Flat Bear & Flat Rooster

 

Flat Bear & Rooster wanted to make it to see the lilac festival, but the mail wasn't fast enough for them to arrive before we left.  BUT- I took some "plain" photo's anyway.  Hope they enjoy!!  

The Lilac Festival is held in Highland Park and is a yearly 10 day festival that marks the beginning of spring.  There are over 1,000 different lilac bushes and over 500 varieties.  There is live entertainment, childrens' activities, and arts and crafts vendors.  Thousands visit every year.  The reports say that the weather and timing of the festival has brought out the best blossoms in 25 years!

 Purple pedestrian crossing, purple is the most common lilac color.

 See all of the vendors?  There are three and a half rows just like this.

 Here are some pictures of some of the things we saw.  This vendor is doing silk scarf dying.  Very cool.  And all yours for $25 each!

 This is what they looked liked when finished.

 A henna artists.  It lasts about 2 weeks.

 I thought this was great!   This man uses only forks as his art medium and bends them into all sorts of creations!  It is his sole means of income and he has been doing it for 12 years. 

 This guy- The Flower Guy was just walking around.  I asked him to pose, he pulled in my mom!!   It was her birthday!

 Chocolate covered banana's!   Yum.  You can make them yourself- very easy!

 Love these blossoms- they come right out of the branches..

 Back at home!!   This is our temporary home school area- the three season room.  Leona has Rooster and Lucas has Bear hiding beside his head.  I had to tell Lucas that Bear is a baby bear and only eats honey, because he was afraid!!

 Studying Penguins today!

 Our home school co-op classes are held in a church- not our home church.

 Here are some beautiful Lilac's!  See you didn't miss a thing!

 We hatched Painted Lady Butterflies and are gett8ing ready to let them go.

 We have 4 flat travelers right now- the most we have had at one time.  Rooster meets Rylie!

 Bear meets Lincoln.  Licoln & Rylie are from Canada.  Where they are from has been flooded and in a state of emergency for a couple weeks.  They are in the midst of moving!

 Miniature Ponies at the library!  We were super excited to get in from the waiting list to this program.  Our library does all sorts of fun activities. They are from Never Say Never Stables.

 This poor kid (part of their family) had the pleasure of demonstrating how a blanket and saddle goes on.

 They set up some games- Lasso the ponies.

 Horse shoes.

 Feed the horse.

 And then we all got to pet and brush the pony.

 They had face painting inside.  Leona wanted a pink and purple pony.

 Then they all got to make a farm scene.

5/14/13 

Leona set her butterflies free!   It was an amazing experience!  The kid's grass caterpillars were long enough to allow for a trim!!

 Bye Bye!!   Leona saying her last good byes!

5/15/13 Seneca Park Zoo

 Golden Tamarin

 The newest addition! Baby Tamarin.

 You can see how small the baby is in this picture.  When it was first born it was only as big as a mans thumb!

 Another new zoo Mom!  The Orangutan had a baby!

 This is the biggest, hairiest spider I ever saw!  sorry it didn't come out well.

 Rhino!

 The Lions!!

 Boarding the Safari bus.

 African elephants.

 The Polar Bears.  The zoo is hoping there may be babies soon!

 Penguins.  Did you know that the colored bands that are on their wings denote witch family each penguin is in. 

 Zoo Party Animals!

 River otter.

 Chipmunks all around!!

 5 /16/13  Abraham Lincoln Park- A natural play ground with fallen trees used for climbing equipment.

 These are huge bees that we have seen at the zoo and again at the playground.  They don't the slightest bit interested in people, but were all over the natural wood at both locations. 

 It went up to 82 degrees with high humidity, so I let the kids fill up some water balloons and have balloon fight with Rooster and Bear.

 5/18/13 Fairport Farmers Market.  We love going to the markets to get our fresh produce and locally made goodies.  We stocked up on locally produced cage free, organic eggs.

 Our take home this week was 6 dozen (yes, 6 dozen) eggs, a dozen gluten free cookies (for the men in the family), 2 dozen regular cookies made by the Amish (for the ladies in the family) Chocolate Peanut butter, and gluten free Blueberry crumb cake.  We'll be taking most of this on out trip to Pennsylvania.

 Later in the day, we dropped of some old towels, sheets and blankets at Lollipop Farm, the Humane Society of Greater Rochester.  They house a variety of animals from the typical domestic animals, to livestock depending on the need at the time.  They provide animal training classes, animal adoptions, petting zoos, as well as an open admission animal shelter. 

 At home, I discovered what ate the heads of of my pea plants!  This little guy.

 A park and play ground are just up the street from us, so we went up there to have some fun.  It's called Harris Whalen Park.  It is known for the great sledding hills that were formed by  a receding glacier. 

 While we were there, we showed Rooster and Bear a Geocache that we had found earlier in the year.  This one is an army box that they fashioned to a tree branch.  There is only enough room for a small log book and a few small prizes.  We traded out the prizes so that we could send Bear and Rooster home with their first Geocache goodies!  If you don't know about Geocaching, Look it up on this Geocaching site.

 Here is a picture of those hills!

 This is the one we went sledding down and I couldn't sit for about 4 weeks!

 What a pretty view of the moon!

5/19/13 After church on Sunday, We came back to the same park with some friends and happen to catch the Boy Scouts of America there doing a big rocket launch.

 It's hard to see, but just above the tree line, to the right of the girl, is a rocket parachuted down.

 Some of the late spring flowers- Trillium.

 Found another Geocache.  we had already found this one earlier in the year as well, but wanted to show our friend and her daughter what it was all about. 

 5/20/13 Lucas lost his FIRST TOOTH!!  He's only 5 and a half!!