Golden Gardening

Image credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann

UP & AWAY: The first thing I did this morning was check to see if the Shuttle Endeavor launched and sure 'nough, it did! A day late, due to weather, but that's not a significant delay. With us set to head to Florida in May to see a launch, we're keeping close tabs on all the launches between now and then, hoping the schedule holds.

IN PLACE: This morning, it was back to workbooks. Today's tasks included some spelling and writing exercises, followed by math dealing with place values.

As a soundtrack, inspired by yesterday's truly super Super Bowl I played football-related tunes for the kids, including the College football on CBS, NFL on Fox, NFL on CBS themes.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?: Visited the Web site of textbook giants Harcourt. There, we did a few of their online lessons. One lesson was about making inferences based on activity depicted in a drawing. Another was about drawing conclusions, where the kids were either shown a picture for which they had to infer what was happening or they were given a riddle to solve. Each time they got an answer right, they earned a star for their detective badge.

GREEN SCENE: We returned to our Monday field trip tradition today. Our destination: revisiting Golden Gardens, where we spent about 5 hours on Saturday as part of a volunteer Earth Corps work crew. This time the trip was for pleasure/leisure.

In addition to our work crew duty, we'd been there a couple of times before, but just to the beach right by the parking lot. Today, we ventured to parts of the (enormous) park we'd never seen before, including the northernmost part of the beach. There's, it's very much like being at a beach along the Pacific Ocean in Oregon or Washington. There's the same type of grasses and sand and even some small sand dunes. Down by the shore, the kids tossed rocks in the water and Christian tried to skip a few stones.

Next, we looped around to a marshy area with a pond full of colorful waterfowl and then we jogged all the way back to the southernmost part of the park, where there's a public fishing pier. Standing there, we could hear a sea lion barking.

Then it was into the car and we drove up to the upper park - where we planted trees and shrubs on Saturday. But before we went to inspect our handiwork, we let Kirby have her first experience ever in an off-leash dog park that's on Golden Garden grounds. While the bigger section of the park was full of huge canines, the small dog pen was empty, which I think was just as well since it was Kirby's first go round at a place like that.
Naturally, she was hap-hap-happy to tear around the place. The kids played tag with her, as well as hide and seek.

Finally, we took a hike to find some of our handiwork from Saturday. CJ and Annabelle were total troopers on Saturday. They stayed focused and really worked the entire time we were there.

Together, our family probably put around a dozen plants in the park ground on Saturday. It will be fun to revisit "our" plants in future trips to the park to see how they're growing.