Weekly Wrap Up - July 1

Did you miss me? Campmeeting always makes me hermit-ize for abit afterwards.

So let's see . . . last week (a week ago) was campmeeting. We stayed in my parents' motorhome, which made it bear-able even with the odd weather, chilly the first few days, HOT the next couple . . .

The big girls had a blast, as always.  This year the afternoon activities didn't grab them, so they opted to not participate, which I think really worked much better for them/us. Last year they only partially participated, but even so, they were EXHAUSTED by the end of the week. This year, having that down time in the afternoon made things work better. In a perfect world I'd still vote for not having the evening meeting go so late, or having an afternoon meeting and NOT an evening meeting, like Kindergarten, but nobody asked me LOL, so given the options, skipping afternoon activities, made things go more smoothly.

Little Bit did NOT sleep well. The original plan (concocted by Sassy & Little Bit) was that the 2 of them would share the bottom bunk. But Little Bit didn't fall asleep well and her wiggling kept Sassy awake. So she ended up sleeping with me, which worked ok-ish the first part of the week, but once my parents came up, I opted to just take her home at night and she & I could sleep in our own beds.

Little Bit was ambivalent about her meetings . . . I think it was too much sitting still for her. I, on the otherhand, was excited to get some great song ideas for a Zoo Sabbath School program, using music we already have and just switching up the words woo-hoo!! Now I have my 4th quarter program mostly pulled together (just have to figure out what animals & props we have and how to work around any we don't have).

The big girls continued to enjoy Family Worship. Little Bit liked the theory of it "are we going to Family Worship today?" but the reality is, for a 3 year old, it's just more time having to sit still and be quiet. Since it was early enough to run into her normal breakfast time, she was kept still & quiet by eating LOL (which may be why she looked forward to it, now that I think about it LOL).

Since we had our afternoons open, we went to Cabelas a couple days. Little Bit, interestingly enough, was pretty happy to just sit and watch the fish in the "pond" instead of looking at all the impressive animal displays. I was impressed that, as we walked into the Africa section, she said, w/o any prompting, "Africa!" I'm not sure how she knows that . . .

So, that was campmeeting week.

The last day of campmeeting, my parents had determined that Hopewell Furnace was actually demonstrating how they would have cast the metal (using aluminum because it's easier than iron . . . lower temp required to melt it, I think, but don't quote me on that), so we went to that in the afternoon. VERY COOL! Hopewell Furnace continues to be near the top of our list of favorite National Parks. The girls had fun feeding grass to the horses there too. MiniMe was too hesitant to actually hold the grass on her hand, but Sassy had a blast doing it.

This past week we've been recovering from campmeeting. . .

Can you spot MiniMe in the tree

We also had fun babysitting our friends E and J on Tuesday. Little Bit was rather out-of-sorts. I think more "changes to her routine" so close on top of campmeeting was too much for her. And 3 isn't an age that responds well to sharing in general. Thankfully, the weather was GORGEOUS so we spent a good part of the day outside.

Little Bit and J, sharing MiniMe's water

Beyond that, we tried to get caught up on laundry and other chores, and get some school in.

On Monday we got to visit with our neighbor, Miss Judy. She's been on a work project for the last few months and we haven't been able to have our weekly visits, so it was fun to be able to catch up.


On Friday Rodney took the girls to visit Grandmom.

And we wrapped up our week by visiting a nature museum on Sabbath. It's a small museum in Lancaster. Our Cosi Museum pass got us in free, and it was definitely worth the price LOL. There was a room where the kids could touch and play with stuff, a room with live snakes & turtles and stuff (in cages), a space exhibit, dinosaur exhibit, and then a room that had the "original cabinet displays". I didn't get a chance to read the history, but I guess the museum started out as being a display of taxidermy birds (and a few animals) over 100 years ago. So all those are in one room together. It was pretty cool. There were also some bird sound thingys (like this one), and the birds in the cabinets, that had bird sounds on the thingy, so that was pretty fun to play with.