Our October 2012 Visit to Hop 2 It

How Alex, the daycare kiddos and I spent our afternoon :-)

Throwing Kisses- The End!

Rhyme Time at the Library

For the little ones who attend on Mondays we often get to make it to the library's Rhyme Time. It's a half hour story time with two or three rhyming books, with some hand claps, feet stomps and songs worked in. Alex loves this time because he gets the rest of the downstairs library to himself usually, as all the kids are in here. So he brings a pile of books and spreads out to read to his little heart's desire.

Getting ready for story time... Taytum goes right up to the storyteller to be her assistant.

Today's theme was about dragons!

Here we are doing a ditty about dragons.

At the end the storyteller hands out coloring pages with a dragon on it, and thanks Taytum for being her helper.

Then we mingle in the puzzle room for a bit afterwards (aka the after party). 

Going up! The elevator ride is the best part!

If you want to be a dragon song...

Tubb's Berry Farm Fall 2012 Trip

I took Alex and the daycare kiddos to visit our favorite berry farm this morning. Raspberries are what they grow in late Summer/early Fall, and they just opened the rows for picking.

Alex ate about a third of what we picked on the way home since he skipped breakfast. I'll freeze most of the rest and use them for our green smoothies. Yum!

We used old milk jugs with a side cut out like a scoop and a rope strung through the handle to tie around our waist as carriers for the berries as we picked. Alex used a small one and I had a full gallon size. The farm supplies these for you! 

Here are a few of the animals we said hi to as we walked around the fields. The middle picture are the baby turkeys we visited in the Spring, only they are almost all grown up now!

I also picked up a big jar of raw organic honey and a lotion bar. This honey is my favorite flavor of theirs (they have several). Its got a little zing to it! It's from wildflowers, clover, and mint blossoms in and around Rock Creek Canyon, and you can actually taste a subtle minty aftertaste (or it could be my imagination). 

The lotion bar is a first for me, and I can't wait to try it. It's handmade on the farm with only natural ingredients and zero chemicals. It has beeswax, sweet almond, apricot, avocado and coconut oil, honey, and essential oils that are healing for skin- palmarosa and geranium.  

Visiting the Library

We had fun visiting the library this week!

Trip to Greenhouses

Today I took the toddlers to visit the greenhouses!

Pepper plants.

Both greenhouse/farms we visited were lovely to look at, but when asked, I learned they use chemicals to treat their weeds, and one uses chemicals on the plants themselves. I was really disappointed, because we couldn't buy anything, and I really had hopes of getting some fresh peaches today. :-(

Still, it was a nice trip to see all the things growing and the pretty flowers.

So the search continues for organic produce in Southern Idaho!

Horse Drawn Buggy

I was so glad to find this lovely relic at the Kelly Greenhouses when we took a trip there this week to visit the plants!

What kid isn't fascinated with old buggies and carriages? In our fast-paced society of multi-lane highways, cars, trains, planes and boats, younger 'are we there yet??' generations have no concept of moseying along at a leisurely pace and enjoying the ride. I don't know that my generation knows about moseying, either, but I think we can imagine it better because our parents and grandparents moseyed.

I'm not entirely sure the folks from back in the day completely enjoyed riding this way, and I can not fathom the ladies of that time had an easy time getting up and down from these carriages with their heavy dresses. I imagine they must have at least had the advantage of appreciating the journey a little more than we do today, though. To them this was advanced technology. Cutting edge stuff only the privileged could afford.

What a fun game to pretend this was a time machine and we traveled back in time to when horses were literally the motors! Imagine the sounds and the smells we would have experienced!

Tubbs Berry Farm

Early this season we visited Tubbs Berry Farm and picked our own fresh strawberries!

We ended up with about two gallons of strawberries! I made a super delicious pancake sauce with the berries using honey and cream cheese. The kids have asked for the strawberry pancake sauce every day since!

The farm has other animals, too. Here is where the turkey chics live. The kids really had a blast trying to catch them and hold them.

They engaged is some light competition to see who could find the biggest berries.

I think they all won!

Our Trip to Herrett Center for Arts and Science

We had a small bunch of daycare kiddos one day and decided to visit our local science museum. After the first time Alex and I visited Herrett Center I knew this was a place I wanted our daycare kids to see.

My first impression of the center was one of pleasant surprise. Reason # (1) it was FREE, reason # (2) it was actually a nice little museum with well done exhibits and diverse themes, unlike many-a-boring local history museums we've encountered in the past that hold little interest for preschoolers, and reason # (3) it was FREE! (did I mention that part?)

The pictures can't really do it justice, though. There are displays of dinosaur skeletons everywhere, a ginormous woolly mammoth, dino poop balls- always gets giggles, beautiful samples, some rather large, of locally mined stones and crystals, an art gallery, a dedicated children's area, lots of fascinating fossils, an ancient technologies gallery with artifacts as old as two million years, live reptiles including a large iguana and boa, lots of interactive 'field' activity areas for older kids to use microscopes, computers, and ancient tools they can practice using, a huge collection of ancient weapons and fishing tools, including the largest collection of arrow heads and spears I've personally ever seen, a wonderful Mayan exhibit with larger-than-life replicas of stone art, some local ancient Idaho historical artifacts, a human skeleton replica (I assume??) 'buried' and partially exposed for a great (and creepy) hands-on experience.       

Huntington Canyon Mammoth

A dinosaur skull and various bones.

The kids loved touching the teeth!

A fun video on loop about the galaxy.

Ancient drills. The kids never seemed to tire of this activity. It gave me an idea to have the kids make some simple tools like this drill over the summer. 

Skeleton man. No creepy factor for these guys!

Back to the drills.

I'm not a fishing fan but this exhibit was really neat.

The power of poop!

And back again to the drills...

In the children's area they had fun puzzles. These were great to keep the younger ones busy while the big kids kept drilling, and drilling, and drilling...

The art gallery wasn't my favorite, nor the kids. It would have been nice to see some kid-friendly displays here, but still a great learning opportunity.