Volunteer Time

This morning, I volunteered at the Big Kid's school. I was told that we were going to be packing gift bags for their big alumni anniversary party, but instead we were putting together photo albums.  They had been given hundreds (thousands) of photos from people over the years and no one has ever put them into albums.  The organizer had put them into generally accurate collections by year, so we just had to sort them by type (sports, prom, graduation, etc.) and put them into the albums with double-stick tape.  I put together 2001-2003.  There were some photos dating back to the late 1980s and as recent as 2006--after that, almost all photos were digital, so they're going to do some kind of Shutterfly books, I think.  I'll be going back tomorrow to do some more after the kids are away at school.

While the Big Kid is volunteering in the afternoons, I'm finding creative ways to entertain the littles.  Today we went to the beach at the Edmonds ferry docks.

The skies cleared and we had a lovely sunny afternoon.  The tide was out, which afforded lots of opportunities to play in the wet sand.


They built sand villages with lots of moats--digging an irrigation ditch from the shallow pools down toward the village.


Ben poked the live barnacles, making them cringe.  They're really funny creatures.


I mean, lookit 'em!  They look like they'll reach out and snap at your fingers.  These are acorn barnacles and are the most common type in the Puget Sound.


After they got good and smelly, fishy and sandy, I took them out for ice cream.  Ben's favorite flavor, Cotton Candy, is back in the stores!  I may have to buy several pints of the stuff to keep in the freezer over winter.  Cammie chose her favorite; rainbow sherbet.


Bathing, medicating, and chasing off to bed!

Girl Scout Beach Day

The day before Independence Day was the full moon.  This means extreme tides.  The low tide was at a convenient 11 a.m., and a -3.19 tide, so I suggested we take the Girl Scouts out to explore the beach, get some lunch, and then come back home for some trampoline and/or a trip to the park.

We arrived to find the tide WAAAAAY out...far enough that you could walk under the ferry docks quite a distance, where we found some soft corals and starfish clinging to the walls.  One of the divers from the underwater park (yes, that's what they call that dive area) came back to shore with a unique find...he had found a tiny octopus.  It's hard to get a perspective on this, but this is a one-gallon bucket, and this octopus was about the size of a marshmallow.  He was SOOOOO cute!

We walked along the beach, looking at shells, dead crabs, seaweed, and finding lots of weird rubbery things in the water.  I didn't know what it was and to me it looked like garbage.  Most of them were much more grey--almost black.  Later, after I got home, I found out that these are the egg casings for the moon snails.  The snails sit in the sand and squirt out this mucus which mixes with sand and sandwiches the eggs inside.  The sand in this area was quite dark, so logically the egg casings were darker (this is a borrowed photo from the internet).  The beaches were littered with these things.  I suspect there will be a booming population of these things in future years.

We walked further along and eventually found some clams--a couple of really big ones.  I picked one up, thinking it was an empty shell and it squirted at me, which surprised me.  I also found one live moon snail.  These things are dang cool!  This thing was bigger than a softball and weighed a couple pounds.  I found directions online that tell you how to remove the snail from the shell by boiling it or simply cutting it out, but it also said that they aren't very good eating.  Edible, yes, but not that good...kinda tough.  I didn't want to take the snail just to kill it for the shell, so I put him back.  His foot was all folded up and he was tucked back into the shell a bit, but I put him back into the little pool of water that I found him in so he could go live out his snaily days eating clams and whatnot.

Ben found the starfish fascinating and we picked up a few off the sand to look at them more closely, pointing out to the girls where their mouth is.  Starfish are particularly odd--you think they're going to be all mushy and floppy like gummy worms, but they're really quite rigid and rough.

We stayed for an hour or so and the tide began to creep back in, and our stomachs began to let us know it was time for some lunch.  We collected our treasures and headed up to a pizza place and had lunch.  Back at the house, they jumped on the trampoline, then walked down to the park to play for a bit and it rained on them a bunch while they climbed the trees.  They came back to the house, toweled off and had some hot chocolate and watched "Megamind."  At about 4:00, Miss G was picked up by her mom and we walked the twins back to their house, which I didn't realize was so close--about five blocks away.  On our way back, Cammie and I found a dozens of snails creeping across the sidewalk.  I hadn't seen many snails in the first 20 years of living here, and now I see them everywhere.  The one on the left was one of the bigger ones, about the size of a quarter, but we saw dozens of little baby ones, smaller than my pinky nail.  There are two different species, I've learned--the brown lipped snail and the white lipped snail.  They were all hanging out together, so part of me thinks that it's merely a recessive trait or something.



Hope you all have a safe and festive 4th of July!

First Few Blocks

Despite my longing to sit down and start cranking out shop hop blocks, a few other things keep getting in the way.  Cleaning house.  Laundry.  Grocery runs.  Taking kids to karate and various doctors.  I did manage to make five of them--a couple of them are very fussy and required to be made with the iron-on adhesive.  One of them is a 3" high bird, complete with little tiny talons.  I don't know how long it'll last, but I hope it'll be permanent.

I finished the blocks for the baby quilt.  I need to set them--not sure if I'm going to sash them or not, but I think I will--plus a border or two and quilt it up.  The baby shower was last weekend and due to the shop hop, I missed it, but I will get this to Diana and Miguel very soon!  I should probably make this a priority over the shop hop blocks, eh?

HOWEVER, I also have this quilt for Judy to work on that I need to have ready by July 9th meeting.  This is a round robin that she and a few friends worked on, so this is her personal quilt, not a store sample.  The tricky part is quilting around the 3-D flowers.  She gave me thread to work it, although I don't think I want to use it on the back due to the color difference; the thread is a pale lavender and the back is creamy white.  Mistakes will be brutally obvious.

The other day I took a couple of girl scouts out to the beach to look at ocean life.  Unfortunately, I didn't know enough about tides to be able to adequately read the charts.  Next Tuesday during the full moon should be a much better day for getting out to see all the oceanic life on the rocks.

Cammie did find a hermit crab that she placed on a rock covered with sea lettuce and we patiently waited for him to emerge...

And just before we left, we found some live crabs running around the rocks.  There are two itty-bitty ones in this picture...can you find them?

We were hoping to find some sea stars while out there, but this is the only one we could see from the water's edge.

To add to the watery discussion, we adopted these tadpoles from Kelly's parents.  They have a pond full of them, with hundreds of more eggs hanging off the lily pads, so we scooped a dozen or so and brought them home in a mason jar.  They're now living outside in Cammie's aquarium.  The fish she had gotten several months ago all died, so it's nice to be able to repurpose it as an outdoor habitat.  We threw in a few pieces of lettuce (which is, apparently, what tadpoles eat) and they are growing well.  Eventually we'll have a dozen little froggies living in our neighborhood...we already have frogs from a pond down the street, and I really enjoy the sounds of their croaking at night.  I don't know if they're going to be the same kind of frogs, but it'll be interesting to see how they turn out.  And, no, I didn't transport them far, so I won't be introducing a new species to this ecosystem...his parents live about an hour away.

Yesterday I took Ben to his well-check appointment (only six weeks after his birthday) and he's gained nearly 4 lbs since March.  NICE!  He's creeping back up the charts for height & weight, too.  No longer languishing on the bottom of the charts, he's above the 25% mark for both and is more height-weight proportional.  These night feedings are doing the trick!  He takes in nearly 1000 calories a night.  If only I could figure out how to get that done in reverse...taking away a few hundred calories while I sleep.

Friday....it should be a nice, relaxing day.  We'll see how that actually turns out.  Maybe I can crank out a few quilt blocks, or start on Judy's quilt, or do some laundry...ideally, all of the above.