Camp Smith Part 2: Day One

After such a beautiful weekend we were thrilled to have yet another sunny day dawn! Everyone got up early, including the two cousins from Kansas, and helped to get the animals taken care of quickly. At 7:15 AM, we packed the van and headed for the Boston Science Museum. The kids stopped asking how much longer after we made them calculate rate times time equals distance problems every time they asked! School in the summer! Shocking!

At the museum we hit the Science in the Park exhibit first, before any of the school groups showed up. It was then on to the engineering exhibit where the girls designed and built trophies for balls. Rachel and Sam were a team and they managed to build a large trophy that supported a tennis ball, a baseball, and a basketball! Hannah and Claudia's trophy also supported the baseball, but was shorter than Rachel's. Abby and Samantha built a sturdy structure that supported all the balls: tennis, baseball, basketball, soccer ball, and the bowling ball!! We checked 4 hours later and while Rachel's trophy height had been surpassed for the smaller balls, Abby's trophy was still the tallest to support the bowling ball! Nathalie and Elizabeth were unable to support any balls with their structure, but they had fun trying it!

Next we met up with my brother Tom, his wife and their girls. Very soon after, my cousin Peggy (sorry, but you will always be Peggy in my mind...) and her son and daughter joined us and we went to check out the Black Hole and Crittercam exhibits. By 2PM we were back on the road for home since Sam had to work at Tractor Supply and we had to take care of the animals before going to the Teen Challenge.

Teen Challenge was a blast. Nathalie's friend Jenny is staying here all week so she can attend also. The teens play some rough and rowdy games before eating large quantities of food, playing a trivia game, and hearing an evangelist speak. The pterodactyl-skeeters were out in full force, making us a very slap-happy group!

Whirlwind Weekend!

We have had so much fun this weekend!

It began on Friday with a trip to the Boston Science Museum with some wonderful friends! We saw the museum's new exhibit on frogs which was simply fascinating! I never knew there were so many differnt kinds! Here are some pictures from our day:

We arrived home around 5PM with just enough time to feed the animals and get to the New London County 4-H Public Speaking Competition. Nathalie had won in her category at the regional level earlier in the week and was now competing at the county level. It was a late evening and we finally got to bed around 10:30 PM! Samantha fell asleep about a half hour into the event.

Saturday morning we were up bright and early as we had invited two families from church for breakfast at our house. Both with the last name of SMITH and completely unrelated! We were serving up our own maple syrup, hickory syrup, sausage, bacon, and eggs! YUM! After we had our fill, we all trekked out to the woods where we showed them our animals and let the kids tap a maple tree. They pet the chickens and the goats and Sam showed everyone how we make our syrup. It was a wonderful time of food, fun and fellowship.

We then spent four hours cleaning our barn in preparation for kidding. We have three goats all due to kidd this week! The barn was a mess and we really scrubbed it down, even washing the windows and vacuuming the cobwebs! It was a lovely warm day and with so many hands, the work went quickly. The girls were rewarded with a trip to Meme's house! We again got home quite late, so we let everyone sleep in this morning!

And now we are supposed to get 14 inches of SNOW tonight!

Boston Science Museum

We actually managed to get all the animals fed and watered and all of us dressed and into the van before 7:30 AM. We got on the road and thankfully saw very little traffic for the 2 hour trip. Sam and the children played this annoying game called "Yellow Car, I Win." (thanks SO much Jones boys for teaching them this!)

As we approached Boston, Nathalie saw a sign advertising the Science Museum's IMax movie "Roving Mars", and she figured out where we were going. Bright child, considering the museum passes were sitting on the dashboard the whole trip...

When we arrived at the museum we got tickets fro the first seating of the movie. We spent about a half hour exploring the "New England Marsh Habitat" and the Solar System Displays. They had a really cool scale model of the Grand Canyon that was enormous and 1 inch equalled 400 feet! Why it was near the Solar system displays, I don't know...

The movie was amazing! It was made with the help of Disney studios so the recreations of the Rovers' landings were done with computer graphics, making them very realistic looking. They stated in the credits that they used the real photos from the Rovers to make the graphics as "real" as possible. I think the rocket blast-off was the best part!

After the movie we wandered through a few more exhibits: Dinosaurs, Playground Physics, and the musical stairs. By then it was starting to get crowded and it was also around lunch time. We went back to the van for a picnic lunch. When we returned to the museum we watched the lightning show, visited the Tamarin monkeys' behavioral study exhibit, checked out the Human Body exhibit where they had a set of sheeps lungs being displayed by a museum employee. She was demonstrating the parts and inflating them to represent how our lungs expand. Hannah thought it was the best part; Abby not so much!

We walked through the "Mythical Creatures" exhibit and enjoyed seeing how they de-bunked or supported many of the myths/legends with some science. Such as the legends of sea monsters: that they recently discovered Colassal Squid, which at 35-40 feet in length would definitely be a sea monster to people in a 25 foot wooden boat! It was interesting, in my opinion, to see how many varied cultures, spread across many miles, managed to create similar creatures. Either we are not so different after all, or there is something to the legends...

After Mythical creatures we watched a live animal show, which of course, was a snake! A very beautiful green tree snake. I know, I know: the only good snake is a dead snake. But this one was very far away, on a stage, with a snake handler: The next best thing to a dead snake. Next we walked up two levels and across the museum to watch two very talented brothers teach about atoms, molecules, and nanos, with juggling and humor!

We visited the gift shop on our way out, but only Hannah bought something: A DVD about human anatomy. We intend to go back in February during a weekday when it won't be so crowded. There is a Forg exhibit that will be coming at the end of the month that coincides with an IMax movie about the Amazon! And we learned that due to special funding, all IMax movies on Fridays are FREE!

There is still so much we didn't see, despite spending a little over 8 hours there: the Butterfly garden, Computers and Technology, Engineering, Space missions, Mathematica, Natural History, Live Zoo, Optical Illusions....

I am very thankful to my sisters in Kansas who sent us the wonderful gift of a family membership to the museum. It is something our whole family enjoys and we always find an activitiy for each kid when we go! Plus, it counts towards homeschool!