We’ve had some fun outings and I was on the ball taking photos, so alas, I have something to blog about again.
Our day trip to Stillwater
We’re lucky to live relatively close to Stillwater, MN, an amazing historic town on the St. Croix river. We went with my parents, sisters, and my one sister’s family and did a picnic on the river with all the kids.
We made some butterflies
In July, we found ourselves owners of two caterpillars who we were hopeful would become Monarch butterflies. I have no idea if Monarch should be capitalized, but they because Very Important to us to not accidentally kill in order not to traumatize the kids for life.
The first one hatched while they were at summer camp and I spent the afternoon Googling frantically on how/when to release her (yes, I also figured out how to tell that she was a she). I later put her in Olivia’s bug catcher (how fitting) and the girls had so much fun watching her when they came home. We ended up releasing her two days later due to some storms we had coming in.
Olivia named her Felicity and it was really fun giving her orange segments and watching her proboscis come out. Apparently, that was something I was supposed to watch for since any concerns with it would affect her being able to get nutrients in the wild. Luckily, she was all normal, proboscis and all.
The second one ended up hatching a few days after the first. We watched the chrysalis go from green to translucent as the Monarch was about to hatch. I actually caught this one hatching on video. Since it was a nice day, we ended up releasing “Sunny” that afternoon. She actually flew away immediately after feeding on an orange segment. You can barely see her in the photo with her in the tree leaves.
Seaquest
Emelia hadn’t been to Seaquest since she was an itty bitty baby back in early 2020. And then we hadn’t been back in two years and we had those ridiculously expensive coins to spend. Emelia was fascinated with the sea life and Olivia tried so hard to be brave for the rays, but she’d freak every time she tried to feed them and they’d splash at her. We lost some ridiculously expensive shrimp things that way.
But overall, it was a good day and the girls each got to pick out a stuffed animal and Olivia chose to get this loooong fuzzy snake. They were disappointed the mermaid wasn’t there to visit.
Game Fair
The day we went to Game Fair it was gloriously cool out, having stormed the day before when we originally were supposed to go. We ended up giving Olivia her car-sickness medication because the trip out there was fairly long and we also didn’t know how she would do on the shuttle bus ride. Emelia loved her first trip on the school bus, and Olivia couldn’t stop talking about the bus ride. She said it was her favorite thing ever.
She tried her hand at fishing and my sweet perfectionist daughter was upset that she didn’t catch a fish even though we tried to explain to her how hard it was to fish without bait. It didn’t help that the kid across the pool from her caught one.
But they both had fun petting all the puppies and climbing on the vehicles. And of course, we had to get ice cream. Prior to kids, Chris and I used to watch the events more such as the dock-jumping (where hunting dogs literally chased a decoy off a dock, launching themselves into the pond and swimming out to retrieve it.). But with two wild kids, it was hard to keep their attention long enough (if you can believe it).
