First Week of School and a Fun Weekend!

We finally said our farewells to summer break and pulled out our books. It has been a nice, long break, but I was ready to get back on our schooling schedule. It's good to once again see the big schedule board taking up space in our dining room!As always, we celebrated the first day of school with pizza! The funnest thing for me was getting back into our Science projects. Our first experiment of the year was an example of the scientific method. I presented them with this question: Can you blow a bigger bubble with a fresh piece of gum or one that you have chewed all of the sugar out of? We had mixed answers, so we did an experiment to find out which one was right. First, each one of them blew a bubble with a piece of gum that had been chewed for 3 minutes. I measured each of them, then had them blow a bubble with a fresh piece of gum and measured them. We charted the results and found that the gum that had all of the sugar chewed out of it blew the bigger bubbles. It was, of course, a fun experiment with all of the gum involved!

Because we are studying life science this year, I had planned to take the kids to the zoo on Friday. However, because we went to the zoo on the first week of school last year, we decided to take them to a safari park instead. Jeff and I have been wanting to take the kids to this park, but with his work and singing schedules, we've had a hard time fitting it in until now. We also wanted to wait until the weather cooled off. It turned out to be a great evening for it, except for the awful amount of mosquitoes that we had to endure! We chose to drive our car through the park instead of riding on the tour wagon. We felt like we would have more contact with the animals from our car, which we did!! I don't know if I had funner feeding the animals or watching my kids, as well as Madison's friend, get excited about feeding and touching them. It was an amazing experience!

You don't see a sign like this one too often!

After the safari, we walked through the petting zoo. The best part of that were the kangaroos. We had so much fun with them!

On Friday night, Madison and I got to have a girls' night out for my niece, Kinley's, 10th birthday. My sister, Vicki, and I took the girls out to eat then to a local hotel to swim, play, and spend the night. We had so much fun!! The girls spent a lot of time playing spa, which was so fun to watch. We finally turned the lights out at 3:00 the next morning because we knew that we all had a lot planned for the next day. We were still tired, but it was worth it to have that fun night out with the girls!!!