AV Symington with friends

I'm going to skip ahead a bit, and pass over a couple of months of posts that I need to get up here, in order to write something quickly. I'm trying to get a post up every day for the rest of the month in order to make it to double digits (again, finally), and as I'm tired tonight and don't feel like digging through mounds of photos to finish up spring break posts, or Foxfield, or my trip to the Netherlands (all of which need to be posted still!), I'll do some more recent stuff instead! That old stuff will get up here soon enough.

Over the weekend, we took our first trip to AV Symington of the season. We were heading there for a birthday party (a friend of Henry's from preschool), and I invited my friend Kelly to come down and meet us there with her kids. We've now had them join us at AV Symington for 3 summers in a row, so it's definitely a tradition! Entertainingly to Kelly and I, Natalie was the one who remembered that this was our third summer trip there all together. 

This year I had a new toy to bring along: my new waterproof camera! I had played with Kathy's on our beach trip last year, and decided this year was time to finally invest in one. For a little point and shoot, it takes pretty good photos, and it's just so nice to not be stressed about getting the camera wet. It worked well on the lazy river:

 And when I was in the water, taking photos of Natalie and Sydney crossing the "lily pads". Natalie almost wiped out, but managed to catch herself and not fall into the water!

 

The camera also worked great for capturing big splashes! I was standing in 5' water as the kids came down the slide.

 But the best part, of course, is capturing underwater photos!

 And finally, I caught a couple of fantastic jumps by the kids!

My eldest was incredibly unhappy when I told her we were leaving (after almost 4 hours!), which led to the face she is pulling in the photos below (that, yes, I pretty much forced her to do). At least the rest of the kids were happy! Also, I love this little photo area that they set up.

And yes, I did instagram my photo below :)

Such a great time with friends! Kelly and I love that this is our tradition now, and it's so nice to be able to go and not have to watch the kids every single second while there.

Spring Break 2016: Luray Zoo

After Dinosaur Land and the Skyline Caverns, we checked into our hotel and let the kids play in the hotel pool for a bit before setting out on our final adventure of the day: the Luray Zoo! I'd heard that there was a small zoo there, and as small zoos go it was worth checking out. Since it was still March, they weren't actually open for the season yet; instead, we were able to book a private tour of the zoo with the owner at a very reasonable price! I had assumed going into it that we would be there with a few others, but nope - it was just the 4 of us.

By booking the private tour, we not only got to see all of the animals at the zoo, but have 3 animal encounters as well. First up: petting a porcupine!

 Natalie was so excited and I think believed that it was essentially a large dog with quills to watch out for. Henry was in the enclosure with us, but didn't want to pet the porcupine.

Next up was my absolute favorite encounter (and one of my all time favorite things I have ever done) - we got to feed a tiger!! (thanks to Evan for taking photos and video during this!)

 We went into the enclosure with the tiger closure inside of there. Once inside, the owner pulled out a couple of wrapped cheeseburgers and showed us how to FEED THE TIGER A CHEESEBURGER. This was nothing that I ever knew I wanted to do, yet I can now cross it off of my bucket list.

As you can hear in the video above, the kids (Natalie in particular) were SO excited to also feed the tiger.

 Despite Henry's initial protests, once he saw Natalie do it, he wanted in as well!

 As I was standing next to the cage, I was literally this close to the tiger. I'm not going to lie...I couldn't resist brushing my fingers over the soft fur on her nose. I shouldn't have, and the owner did give me a warning, but tigers are my favorite animals...it was worth it!

After touring around the rest of the zoo, including the petting zoo (Evan's bane!), it was time for our last animal encounter - feeding a lemur! This time I brought my camera in with me so I was able to grab a few good pics of us with the lemur.

And Evan grabbed this one of all of us inside with the lemur using my phone.

If you're in Luray, I highly recommend checking out this zoo...and if you can schedule the behind the scenes tour - do it!

Spring Break 2016: Caverns Day 1

After our stop at Dinosaur Land, we continued on towards Luray, VA - our destination. We didn't really have a schedule, and so we were open to making stops along the way. When we saw signs for Skyline Caverns in Front Royal, we thought why not hit a smaller cavern before getting to our main destination of Luray Caverns?

We ended up being really glad we did - the Skyline Cavern was small, and we had a really small group to go through the tour with. A pretty good introduction for the kids to what we would see the following day. I liked that this caverns did a lot with pretty colored lights, which made looking at the formations really interesting!

 

The above photos were taken with my phone - these were with my camera. There was incredibly low light, but I think that I managed to find the right settings and adjust the grain so that they came out well!

Now back to camera photos...The kids were very good about not touching the rocks...until we reached a few formations that we were told specifically they could touch, and that made them very excited! (You can't touch the rocks as the oil on our fingers interferes with the rock's natural growth).

 

Like I said, they placed colored lights in great locations throughout the caverns. I particularly liked this display behind the "Great Eagle" formation.

  And who doesn't love an underground pond? The reflections that it creates are just stunning.

 We even managed to see some VERY old crystals growing along the ceiling. These are protected and studied by a few different groups as they grow very slowly and in very few locations around.

 We definitely enjoyed our first cavern experience!

Spring break 2016: Dinosaur Land

Evan and I didn't want to do a huge spring break trip this year - last year we had a blast in Boston, but this year we wanted to stay a little closer to home. We had talked about taking the kids to Luray Caverns at some point, both because I thought they'd enjoy it, and because Evan had never been there, and this year it worked out great to make that trip happen. We spent just two days, leaving early Thursday morning, and coming back late Friday evening - a good couple of days away, just the 4 of us. I have split the trip into five parts - here's part one.

On the drive down is a cheesy tourist place I had heard of: DinosaurLand! I knew we absolutely had to stop in there. Not only do a I love cheesy things like this, but I knew the kids would love seeing the dinosaur replicas. And boy was I right! We were nearly the first people there for the day so we had the place nearly to ourselves, which meant lots of time to explore each replica. It helps that they make it so you can climb around and touch the dinosaurs - extra enjoyable for the kids!

Next to each dinosaur is a small plaque with the name and some facts about them. Not being totally up on my dino-lore, I"m not totally sure how factually accurate it all is, but they were a lot of fun to touch!

Henry, while fascinated by the T-rex (and other large carnivores), did not really want to go near it. Natalie had no such problem. Isn't the T-Rex so lovable? :)

There was also a giant King Kong in the middle of DinosaurLand that the kids could stand on. Again, Henry at first was a bit afraid, but after watching Natalie and I climb up there he wanted his turn too!

And, of course, the raptors are always scary. Ack!

 

If you're heading south and find yourself near DinosaurLand, I definitely recommend checking it out. A fun way to spend an hour (not really much longer than that), and when on your way to some other destination it's a really great pit stop to make.

FDES Second Grade Musical

Unfortunately, my high amount of travel in April kept me from something that I was really sad to miss: Natalie's 2nd grade musical performance. We didn't find out the performance date until about two weeks before, and at that point I had a trip to California that was long planned so there was simply no way that I could go. However, Evan did a wonderful job taking lots of photos and videos for me so that I would feel like I was there!

The second grade classes spent a lot of time working on this musical during school hours; we were all very excited to find out that Natalie was chosen to have a solo - the biggest reason that I wanted to be there!

The theme of the musical was "How does your garden grow?" The 2nd grade spent a lot of time this year on garden, plants, butterfly life cycle (they did a whole section on monarchs and raised money to help the monarch population), etc, so this theme was a perfect fit with all that they had been working on. Look at all these cute second graders! Recognize the one in front at the mic? :)

Evan did exactly what I asked him to, which was take a lot of shorter videos throughout the entire musical. This meant that I could really view the entire thing! But I won't post everything here...I'll just focus on the parts that feature Natalie.

Like...this video, with her solo! I have a ton of other clips, and they're all great, but I'll just post this one. She did great!!


Very proud of these kids and all of the hard work that they put into this musical, and the other big projects they worked on this year (creating rules for the new playground, and their monarch fundraiser, to name a few). I can't believe tomorrow is her last day as a second grader!

WCDE 2016

How do I know we're in for the long haul with dance? Well, back in early February, Natalie and I had a first: she participated in a weekend dance workshop, and I attended with a bunch of other moms! This event was actually pretty great, and not nearly as intense (yet, at her age) as I had worried that it would be. Definitely one of those things I never considered I would do...and yet there we were, and honestly I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

The weekend was competition Friday evening (which we went to briefly, after meeting a couple of Natalie's friends for dinner), workshops most of the day on Saturday followed by competition (which we watched more of, but still didn't stay until the end), workshops on Sunday until early afternoon, and then "best of show" performances and awards Sunday afternoon.

This year, Natalie's age group only participated in the workshops, which was really enough - the girls had two full days of classes and were tired just from that.
First, the ballet class - loved the choice of music!

 

There were jazz and lyrical classes, with time spent going across the floor.

 A pretty sassy Katy Perry number that was definitely a favorite of the class (and taught by the guy who was Right Shark in her half time show!)

A pretty sassy One Direction number:

 And then, at the end of day two, we discovered something Natalie really likes (and was better at than the jazzy hip hop classes, actually) - ballroom!

 

Look at that body curve! And the joy on her face! She truly rocked this routine (this video isn't quite the full routine, but it would have been harder to upload the full routine as the video was a lot larger).

Really proud of our girls and all the work they put into the workshop! It was a great experience for them, and actually pretty fun for us moms too. Next year Natalie not only gets to participate in the workshop but also perform in the competition with her Showkids group - the girls are so excited already!