, any word" he repeated over and over to us. lol So we start to ask him words to spell. He's a pretty good speller, really good memory.

I just thought it was pretty fun that it all started from a dumdum wrapper. :)