Caterpillars and Hermit crabs

We have new pets! I have been wanting to expand our hermit crab habitat for a couple weeks, mainly because the poor hermit crabs (we have 2) were in the bare minimum of an enclosure: no climbing things, nothing really to spark their interest and do. I had been doing some reading on them and realized we really needed a couple more and a more stimulating environment for them. I got the kick in the pants I needed when tent ceterpillar season came...

The kids and I are hopelessly in love with fuzzy adorable tent caterpillars. Yea, they eat trees. Whatever. They're cute. And there's TONS of them, so no one fights over who gets to hold the bug (something I frequently hear with roly poly bugs, lady bugs, etc). Since we're homeschooling.. THAT kind of gives me a kick in the pants to *do* something with said caterpillars. Like watching them turn into moths. We gathered a few for each child and put them in jars with leaves. But they didn't do so well. Almost all of them died and we felt horrible. So I thought about it and figured they died because the jars were too small, the leaves weren't on the branches and they were over handled. So today we expanded the hermit crabs cage to a ten gallon and used the old critter keeper (I think 5 or 3 gallon) to house caterpillars.


The girls checking out the many many caterpillars we collected. I had them each pick 2-3 they wanted to keep.


It's hard to tell how many we found. Ariel FREAKED because they were all crossing the street. She had us all picking caterpillars off the street so they wouldn't get run over. Then, she wouldn't ride her tricycle home until I walked in front of her and cleared the path of caterpillars. We had a pint mason jar and it was half full of caterpillars- we transferred them to the tupperware.


Our new caterpillar home!! We put in big sticks to climb on and I broke a branch off what I think is a cherry tree. Last I checked they had settled in and were devouring the leaves.


Close up of the caterpillars. They are cute! You can click the photo to enlarge it.


Our new hermit crab habitat! Everything in their habitat is new except the food dishes. We have 5 hermit crabs now. Wow, the ones we got were huge. They weren't even the biggest ones, ours were just smaller than we thought.


Hermit crab behavior is so neat to watch. The little guys have a surprising amount of personality. We washed all our hermit crabs and put them into the new home. Two stayed in their shells but Trevor's new one (on the bottom in the pic) started exploring, as did Rachael's (on the top in the pic) and Ariel's (the little one in the middle). Both Rachael and Ariel's we've had a while. They were not too keen on Trevor's crab. They came right up to him and did a little shell fight- maybe? To a lesser degree- no pulling crabs out of shells and minimal chirping. They both crawled on top of him. Trevor's sat in his shell until the others crawled off (they sit up there like 30 seconds, crawl down and crawl away like "Ha! So there!"). Then Trevor's would catch up to Rachael's (he ignored Ariel's after that) and crawl on top of Rachael's. This repeated for a solid hour. Yes, I watched them probably the whole time. Finally, I guess Trevor's got sick of this 30 second thing and crawled on top of Rachael's crab and sat there for our entire dinner. After that there were no more shell fights. I guess Trevor's hermit crab is maybe boss man in the tank now? I think they like their new home, they've been exploring it all afternoon.


Close up of Rachael and Ariel's hermit crabs gettin their shell fight on with Trevor's crab. ETA: Um, no they are not done fighting. I'm a little nervous this might turn into something more serious. They have been doing this since 4pm and it's 8pm now. Hmmm.. must do some research.

One more video- Ariel

This was a video I tried to upload before but couldn't. It's Ariel had Lake Fairfax. *I* think it's cute because she tries to make a "ssss" sound like a snake in the beginning. Then she chows down on onion grass. Rachael and Ariel adore onion grass.

Trevor talking about his lego creation

Trevor is obsessed with Indiana Jones and Legos. He built some structure with Indiana Jones in mind. I get to be clueless over a feature of the creation and Rachael totally knows what it is. heh.

Rachael is reading!!!

Rachael is reading!!! We've been casually working on a couple sight words and blending sounds together to make words. She reads from Trevor's phonics readers and we loosely (very loosely) base her lessons on the k12 lessons Trevor does. She is too young to have the attention span for all the work he does. So we focus on reading and less on syllables, breaking words into parts and rhyming. This is the third story in the first phonics reader- She has never read this story before today. Goooo Rachael!!!

Spring days means time to be outside!

We've been spending a lot of time outside the last few days. It's been sunny and warm. Trevor has been learning to play baseball with Ray, Rachael has been playing her soccer and they all have just been running around and pretending, playing and enjoying their newfound freedom. Today we went to Lake Fairfax. The goal was to find tadpoles. However, we just didn't see any. I don't know if it wasn't the right time or what but last year when we went we found TONS.

It was 86 degree today and so gorgeous out that we didn't let the absence of tadpoles stop us. We spent two hours there before getting a phone call from Ray and we jetted over to another park to meet him for dinner and playing at the playground. All in all, a nice way to spend our afternoon! Here's Lake Fairfax in pictures:


Finding water skippers and trying to catch them.


There, Trevor! There's one!


Ariel joining in on the creek wading. She didn't want to get in the water at first. technically, I don't think we are supposed to be wading in the water, anyway.


A snake!!! A snake! Oh, it's a snake... We saw this black snake heading down to the water (making this the second black snake we have seen in as many trips to this park). It saw us and got scared and froze. It froze so long that Trevor and Ariel lost interest. Rachael and i sat and watched the snake slowly make his way back up the creek bank and into the dead leaves again.


Hey! Look at the snake!!


As the snake slowly crept out of sight under the leaves, we thought we had seen the last of him. Suddenly, he started writhing and thrashing and flipping out! Turns out he ran into this little guy under the leaves as he was making his getaway. The black snake went one way and this guy (a baby black snake?) went the other way, saw us, turned around and headed under a tree root.


My cutie patootie, Rachies!


OK, I have video, too. I'll try to get it up, but blogger has iffy service in the evening. I really need to put this blog on our own server.

Air and Space museum trip.

We currently have Ray's parents spending a few days with us and what a whirlwind trip it has been! Friday we went into DC to try and meet Ray at his office. But the GPS in the car got confused by DC's crazy streets and couldn't get us there. We finally stopped in NW DC for lunch and Ray came out to meet us, instead. Afterwards, since we had paid 13 dollars to park in the garage, we just took the metro to the Air and Space Museum. We forgot the stroller so ended up carrying Ariel, who spent the entire day exhausted. Let's just say we all got an arm workout carrying her!


Grandma and Rachael walking to the museum.


Grandpa carrying Ariel. The museum was horribly crowded with school groups. Usually things are pretty empty during the week; I guess Fridays must be field trip days for schools.


Trevor and Rachael posing by a space rover thing. We also saw a couple other space exhibits and saw the IMAX feature "Cosmic Collisions". It was very good. The kids were scared the huge planets were going to run into them. heh.


Poor Ariel just zonked out. She was uncharacteristically exhausted all day. She walked briefly in the gift store. Then she walked long enough in the metro station to smack headfirst into a railing. She was so tired she fell asleep soon afterwards (no, not a concussion). We took a break on the way back to our car at the Starbucks. We needed a caffeine fix!


Rachael drinking her drink and partially eating, partially playing with her sour gummy space shuttles from the museum gift shop.

Legos and baking (but not baking legos. heh)

Trevor is on a huge lego obsession right now. He builds with legos all the time and just discovered the creator program on the computer where you can design your own creation and then actually purchase it. He has built a great many things, but not to actually purchase, just to have fun. Building them on the computer is a completely different experience than building with them in person as there is every lego block available under the sun on the computer. He made a little garden with lego food and all gated in this morning. It was cute. He usually builds battle ships and robots with his real legos. Here's a few of his creations..


Two lego guys battling it out. I think they are Star Wars guys.


Those are Star Wars guys and Trevor made various Star wars ships. I think they have battled and defeated the guy laying down.


More lego ships. One actually is a Star Wars ship he purchased with his allowance.


Baking! I made pie crust for a quiche and the kids took over the scraps. The shaped them into various things with our Christmas and Halloween cookie cutters or just freeform. I ended up making them a fresh batch of pie dough so they could make "cookies".


Rachael making cookies and sporting her Hello Kitty ears.


Ariel concentrating hard on rolling out the dough.


I sprinkled the dough with cinnamon/sugar before putting them in the oven. They came out quite tasty! I forgot to take pictures before we ate them, though.

Photo backlog..

Here's a couple picture posts since I'm behind. This was our wonderful Easter vacation in NC with my parents. It was also Ray's 32nd birthday so we celebrated that, too. The weather was supposed to be cold and rainy but we were pleasantly surprised with sunny days. It was a really good time for all of us and the weekend passed so quickly!!


Trevor looking at his Easter basket.


Ariel looking at her sheepie she got in her Easter basket.


Any easter eggs down here?


Heading to the park in NC with the grandparents. Easter day was a gorgeous day.


Ray's 32nd birthday ice cream cake. We had a fun bday for Ray. We went to see Horton Hears a Who, went out for a yummy lunch and spent some time at the park.