Last Space shuttle launch(or not!)

A few months ago I found out that there was supposed to be one last shuttle launch, and it was going to be a night launch on my birthday. So, since I had not yet gone to see a launch, I decided I wanted to go. It wasn't easy to get tickets, there was a lottery, but I was selected and we got tickets. They postponed it once, so it's not my birthday and not a night launch either, then after we spent most of a day at Cape Canaveral, it was postponed again. We decided it was fortunate we lived fairly close, since there were people visiting from other places who would not be able to come back for the launch.

Shakespeare's birthday

Sunflower theatre students helped to put on a Shakespeare birthday celebration at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach. Part of it involved dressing up, and there were so many lovely fairy wings to use.

Chickens in math class!

Way back before K, I found a sale on a math curriculum with froggy manipulatives. Every once in a while I'll take it out to add variety. The frogs have cute little logs that allow for grouping by tens. Then we had to weigh some of our new chicks. They look pretty silly at that in-between stage.

Checking out the new surroundings!

Weighing chickens using frogs...

We can't see in the back!

Take me to your leader!

New chicks!

We picked up 9 baby cochin chicks from our cochins today. Apparently the red had escaped, so these are from the little blue cochin roo. We also lost both the orpingtons sometime last year, so it's been a few months since we've had any chickens. She knows we can't have any roos, so she picked out one that definitely had roo characteristics. Hopefully we have a better ratio, no.

Miami Seaquarium mammals and mating turtles!

We attend a homeschool class at Miami Seaquarium, bu I generally don't stay in the homeschool class with the little girl, and often end up going the the Top deck show to observe the dolphins. After the show, the trainers tossed some balls into the pool for the dolphins to play with. They were able to toss them pretty well.

Later I ended up at the tropical birds section, which include some tortoises. Some were a bit busy.

After the class Cowgirl has time to see the killer whale show, and it's always a game to see whether we sit in the splash zone or not. The water from this tank is cold!

Camping at Jonathon Dickinson State Park

We went camping with a few friends at Jonathon Dickinson State Park. Our one mistake was getting a site at Pine Grove. There's no shade there. Apparently there had been fire or storm damage to the trees. It was like camping in a field. But it was still fun, we just spent all our time down by the water(or in it!)

Pine Grove site

This tree had the sand washed out from under it!

Owls out during the day!

Getting a new inflatable kayak ready

Paddling down the river

Dictionaries - Not enough words!

I have had this particular dictionary for at least 15 years, and I have finally reached the conclusion that it's not very helpful. It's a Viet-English, English-Viet book, but I've found that having both directions in one book makes the set of words included rather limited. Also it's copyrighted in 1975, so I'm sure there are new terms that are missing. I bought a Viet-English only book from Vinabook.com, and it is supposed to have 175,000 word/phrases. In truth, the way Vietnamese is used a lot of concepts are actually expressed using 2 words, so the V-E/E-V dictionary has definitions for the individual words but not so many phrases. I had to start using the V-E book recently because there were words in our 1st grade Vietnamese curriculum that I could not find in the other dictionary. 1st grade words! Not in the dictionary! Now I know I need to get an updated English-Vietnamese dictionary too.