State Fair 2013

This is going to be a very picture-heavy post... it's a recap of our visits to the State Fair!

Yes, I said visits! On Friday, Aaron went off to visit Chris and Kim in Portland for the weekend. He had an early flight, but the girls are early risers anyway, so it was no big deal for us to see him to the train on time. Once we were there, the girls said, "STATE FAIR!!!!" So off we went! And before long, Gramma Liisa joined us there.

We did some of our usual things that we love to do at the fair. We rode the carousel - one of the girls' favorite rides.

I think it won't be long before they're too old for the carousel at the Fair, and it'll make me a little sad. It's been one of their favorites year after year.

We saw the animals. Ella called these "ghost sheep."

We also visited the Miracle of Birth center, the cows, and the bunnies. We saw a sheep being sheared - neither the girls nor the sheep particularly liked that. They did like the calf, the ducklings, and the piglets at the Miracle of Birth center - they got to pet the one day-old piglet, which was adorable.

And we ate ice cream, because it was a toasty hot day!

We also had cheese curds, roasted corn, skin-on fries, cotton candy, and Spring Grove soda. Yum!!

Then on Saturday, we were back - this time with Laura and Dylan!!

We really were this excited about it!

There were multiple trips down the giant slide -

It's difficult to get a good picture of someone coming down the slide, so this'll have to do! Laura rode with Ella, and Maisie and Dylan rode together. The giant slide is SO fun. It says it's the best ride at the fair, and I'd have to agree.

After that, we went to the bird show. Ella got kind of antsy, though. So while Laura, Dylan, and Maisie watched the raptors, Ella and I took a little walk over to the poultry barns. She loved the chickens and spotted a lot of eggs in their little pens.

She was kind of grossed out by the turkeys' big wattles, though.

Seriously. Do wild turkeys have these? This must be something that people have bred for, right? I can't imagine this working very well in the wild.

We also saw this puffed-up guy in the breeding pen with two... hens? I don't know what a female turkey's called.

But he was clearly showing off. It was the turkey equivalent of Hey pretty laydeeez!! 

After a trip through the poultry barn, what's better than a turkey sandwich? (Does anyone else think it's a little weird that the Giant Turkey Sandwich stand is right by the poultry barn?)

Dylan was like, "this could be an ad for the fair!" Which, I must say I agree. Cute, happy kid with a turkey sandwich and an Icee, outside the DNR building, wearing a John Deere visor? Love it!

We relaxed in the shade and enjoyed our turkey sandwiches (me, Laura, Dylan, Maisie) and corn dogs (Ella).

After lunch, it was getting HOT! So it was off to the river raft ride.

I rode with the kids while Laura held our bags. There was a long line... but it was worth it. We all got SOAKED. So fun!

After the river ride, Dylan wanted to check out the lumberjack show. So Laura took him and Maisie, while Ella and I went to the Butterfly House (which Maisie Did. Not. Want. to visit.)

The butterfly house is always great for pictures. Can you tell how hot it was? No breeze and lots of people made for a sweaty butterfly experience.

Sweaty but very fun.

The butterfly house was followed by rides at the Kidway, and then the parade and a snack of bomb pops.

Then it was off to the Agriculture/Horticulture building. It sounds kind of hokey, but I really like this building. There's big veggies, crop art, Christmas trees, bees and honey... it's all pretty interesting, really.

Biggest sugar beet: 15.5 pounds!

The average beet is 3-4 lbs., so this one really was a monster.

Corn, for Grandma Jo:

The crop art tends to have a liberal/progressive bent, for some reason. Last year there were a ton of "Vote No" pro-same-sex marriage art pieces; this scarecrow fits right in.

She is scary, wouldn't you agree? ;)

We also checked out the bees and honey, and some really cool Dr. Seuss-themed flower arrangements. But as lovely and interesting as the Ag/Horticulture exhibits are, the building was roasty toasty. So after that, we went out to the Produce Exchange stand for peaches and a little sit-down in the shade.

We also got cream cheese wontons and egg rolls - it was getting later in the day, and we'd been doing almost nothing but walking, so we were ready for some more real food!

There were some intense negotiations over the division of wontons and rolls, as you can see.

The day was getting along, it was hot, and there were people as far as the eye could see. So we decided that we were just about done. We made our way back through the crowds, following Laura and Dylan.

After a quick tour through the grandstand and a stop for Sweet Martha's, we headed for home. When we got home we were tired and dirty, and I was a little sunburned. (ouch!) But it was a wonderful day. We'd had so much fun with Auntie Laura and Dylan, and with Gramma Liisa the day before. (And that long cool shower felt so nice after I put the girls to bed!)

We love the State Fair!!

Dinosaurs at the zoo!

First, one note: tomorrow is Maisie's last day of Kindergarten. OMG! So if you see me, I might be a big weepy about it. Be nice to me... and tell her congratulations!

Last Saturday, the girls and I headed down to the Minnesota Zoo. There are two new exhibits there for the summer! One has African animals, and the other has dinosaurs. Yes, dinosaurs at the Zoo! Just animatronic... this isn't a Jurassic Park situation.

If you haven't ever been to the Minnesota Zoo, let me take a second to explain its layout. There's one main building that has customer service/ticketing, a cafeteria, and the gift shop, and several indoor exhibits: Discovery Bay, the Tropics Trail, the penguins, and the Minnesota Trail are all in the same building. Then outside, there's a main plaza with a fountain/splash pad and a lot of trails with outdoor exhibits. Russia's Grizzly Coast, the Northern Trail, and the Family Farm are all outside. Dinosaurs and the African animals exhibits are outside, along the Northern Trail.

We had sunscreen, sunhats, and were ready to walk the trails to get to Africa and to see dinosaurs. Sadly, there were other plans for us! When we got to the zoo, we were told that a bison had escaped its enclosure, so nobody could go outside until it was recaptured. WHAT!

So, instead we spent the morning doing activities to help Maisie earn her Girl Scouts Minnesota Zoo badge. Ella was not exactly pleased about this arrangement.

But, what can you do.

Eventually we did all Maisie's activities (How many species of frogs are in Minnesota? What are three bird on the tropics trail? Draw your favorite fish on the coral reef. Draw a food chain of animals you see on the Minnesota trail.) and got the all-clear to head outside. FINALLY! We were off to see the dinosaurs!!

This is a dimetrodon. I don't know why, but I think its fossil looks much scarier than the robot version. Maybe because you can see the teeth so much more clearly? Or maybe it's the freaky spines... hard to say.

Either way, I'm glad we don't have to worry about running across one of these in the wild.

By the time we got through dinosaurs and the African exhibit (not as great as advertised - one giraffe and a bunch of ostriches was really all we saw), the girls were hot and tired. Fortunately, we went through the central plaza with its splash pad/fountain on the way back. They were ready to cool off and weren't going to be stopped by not having brought swimsuits!

A quick pose on the wolf statutes on the way out...

 capped off a great day at the Minnesota Zoo!

Fossil hunters

Aaron and Maisie have been getting interested in geology lately. They pick up rocks when they're out on walks and try to identify them when they get home. I'm always happy to encourage an interest in science, so on Sunday morning I suggested a field trip to go hunt for fossils!

We went to a St. Paul city park on the Mississippi called Shadow Falls that's known as a good place in the cities to search for fossils. If you want to go, it's right at the western end of Summit Ave., by the WW1 monument. There's free off-street parking, yay!

Once you get down off the main monument area onto the trails, there's also some pretty spectacular geology! This is taken right below the monument's safety rail. You can see layers and layers of limestone:

Here's the reason for the safety rail:

I'm not sure how high up we were there at the top of the bluff, but it was pretty dang high.

At this point we hadn't gone far at all, but we had already found our first fossils!

This is a hunk of limestone with some fossils that are pretty typical of what you find in the area. They date from the Ordovician time, 505-438 million years ago, when the area that's now Minnesota was covered by a shallow inland sea and 10-40 degrees south of the equator. So you end up with a lot of fossils from small marine organisms. The round thing you see in the limestone is part of a stem from a crinoid, a family of sea lilies that are related to sea urchins and sea stars. There are other little fossils in there too but they're hard to see in the picture!

Aaron scouted out some trails to get down to the riverside, north of the falls. I don't have pictures from the hiking part because the trails were a little narrow and steep, so not exactly good picture-taking! But we all made it down to the river.

Yes, bunny ears. It was Easter after all!

From the riverside you could see the different rock layers that make up the area. There's the limestone on the top, followed by shale (which holds most of the fossils). The white on the bottom is a huge layer of sandstone - it's extremely soft, so the graffiti here is carved in instead of written on the rock.

At the riverside, we searched for fossils. Aaron was an AWESOME fossil hunter and made some excellent finds! Maisie took notes in her field journal, drawing pictures of animals we saw and the different shapes of shells we found.

She did a great job of documenting all our finds.

We also poked around a little bit up and down the shore, looking at the different rock formations. One area had these HUGE slabs that were clearly sliding down towards the river. They were really fun for the girls to climb up and around.

HUGE!

Eventually it was time to head back up. So up up up we went...

back up to the monument. We checked out our finds, had a snack, and compared field journal notes.

So here's a representative sample of what we found!

Going clockwise - the top rock is that big piece of limestone with embedded fossils. Next is a piece of shale that Maisie thought looked like a dinosaur tooth. Then another smaller piece of limestone with fossils, followed by a big piece of black something or other... very smooth and shiny! Then you can see some of the shells that we found.

We weren't able to identify everything, so that afternoon the girls and I took our finds to the science museum, to get some identification help.

At 9:00 in the picture is what we initially thought was a fossilized shell. If you look closely, it has lines on it that look like those on the kind of shell a scallop would have, if that makes sense - radiating out from a point. We took it to the science museum, though, and the scientist there identified it as actually a trace fossil! It's a piece of stone that used to be sand that had a shell on top of it. Cool, hey? Then there are the two little things that look almost like vertabrae. They are fossilized bryozoans - a colonial organism very similar to coral. If you looked closely you could see that they're covered in tiny pores, each of which was the home to one tiny animal.

At the end of the day Maisie said, "We learned so much today!!" Both girls really had a lot of fun. They loved hiking, seeing the animals, and talking about the rocks. Today my legs are sore, sore, sore. But it was a lot of fun and an experience we will definitely repeat.

Going for a walk

Aaron, Ella, and Ella's bunny took advantage of yesterday's unseasonably high temperatures to go for a walk (and send me silly pictures).

Sent from my Windows Phone

Urban legends

There's an urban legend that everyone eats a teaspoon, a pound, two bushels, or some other specific amount of dirt of the course of their lives. The amount varies depending on who you ask, but the idea remains the same.

Ella has been making sure that she gets her fair share of dirt.

Not a lot to say today... Ella had her first birthday, which will warrant its own post soon. It was a fun, fun party. But it's late, and I have a busy day tomorrow, so I'm going to stick to pictures.

First a new favorite picture of Ella, from a trip to the Children's Museum yesterday. Doesn't she look like a big girl?

I love it for that reason, but it also is like, wait a minute - where did my BABY go?? She's walking like crazy, and at just 12 months is already SUCH a toddler.

And this picture of Maisie is from a trip to the park today:

That, to me, is just pure joy.

Tiny Trouble's big sister is home for the summer

Ella can walk everywhere now. This means, in her mind, that she has license to examine and dismantle everything, and will start screaming at the top of her lungs if her investigation is interfered with. She can climb all the of the low-lying furniture without much difficulty, but still gets down half the time by falling off face first. But god forbid you should try to prevent her from climbing up again...she has baby rage issues. Also, forget trying to take away her bottle, even when it's completely empty. She will GET you.

Maisie is trying to find her schedule now that she's home for the summer. We're getting our rhythm, but with plenty of drama along the way. Here's some fun from earlier this week.

A little talking and a little walking

Ella has steadily been growing more verbal. Instead of some explosion of ability, I think she's slowly been sneaking up on talking without any of us being much the wiser. She's uttered sounds that are similar to words before, but always preceded or followed by baby talk, so that we were unsure it was what it kind-of-sort-of sounded like. But lately she's started to dial back on the baby talk portion, until today I swear she said "hi" and waved to one of the cats when she saw him. If she had a first word, I have no idea what it was. She's also taken to standing up, looking around, taking a step, and then sitting down. Sneaky, right? Apparently she's not going to really start walking until she can chase down Maisie and pounce on her.

I'll leave you with a few of Maisie's computer drawings.