Halloween Week

Our week started with a trip to the LA Zoo, which is not nearly as expansive as the one in San Diego, but was fun none-the-less. :)

Lightning the Prairie Dog :P

Cub and Taz played prairie dogs, too.

One of Cub's favorite animals is the Meerkat, which is very cutely standing on a rock behind him....you just can't see it in the picture.

 The giant otters to the right were the highlight of the day. They have been sluggish during our visits in the past, but this time they were up and playful. First, they chased something round (seed? rock?) around for a bit, then this one climbed up on a fallen log and made the most interesting sounds. We all agreed it was not the noise we were expecting at all.

Cub's reaction to his writing assignment this week. :P

I think he's been taking school-reading-position lessons from his brother. :P

Her brothers let her play Mario on their 3DS's for the first time this week. She loves it.

Crawdad's notebooking pages on the tundra for Preparing.

The boys completed notebook pages for our worldview studies. They were supposed to draw pictures of things that had influenced their worldview. Cub's is on the left, Crawdad's on the right.

Crawdad's cave art. I thought he drew one cute woolly mammoth, especially since he was using charcoal.

 Left, Taz has a picnic for her pillows and her Elmo blanket. Unconventional party guests, yes, but then no one ever accused Taz of being conventional. :) Below, she is pretending to build the Tower of Babel. She learned this week that people can speak different languages, and how that originated when God scattered the people in Babylon. I wish I'd been able to get a pic of her face as I spoke a few random Spanish or German phrases to her. Her expressions were hilarious. :D

Here, Crawdad is creating the wall of his "cave" for his cave art. He crumpled up construction paper and dipped it in tea. Note to anyone about to do this unit in Preparing: the paper really falls apart when you pull it out of the tea if you aren't careful. We actually had better luck just dabbing our paper with the wet tea bag.

 On Tuesday, we hit the corn maze. Right, Taz rides in the cow train before entering the maze. We thought this was going to be a pretty tame ride....until the driver did donuts. She thought it was great. Cub was sort of wishing he had gone. :P

Is it cheating if he's taller than the corn?

Racing to see who gets the honor of leading the way. :)

She loved the giant inflatable slide.

Pumpkin maze. You can just barely see Taz and Lightning coming out behind her. :)

 To the right, Taz drives the bumper boats. She tried this ride last year and had to be rescued because I could not make her understand how to steer, and she started crying and trying to climb out of the boat. Yikes! She obviously remembered last year's experience because when we passed by, she told me that "4 year olds can't drive the boats, but big 5 year olds are not scared." She was right--she did a great job. :)

Crawdad on the tether bouncy trampoline thing.

Yep, that's Cub upside down on the tether bouncy trampoline thing. He had a great time doing flips. :)

This is my son's solution to my statement that if he didn't stop making random noise, I was going to assign him dish duty. Yes, he really does hate washing dishes enough to plaster blue penguin duct tape across his mouth by his own volition. 

 On Wednesday, we carved pumpkins. I don't think Baby Girl is too impressed with the feel of pumpkin innards. :P

 Left and below, Cub helps Crawdad with the planning and carving of his pumpkin. A good big brother moment, that. :)

One of the seeds inside Crawdad's pumpkin had sprouted!

Taz's intention was to match the fuzzy pink monster you see in the background here. She calls it "Mama Monster," and it has a rainbow baby monster. Taz's own Mama skipped a costume this year, although I did put pink sparkly stuff in my hair. :P

Happy Halloween from my bed sheet ghost, my spider, and my fuzzy pink monster. They were all very pleased, as they received quite a few compliments on their creativity while we were out trick-or-treating. :)