Children's Museum Cont.

The tickets for the Children's Museum were all day tickets and they let you come and go as you please.  Talk about catering to families! We went back for another couple of hours between naps and dinner.  This time we played with the tree again (of course!), the digging area, and outside.  

The Great Apple Tree.  In these pictures you can kinda see the tubes in the leaves that the apples come down. 

This digging pit had little pieces of rubber, not sand.  It was perfect to play in, except for the mess it left in Charlotte's shoes.  At this point in the afternoon there were maybe 6 other families in the museum so Jay and I just chilled on chairs and watched the kids play.  It was a nice, relaxing way to spend the late afternoon. 

Another favorite: the big slide!

Charlotte is definitely a country girl!

More inside playtime

  
Before we left we, headed to the outside play area.  There was a section with large musical instruments for the kids to play.

Each block you stepped on played a different note.

Charlotte couldn't resist the water area and was soaked by the time we left.  Luckily we had an extra set of clothes in the car!

Scattered outside were these drums.  The bigger they were, the lower the sound. We had a two man band going on here. 

Children's Museum

While we were in Richmond last week we took the kids to the Children's Museum of Richmond.  This was the perfect place to go considering it was 100+ degrees outside and the museum was nice and cool.  It was the ultimate play area for the kids without being crazy or overly stimulating.  Everything was designed for play with a purpose.  We stayed a couple of hours in the morning then went back to my parent's house for lunch and naps.  Here is the massive photo dump of pictures from the morning. 

When we first arrived we had to walk around the gift shop while we got tickets.  Charlotte is a shoe girl.  This was the first thing she spotted and hat to look at!

The three and under room had all kinds of vehicles and there is nothing my kids love better than a toy with wheels, especially ones that they can drive! 

There was a farm stand section where you could sort the produce, hit a lever to make an egg come out of the chicken, and push buttons to listen to animal noises. 

All the toys were made to be climbed on, climbed under, or climbed through. 

 

 Trey LOVED fishing in the boat.  The fishing pole was in high demand and he did a good job sharing with other kids, but he could have fished all day.

 

He is also quite adept at auto repair.  I may need to remember this in the future.

This is a picture of Charlotte and a dinosaur.  She is giving him a kiss.

Going down the slide together, although in hindsight Charlotte would have been safer not starting out in Trey's lap, because you can see she ended up behind him!

  

This tree was played with for the better part of an hour.  It is a huge apple tree with 3 sides that have apples coming out the kids can pick and put in baskets.  When your basket is full you deposit the apples into a container inside the trunk and these tubes with air (or some other scientificy-thing) suck the apples back up the tree and out onto the leaves.   

 Back at Nana and Papa's happy to relax and play.  

Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens

Having no power at home led to a mini vacation at my parent's house in Richmond.  On July 4th we went to Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens with my brother and his family.  The kids were happy to see their cousins and had fun exploring a new area. I was impressed by the beauty of the gardens and how wonderfully the Children's Gardens were set up to inspire creativity and play.

Warning: Lots of pictures ahead! 

Waiting to see our cousins! This was my attempt at a nice picture together of the two of them- fail! 

They boys wanted to hold hands as they walked along. 

Trey's cousins helped him since they knew the way around.

In the Children's Gardens.  They had these neat huts with primitive tools and household items.  Trey is sweeping and Charlotte is playing with a dried corn cob. 

We didn't bring the stroller with us and figured Charlotte could just walk.  She walked without getting tired the whole time, only she always didn't want to go where we were going!

This area had a bunch of branches on the ground just for climbing.  Charlotte loves to climb! She also spent a lot of time standing up on the stump behind her.

There was also a huge tree for the kids to climb.  Trey was so brave to climb all by himself! This was just before he slipped and fell under the tree :)

Trey and Chandler looking out the window in the tree house.

Trey LOVED the sandbox and did not want to leave it.  I think he would have had fun digging all day.  He just saw this picture on my computer and said, "That's me digging in the desert with my friends Jacob and Chandler."

Charlotte's first time in a sand box.

She's no so sure, so Chandler brings her a shovel.

She starts to dig with the shovel....

and then decides the sandbox is not for her.

We ended the day with the water area.  There were a lot of kids and Trey and Charlotte were just trying to figure out what all these sprinkler things were!

Charlotte cracks me up here.  She is watching the other kids. She wasn't super excited about the water but she enjoyed seeing all the other kids around. And she looked really cute in her bathing suit :)

Power Outage

  I have been a little absent from blogging for the past week or so because from Friday June 30th- Thursday, July 5th we were out of power.  For us that means no electricity and no running water! It was an adventure in camping at home.

On Saturday the house was still pretty cool and the kids enjoyed cuddling for a book. 

On Friday night we had a bad thunderstorm come through.  The kids were already asleep in bed when the lights started flickering, and then they stayed out.  We dug through the cabinets for candles and flashlights and ultimately decided just to go to bed and hoped the power would be on by morning.

Sometimes entertainment comes from stickers bought at the dollar bin at Target.  You can see all the bottled water in the background. 

No such luck.  On Saturday morning we used our phones to read the news and realized how extensive the power outage was.  We made the best of it by putting the refrigerator stuff we wanted to keep in coolers and tried to stay cool without A/C in the 100 degree heat! Saturday afternoon Trey and Jay braved going into town to look for ice.  It was kind of a mad house with everyone else buying up all the ice and people waiting for delivery trucks, but they were successful.  They also got bottled water and some bottles frappacinos for me, since I couldn't have my morning coffee without electricity!

Staying cool drinking bottled water through a straw.  You can see our dryer set up behind them.  After  swimming each night, I would hang out all the towels and bathing suits on the drying racks near the windows for them to dry off for the next night. 

That evening we took a bath in the creek to cool off.  The water felt like bath water and I never thought soaping up in creek water would feel so good!  In fact we felt clean enough to go to church the next day.  We just needed to get out of the house so we went to church and then bought some more provisions for food since we realized this was going to be a multiple day event.  Hello- juice boxes, poptarts, soda and other things I do not normally buy.  I also stocked up on canned fruit and those toddler food pouches that had a serving of fruit and veggies in them. Those things were expensive and I had never really seen them before except in chick-fil-a, but Charlotte LOVED them so she had one with every meal.  I tried to serve them pop tarts for breakfast, but neither of the kids would eat them.  They had never had one before and just didn't care for the taste.

Toddler food pouches.  It made me think about making green smoothies and my own pouches for Charlotte to eat since she seems to eat anything that comes out of this type of container.

Another way we adapted was all sleeping in the basement. We have a double bed down there already, so we set up Charlotte's pack 'n play in one corner and a mattress for Trey in another. They both did really good down there and it stayed around 70 degrees so we all woke up feeling refreshed and cool. 

This was dinner the last night we were at home.  We grilled the homemade french bread I had in the freezer that had thawed, and cut up tomatoes and garlic from the cooler that we had in the fridge before the power went out. 

During the days we tried to keep everyone cool and hydrated and we often drove into town just to stay cool and buy more ice for the cooler.  As meat thawed in the freezer we would cook it for the next meal.  I got a little tired of grilled chicken.  Every evening we would cool off and take a bath in the creek.  It really wasn't so bad not having power, except for finding out each day it would be longer and longer until it was restored.  On Tuesday we were running out of clean clothes and we found out it would later in the week when we got power (we were told originally it would be Monday night or Tuesday morning from the facebook messages by the power company) so we decided to pack up all the laundry and toiletry essentials and head to my parent's house in Richmond for some regular showers, A/C, and a bit of normalcy. 

Charlotte sat in the train box while she watched us fix food from the coolers.