Science in our Backyard

There was a gigantic web connected to our house the other day. We decided to leave it and look at the wonder of the web. This unlucky dragonfly was caught and we had the privilege of watching the spider wrap her web around it and then suck the juice out of it for dinner. Aubri's reaction, "Cool! That's so awesome." Gavin was really hoping it would be a radioactive spider that would bite him. No such luck so far.

The next day we were able to watch this beetle morph out of its' shell. Gavin noticed the changes in the wings each time we looked at it. It finally flew away once it turned dark.

Pretty cool disgusting stuff.

We are also working on our own ant farm. No tunnels yet but hopefully they will appear in the next few days.

She loves me yeah yeah yeah

Strategic Bedtime Routine

Lately we've been getting more sleep than usual. Micah's finally sleeping through the night and Aubri sleeps through the night most of the time. Gavin always sleeps like a rock. The bedtime routine has been an experiment since day one and is constantly evolving depending on the phase of the particular kid, and of course it got more complicated as we added more kids. Aubri is still the trickiest one of the bunch as she has my sleeping disorder of being a night owl and an insomniac. We've started attempting to have her skip naps, which makes it easier at bedtime, although she starts the "melt-down" at about 4pm on those days.

Once a week, Sara gets away from the house for an evening, and I get the privilege of attempting to get all three kids to sleep before insanity sets in. My routine sometimes hinges on whether or not Aubri took a nap that day. If she napped, she's the last one to go to bed; if not, she's usually the first.

On my most recent attempt, it was a day that Aubri napped. My plan then is to get Gavin in bed by 8pm, and make sure he's sleeping by 9 before I put Micah in there (they share a room). If I ever put Micah in there before Gavin has entered his deep slumber, my plans fail. So by 9 (usually), I then get Micah in his jammies and feed him a bottle in his room. This usually only takes 10-15 minutes and I make sure to get a video going for Aubri so we don't have any abrupt interruptions.

So I pushed in the VHS tape on the VCR for Aubri and headed to the bedroom with Micah. During this time, Sara came home and saw Aubri working out to a Kathy Ireland workout video! Apparently I didn't look at what video was in the player. She quickly grabbed the camera and got a little bit of footage before Aubri spotted her: