Late May Update

Once again time is flying and we are almost ready for summer.  Being that it is memorial weekend and I actually have some free time before everyone wakes up, I thought I’d update our blog before we start summer activities.

Trip to the Phoenix Desert Botanical Gardens

We’ll start with a visit to the local Desert Botanical Gardens.  Frequent visitors to this blog know that it is one of our favorite places to go in the fall and spring.  This winter/spring they have installations from the artist Chihuly (check out the link to see good pictures).  So we went on over and saw his very cool glass sculptures placed in with the cactus and such.

Here are the boys at the new entrance garden:

  This was one of our favorites.  It was in the hummingbird garden and the picture really does not do it justice (I brought the little pocket camera… yea, that is the reason why the pictures are not so good, my camera is bad…)

Along one of the hiking trails in the garden they have a place where you can put your camera on a little shelf, set the timer then run over and get a gr0up photo with some local cactus.  So this is a rare picture of Andrew, Ben and Daddy together.

No visit would be complete without stopping by the butterfly house and checking out the hundreds of flying bugs.  Very cool and the boys love it.  We must have spent 45 minutes looking at them and trying to find the rare ones.

 They liked it so much the became a caterpillar and a butterfly:

   

They usually have some sort of arts & crafts thing for the kids.  On this day it was making bugs out of pipe cleaners.  This is Andrew’s spider crawling on a yucca plant. Although it doesn’t show well in the picture, one of our favorite installations was this one.  It has tall, bold red tubes and then an old row boat full of different colored globes.  Very cool.  Another favorite spot in the garden is the herb garden.  This is Ben relaxing in the Tea garden.  Nice cozy corner out of the crowds where you can sit in the shade, smell good smells and see the flowers in the rest of the herb garden. Two of my favorites, and I actually got OK pictures of them.  Something about the blue glass in the green/brown desert scape:   I asked Ben to take a picture of Andrew and Me by the pond at the bottom of the hill.  “make sure you get the floating glass cubes and us in the frame!”  Well, he got me but cut his poor brother and the cubes in half.  We need more practice at this! Easter ‘09

Heidi was visiting her Brother and Mother at Easter this year so we had an all male Easter weekend.  Lots of fun.

We did the egg decorating thing the night before.  Unfortunately I didn’t think to take any pictures, but here is the basket with the final results.  Obviously, we had a Star Wars decorating set in the mix:

We also had the obligatory hunt for eggs.  No one fell on a cactus this year.  Andrew still loves to wear his cowboy boots:

Ben got the eggs on the high ground.  It was a very nice day weather wise – the citrus trees were green and blooming and lots of flowers were out.

The boys got bubble guns in their baskets. Lots of fun was had:

  I didn’t get any pictures of the decapitated chocolate bunnies because someone in the family (who is black and white and walks on all fours) ate the bunnies when we were not looking.  Fortunately there is not much real chocolate in those things.  All and all a relaxing and enjoyable Easter day.

Scout Activities

Ben finished up Webelos and became a full fledged scout.  Here he is with the den leader Chris getting his Arrow of Light plaque:

No, he is not wearing lipstick.  The boys were drinking fruit punch and eating pizza before the ceremony and they all look like clowns in their pictures. I’m still not a big fan of the BSA as an organization and their beliefs, but Ben had a great leader who and he did a great job of getting the best out of the good stuff and learned to ignore the bad stuff.  So a good experience.  On to Scouts!

   Our transition event was the annual “Family Camp” where the cub scouts, webelos and boy scouts all go up and share a campsite with their whole families.  It was just outside of Prescott in amongst some boulders and trees (see an earlier posting of Andrews drawing showing the campsite.

This is our tent.  The boys took a break from fighting wars amongst the rocks to chat and whittle.

As part of the weekend, there were some science activities and one of them was digging for fossils.  Andrew found this dinosaur!

He really enjoyed playing touch football with the older boys.

Here is Ben, Patrick and Joseph showing off their very cool volcano that they made at one of the science stations.

And lastly, Heidi and Chris share a hug at the end of the first day.  Chris likes to have another girl along on these trips, it’s usually her and a bunch of boys and their dads.

Moe and his Bed

And lastly, we have the “fuzzy pet story” just like your nightly news.  Heidi spent almost an entire day really cleaning our bedroom and getting the new comforter & pillow covers on and really making it nice.  And when she finished Moe just hopped on up and claimed it as his own.