The last 2 weeks: LEGO, letterboxing, and summer fun

It has been a busy couple weeks, so I'm combining last week and the week before. I'm sorry that this is such a long post!

We started with some LEGO fun on a Monday morning before we were going to a swim party with co-op friends.  I loved these LEGO tricolor gummy men that Almost unschoolers made.  I had the same silicone minifigure ice-cube tray laying around because I bought it for our lego co-op class last Winter.  Turns out I never used it for the class, so I was bummed that I had wasted the money on it.  But, then she started posting all these fun ideas like the melted chocolate-chip lego men
(which we did, but didn't get pictures of), and these gummy men, and even jolly rancher men (which we still have to do). I was so excited to find uses for this ice-tray!

 Our lego gummy minifigs.  This turned out to be such a fun activity in more ways than one.  Making gummies with these boys was a hit.

Alex with his gummy minifig

 This is the silicone tray.  Now I can think of all kinds of fun things to do with it.

They came out pretty good, and the kids just gobbled them up.

This was probably the funnest part.  After they made their gummies I let them make their own designs on a plate.  I had never worked with this gummy mix so I didn't quite know what I was doing, but now we definitely want to do it again.  The tutorial at Almost unschoolers was super helpful!

Aaron's fish

Then it was off to an afternoon of swimming!  We were invited by a friend at our co-op to their neighborhood pool.  They had a private party just for our group, so it was a lot of fun.

We don't get many opportunities to swim in outdoor pools.  These kids swam, and swam!

Alex's first time on a dive board.

He loved it...

The next day on Tuesday we had a birthday party which was at the fountain park.  More sun for us!

Alex playing duck duck goose!

kids at the fountain

Wednesday was a lot of K'nex building fun.

Aaron with his creations

He was really proud of this bird.

We also got a chapter of history in.  Aric colored these Greek paper dolls.  Yes, we are still on Greece, and not moving very fast through SOTW.  Hoping to make it up this summer.

We have been studying bees.  I found this fun bee honeycomb hexagon craft to make out of paper towel rolls.  Aaron loved it.  I'm sure if we hadn't run out of rolls he would have kept going.

We went away June 14th for a night to the coast without kids for our 15th anniversary.  It was a nice break from kids, and life.  The coast was beautiful.

While we were at the coast we bought this book that we are excited to do with the kdis.  It has some great adventures and things to see while finding a "treasure" (a box with a stamp in it, a lot like letterboxing) on the coast.

Which leads us to our next adventure.  The Monday after the kids really wanted to go out and try their new walking sticks that we picked up for them at the coast, but we didn't have time for a full hike.  So, I decided it would be fun to find a letterbox.  Letterboxing is a lot like geocaching, but you use clues instead of a gps to find the "box".

We followed all the directions, and almost didn't find it.  But, we didn't give up..


...and finally found it in a hole at the bottom of a tree.

 There it is!

 Alex was ready for an adventure.  He refused to give me the backpack.

When we were all done we headed to the store across the street for some chicken feed.  We didn't even know this little park was there.

The Lego movie came out on DVD on Tuesday.  We have been waiting for this day for a looong time.  My kids were pretty excited.

One morning was spent creating all kinds of perler bead patterns and pictures.  Here we have some creepers, a sailboat, and hamburger and fries.

My 3 year old has figured out how to climb our tree in the front yard.  He was so proud of himself!  Even told me to go get the camera.

That about wraps it up for the last 2 weeks.

Desiree