camping with little ones...

YAWN is about all I can say

Seriously though, we had so much fun camping this weekend. On friday night after work, we packed up our new tent trailer, convinced my sister and her husband to come with us, stuffed almost everything we own into the van, and drove off to a camp ground a few hours away.

We didn't arrive until after dark, and lucky for us, homeschooling family that we are, our science class (we've been learning about weather) followed us out there in the form of big clouds, lots of wind, drizzle, downpours, lightening and thunder, etc... The only thing the kids missed seeing were a hurricane and a tornado. That was the first night.

The next morning when we got up, we got to see some of the fruit of our homeschooling efforts when our darling little grade one was explaining to her auntie that the drops of water falling on her head from the roof were not coming from the outside of the tent, they were from the water vapor in the air inside the tent that was condensing on the ceiling. LOL... I'm sure this didn't make auntie M feel any better about having a wet pillow and blanket, but I was happy to see that some of what we've been teaching is sticking.

One thing that I'm starting to see about homeschooling is that school teachers don't get that pleasure of seeing the fruits of their teaching as often as a homeschooling parent would. It's such a treat for me to be able to watch E understand and then apply her knowledge slowly over the progress of each year. For instance, later on in the day, when it was still raining and we were all having so much fun crammed into our tent trailer with a crazy toddler bouncing around, E eased her boredom by drawing, and then writing a story for us spontaneously.

My cat is red.
My cat is a good cat.
Good cat!

These are all words from our spelling lists, and I was delighted to see that she is actually learning them and not just straight memorizing them in one context.

Anyways, the rest of the trip turned out lovely. We spent the rest of the day at a very fun dinosaur museum where the kids had a great time running from exhibit to exhibit, thankfully burning off some of the energy that had built up over the past day hiding from the rain. My favorite quote of the day was my little 3yr old boy:

" mommy, why are dinosaurs called dinosaurs?"
....."ummmm... I don't know sweetie"
"hey I know!! Maybe they are called dinosaurs because they die all the time".

(He is becoming much more aware of sounds in words and breaking words apart into the sounds they start with. This is the first step of learning how to read, so it is really neat to watch it start. With my first preschooler, I was trying to hard to push her from one stage to the next, trying to be a good 'teacher'. With Z I don't have time to do that and I really enjoy watching him learn things as his development unfolds naturally.)

Below are some more pics of our trip... my favorite one being the first with H climbing into the exhibit... notice the sign right beside her :-)