Children’s Museum of Richmond

My mom was in Virginia for a week attending meetings for work. We drove up to spend part of the weekend with her. It was wonderful to see her again. We are looking forward to their visit in September. While in Richmond we drove around to see some of the historical statues and monuments. We were a little limited on time so we decided to check out the Children’s Museum and then the Museum of the Confederacy. We didn’t make it to the civil war one, the kids were so involved in all the different activities at the children’s museum that we couldn’t pull ourselves away from it. It was a really neat place.

All of our kids love art so they were thrilled with all the art projects available to them.

Xander’s favorite parts were the apple orchard where he could ‘drive’ the big farm truck and kick us out at will…he would tell us to “go paint!” (back to the art area) and blow us a kiss good-bye! Picking the apples was fun too. He also spent a lot of time at the various water tables.

This was really neat, it was called the ‘Shadow Play’ they had butterflies, water falling and wiggly worms on these screens and when your shadow crossed it it did really cool special effects. If you held really still the butterflies would actually land on you or rather on your shadow just like in real life. And the water would pile up on you and then flow over you like a waterfall. It was awesome!

Other big news…First day of School (feels like we just finished…)

July 17th found us waking early, packing lunches and backpacks, scrambling for last minute items, like shoes… The schools we chose for the girls are year round schools. Susie started 6th grade at Tucker Creek Middle School, home of the mustangs! She was pretty excited about that, there is a large statue of a mustang in the school courtyard. Becca and Katie are at Arthur W. Edwards Elementary school starting 4th and 1st grades. Becca has been very vocal about how she did NOT want to go to this school. We stopped in several times getting paperwork filled out before school got started. She would say, “It’s old, it smells bad, there are no lockers, the cafeteria is in the gym…” on and on whine, whine, whine… the girls have been extremely spoiled by attending Edith Bowen. Well, we were all anxious for the first day to come and go. I picked them all up feeling more nervous than they seemed when I dropped them off. They all had a wonderful first day of school. WHEW!!! They were very excited about everything and Becca has not complained once since then! Xander on the other hand asks all morning “pick up sisters?” “go drive mom” and he doesn’t even put up a fuss at naptime because he knows when I wake him up it is time to go pick up his 3 favorite toys, I mean sisters!

Well that about wraps it up for now. I guess I could be diagnosed as homesick if you count how many times I check my email every day hoping to hear from someone…anyone… that is a hint by the way…Thanks to those of you who have responded to these letters, we love hearing from you!

Our thoughts and prayers are with all of you.

Jamie