Or at least those are the pictures I took..... field trips.
February blah's are a real thing. I've read about other homeschoolers having them. I'm sure school teachers do as well. I didn't think it pertained to me. But alas, I find this year that it does! You just don't want to do anymore school! But you must press forward if you're going to finish before summer.
And my kids have become sticklers for their summer. They want to have ALL Of It. And they always do, no matter if we finish the end of June or the beginning. We do 36 weeks of school ~ no more. Their breaks were had throughout the school year if the summer happens to be a shorter one. I guess it's the living in a neighborhood full of kids knocking on your door that makes them aware of any loss of summer.
Anyway, we're pressing through the blah's.
We joined a couple of families to celebrate the birthday of one of their boys. He wanted to celebrate at this park called Mud Creek.
We've had our own doin's with Mud Creek and they weren't pretty. They were hot and creek-less. I decided that place was a bust and never went back.
But there is so much more to Mud Creek! You just have to take the path less traveled. The path that I didn't realize was a path. It leads to caves! And woods and trails and this cool hole in the ground that probably would be an excellent place to explore and get into trouble if it wasn't capped by an iron cage.
Our kids total a dozen. I met the moms through a facebook homeschool something-or-other. We meet together every couple of weeks now to discuss educational related items and chapters from a book called The Great Tradition, edited by Richard Gamble. I read Plato and Clement of Alexandria and it's awesome.
And then we joined one of the families atop the parking garage near Scobee Planetarium and we watched the Lunar Eclipse. The Super Blood Wolf Moon to be exact. There were hundreds of people there and IT WAS COLD! So cold. We had blankets and our box of hats and gloves, but we're pansies with cold weather since we've been in the South these past 10 or so years.
There were quite a few telescopes there and we looked through several high-powered ones to see the moon.
I take a picture of our water tower every so often. Why do I love it so much? It makes me happy for some reason. Liz said it reminds her of a benevolent robot watching over us. Like from the When the Tripods Came series.
On the way to Mid-Winter Camp we stop at Bon Ton Meat Market and get snacks. And they have these yummy little pies. I took a pic to ask Phillip which one he wanted. He chose cherry. He wished he had chosen peach. I wished I had chosen one of my own.
On the way to Mid-Winter Camp we also always pass by Bastrop State Park. This year we left a few hours early and spent some time hiking the trails. There was a fire there in 2011 and then a flood in 2015. The Park is recovering from the fire ~ it's really neat to see the new growth and watch how a habitat recovers from a large forest fire. The first year we went to camp we could see that there had been a recent fire, so every year we get to watch the progress of growth as we drive through the Loblolly Pines.
Liz.
A dew-laden dandelion puff from a walk in the neighborhood.
