Jamestown Field Trip:

Today’s field trip to Jamestown was sooo much fun!  Ryan and I finally got to see, touch, smell, and hear some of what the settlers experienced (well, the pleasant experiences anyway 🙂 ).

We took a class that taught us about navigation and the trip to America, had a picnic lunch in the van, explored the indoor museum, watched a short movie, took a two hour tour (the ships, the fort, and the Powhatan Indian village), and checked out the cool gift shop.

It was neat to see all of the different license plates in the parking lot and a good reminder of how lucky we are to live so close to so many awesome historical sites in Virginia!  We missed having Brendan with us, but he said that he enjoyed the quiet time and got lots of work done.

You know I had to take lots of pictures, so here they are 🙂 :

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What’s All The Buzz About???

One of the moms in our homeschool group invited us to her home to learn about beekeeping today.  Her husband started keeping honey bees 2 years ago as a hobby and also out of concern due to the declining population of bees.

We were excited to “bee” invited (get it – LOL?) !

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Here are just a few of the facts that we learned 🙂 :

– the queen bee has a stinger, but normally only uses it to sting/destroy other queen eggs in the hive

– the worker bees are females and the males (drones) don’t do much of anything except mate with the queen (’nuff said – LOL!)

– swarms happen when the hive becomes too crowded or the queen dies

– worker bees only live about 2 months or so during the summer months

– honeybees are not aggressive and will normally only sting to defend themselves

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I have to admit that it felt strange moving closer to the bee hive to see the action when common sense tells you to stay away, but not one person was stung and it was so cool to see them up close doing their thing!

Carrie and her husband were so sweet to invite us to their home…they even had refreshments, popsicles, and a story time for the younger kids – thank you guys 🙂 !!!

Field Trip Friday!

We got to take a private tour of one of our favorite pizza restaurants, Stevie B’s this morning. We had lots of fun learning some fun facts, trivia, and history of pizza. Dave C. was a fantastic and FUN “tour guide” 🙂 ! After our tour, the kids had a dough sculpture contest and then got to enjoy some delicious pizza!

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Field Trip Friday!

This afternoon, we had the opportunity to meet up with a group of middle schoolers to play laser tag and indoor paintball.  It was the perfect way to let off some steam! There were two girls in the group and they hung right in there with all the boys 🙂 .  Everybody had a blast and then some of us went to Sweet Frog to cool off (I didn’t get any pictures of that part of the trip…the boys were soooooo tired of me taking pictures that I figured that I better NOT bring the camera into the yogurt shop – LOL!).  What a FUN afternoon!!!  We are blessed to have such an amazing group of friends!

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