Chicken Portraits

Our boys finally started practicing their little baby crows, which means we had to re-home them back to my friend. I could have probably kept them for a few more days, until the first real (loud!) crows came, but Grumpy Neighbor is still actively trying to manipulate us into getting rid of our chickens (Did I tell you that he offered to pay us $500 to get rid of them? Sigh), and so I think he'd probably call 911 or run over with a shotgun if heard so much as a single crow--so off the boys must go.

Before the two boys left, however, we took an afternoon to take portraits with them. These are in the same vein as our foster kitten portraits, only with chickens, they're even more silly:

Fluffball

Cluck and Peck, our two boys

 Cluck

Peck

Arrow

all four 

 watching them forage while out on a "field trip" from their yard

The girls held Cluck and Peck on their laps the whole trip out to my friend's farm to leave them. She'll wait to harvest them until they've grown up a bit more and she can be entirely sure that they're boys, and in the meantime she sometimes sends us photos of the two sitting on her porch rail and looking quite pleased with this free-range life that they've made their way into.

Our girls, meanwhile, don't seem to miss the boys a bit. Their coop and yard is perfectly comfy for the two of them, although they escape just often enough to drive poor Matt to distraction as he cobbles on yet another fence rail or wire bit to try to foil them--the good new is that he's perfectly on board now with my conviction that we must buy a new house that we can afford to double mortgage with this one while we prepare it to sell. A cobbled-together chicken yard just outside the master bedroom window is the last straw, really. A buyer could perhaps overlook the kid-painted front door, perhaps overlook the seashells glued to the bathroom door frame, perhaps overlook the big basement timeline, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, is going to buy a home that has a chicken yard right outside the master bedroom window.

Except for me, of course, I adore it. And when we find a new house, I might do it again!

Sesame Street to Gettysburg

Although the girls had been studying extensively for this and they did enjoy the experience, this last stop was absolutely for me and Matt.

It's a rare thing for us, this ability to do something that we adults want to do, and I'm cherishing the girls' new maturity that's allowing it for us. It's been a LONG time since a kid of mine threw a fit in the modern art museum (although that experience was so traumatic that we have perhaps never been to a modern art museum since). And so, on the last day of our trip, after hotel breakfast and Willow's chess class (you've got to love online classes for vacationing without learning loss!) we drove to Gettysburg, just because Matt and I really, really wanted to see it:

Gettysburg is actually a great place to visit with kids--it's outdoors, so they can do a lot of running around; you pretty much have to drive to the different sites, so they can get a break with air conditioning and a book fairly often; and the monuments are large-scale and eminently climbable:

The first thing that we did was run into the Visitor's Center just to buy a self-guided audio car tour and Guide to Gettysburg Battlefield Monuments: Find Every Monument and Tablet in the Park, and then we spent the next few hours following the tour (which was incredible--tons of context, detailed explanation of what you were looking at everywhere you went, thrilling storytelling with sound effects. It completely made our trip):

The kids LOVED the artillery.

Thanks to Killer Angels, I have a huge soft spot for Buford and Reynolds, and so McPherson Ridge, the first engagement in the battle, was my favorite stop:

I was super sad about Reynolds dying.

Fortunately, the girls love audiobooks, so the audio car tour was the perfect way to see the battlefield: we'd listen to the stories, listen to the orientation at our stop, get out and run around and see stuff, and then climb back into the car to listen to more stories.

Sydney's favorite stop was Oak Ridge; she listened with bated breath to the audio tour's description of brave Sallie, the pet dog of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, and when she learned that there was actually a monument to Sallie on Oak Ridge, I handed her our book of battlefield monuments and told her that we'd stop at it if she could find it, so she did!

Willow really liked best climbing the huge fire tower that allows you to overlook the locations of the second day of fighting. Seriously, there were So. Many. Stairs, but I have really committed myself to a healthier body, and repeating to myself all the way, "This is good, healthy activity!" I climbed those damn stairs (something that I actually don't think I could have done three months, 14 pounds, and four inches ago), and the view from the top...

Was excellent:

Even though my home state was on the wrong side of the war, I did manage a shout-out:

Some of my peeps were apparently also paying their respects there:

Again thanks to Killer Angels, Little Round Top is Matt's favorite spot in the battlefield:

Bayonets fixed, Chamberlain's brave men prepare to charge down the hill!

He has a special place in his heart for Chamberlain, whose story is pretty epic. Also, he helped hold Little Round Top against all this:

The High Water Mark of the Confederacy is also an amazing spot, and yes, my bloodthirsty little soldiers are attempting to cross the line and shoot you:

You can actually hike the fields that the Confederate soldiers charged across, right from the statue of Lee at the center of the Confederate line to the statue of Meade at the center of the Union line. We saved that for another day, however.

We did not finish memorizing the Gettysburg Address in time to recite it at the spot where Lincoln originally read it, alas, so Will read it for us, instead:

We did see the cemetery that he dedicated, at least--

--and the spot where it was read, and the memorial to it--

--so when we finally finish, we'll be able to imagine the appropriate setting for our recitation.

Again, we closed the park down. We had to blow through the museum--

Actual cannonballs fired at Ft. Sumter--very cool context for the girls, since  they've memorized that conflict.

--and zip through the gift shop before they kicked us out at the end of the day.

It had been a long day, through which we had sustained ourselves on peanut butter sandwiches, clementines, granola bars, and tortilla chips, so we celebrated this final stop on our road trip with a late afternoon visit to a restaurant named, of COURSE, General Pickett's Buffet.

It was our last charge, you could say...

The girls and I did a ton of prep work for our trip to Gettysburg. Here are our favorite resources:


Will read most of those independently--she's such an avid reader that it's an easy way to boost her contextual understanding of a topic. We all did the picture books and documentaries together, but for Lincoln, I only had the girls watch the first scene with me, the one in which Lincoln visits the battlefield and hears the soldiers reciting his Gettysburg Address.

You can also check out my Civil War Pinboard for the educational links, resources, coloring pages, memory work cards, timelines, artifact images, etc. that we used. I have a playlist on Spotify for all the music from the Civil War, which the girls LOVED listening to (awkward as it was to have Sydney suddenly bursting out with "Dixie" at random times in public places), as well as a great audio version of the Gettysburg Address that's helping with our memorization, but Spotify won't let me embed it. The good news is that you can search Spotify yourself, for something like "songs of Civil War," and find all the same as me.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Sesame Street

They may be a little old for it this time around, but my girls have been asking if we can go back to Sesame Place ever since the last time we went there.

Yes, the girls have grown up a lot in the three years since our last Sunny Day:

Sesame Place 2010

Sesame Place 2013

Sesame Place 2010

Sesame Place 2013

 Fortunately, none of the magic has worn off, neither from the place nor from my children, and they were just as thrilled to be there on this day as they were on that day back when they still watched Sesame Street for fun and edification:

  
There were benefits to being bigger kids this year. The roller coaster didn't seem so scary anymore to a girl who's illegally ridden Rock 'n Roller Coaster twice in a row--

Do you see Will way in the background? I volunteered to help out a mom with two little kids by riding with one of them, since my big girl was tall enough to ride BY HERSELF!

--and big kids have an even BETTER time on all the climbing equipment and huge wet and dry active play areas:

Matt and I didn't even have to trail them, but could sit and chat and catch up from our week apart!

We did skip some shows in favor of those thrill rides that were even more fun this year, but we  went to others, and yep, they were still magical, too:

My grandpa used to record shows like this and I know for a fact that nobody will ever want to watch it.

Right as the parade was about to begin, and all the parents and their excited small children were crowded around, two women got into a fight right in front of everyone. One woman was screaming at another woman that she'd tried to take her son, and then she started punching her, and then a couple of dads jumped in and separated them, and then the woman SPIT at the other woman. An employee ran to get a security guard, and all the mommies, me included, were trying to block off the kids' view with our bodies. The mom next to me turned to me and said, exasperatedly, "Don't they know that we're at SESAME PLACE?!?" It cracked me up--fistfight in the middle of a huge crowd, I'm trying to figure out how to get the kids out if there's a riot or someone pulls a gun, and the mom next to me is pissed off because this place is SUPPOSED to be appropriate for preschoolers!

Unlike last year, we also didn't leave early--on this trip, we apparently had a habit of staying until closing time everywhere we went. We went on more rides, saw another show, met Cookie Monster and Bert and Ernie and Abby Cadabby and Zoe and Grover et all, floated down the lazy river, zipped down the water slides, rode Elmo's Blast Off, and did everything else there was to be done. Gradually, though, we found ourselves sort of naturally tapering off. First Matt and I decided that we were done with rides, although the kids were still free to go strong (and they did!)--

--and then Willow bought herself a bubble-blowing gun and decided she'd rather run around playing with that, leaving Syd as the last man standing. And that kid had energy! She did the same three water slides over and over and OVER, long after it had gotten dark and too chilly for people to ever want to go on water slides (which means no lines, so yay!). When she was finally done with those, she wanted to ride the swings a couple more times to dry off, and then she wanted to stop and notice every single great thing on the way out and have her picture taken with it:

It felt like suitable revenge for every museum visit she's ever had to accompany us on.

And of course, after the park had closed and we'd finally dragged the kid out of there and gotten her strapped into her seat, I don't think we'd left the parking lot before she was sound asleep, snoring in her booster. Will followed her about a minute later, leaving me and Matt to drive on for another couple of hours in peace.

Next stop: Gettysburg!