Bell Museum and our new kiddie pool

We went with Laura, Mado, and Elias to the Bell Museum this week. The kids weren't too impressed by all the taxidermy animals, which are what fill most of the museum. They did like the cool touch and feel room, though. In the above photo, they were seeing what bogs are like to walk on (lumpy and squishy).

Here they are at another display. They got to sit with a 1st grade class on a field trip and hear a talk all about snakes and how the milk snake has coloring similar to a coral snake (which is venomous) in order to try to fool its preditors.

Mado is spending the day with us while her family moves to a different house. It actually was sunny and quite hot out, so we broke out the new kiddie pool. The kids were so happy to get to play in water. :)
Last summer we had a gigantic rectangle "family swim center" inflatable pool. That thing was fun but really hard to dump. The racoons (ick!) punctured it at the end of summer, so we got a new one for this year. We went with a smaller one, and Molly was not impressed. I pulled it out of the box, and she said, "Is that it? It's so small. Will it get bigger when you blow it up?" Yeah, it's small, but I think we'll try to get to the Y more for "real" swimming in thier awesome real pool. This will do for play. :)

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Alex heard us cheering for Cory at the last softball games, and it "clicked" that Daddy's name is Cory. Alex has taken to calling him Cory 80% of the time, even though we keep telling him he needs to say Daddy.
Alex also has been favoring Daddy lately more often, and now whenever he's unhappy with something I'm doing, he tells me he needs to call Cory and tell on me. :P
I had gotten behind with laundry, and yesterday at nap time Alex had no clean sheets for his crib. I grabbed one of Molly's twin bed sheets and brought it into his room. Alex was MAD and yelled, "No, that is Molly's! Need Alex's sheets!" I got a different sheet that was just solid navy blue, and I put it on his mattress and tucked it neatly underneath so you would never have guessed it wasn't a crib sheet. He was STILL mad and not calming down. After trying for quite some time to explain that his sheets are in the washing machine and will be ready at bedtime and he just needs to try this sheet for nap, he declared, "Need to call Cory! Please call Cory now??? Need Cory!"
Thankfully Cory was at his desk and had a minute to talk to Alex, so they had a good conversation about the sheets and Alex reluctantly agreed to nap on them.


Molly had never really gotten into playing with her baby dolls, and they had been put away in a closet for probably a year now. Lately, though, Molly has seemed more interested in REAL babies and making them smile, so yesterday I got out her tub of babies and gave them back to her. She was SOOOOOO excited! She is totally into it, and she is loving Baby Annabelle, the doll that cries, laughs, sleeps, and makes other baby sounds. Last night before bed, Molly had to put her babies to sleep. Then Cory made sure Annabelle was turned off. Molly said, "What if Annabelle wakes up during the night and needs a bottle?" Cory told her that he thought she would stay sleeping but that Molly could get up and feed her a bottle if she did wake up crying. Molly frowned and said, "But then I will be SO TIRED in the morning!!!"