Growing Everyday

Along with Grandma and Grandpa Westberg, we took a day trip to Squire Boone’s Caverns. Squire Boone is the brother of Daniel Boone. There is a whole little kitschy town set up with a place to mine rocks, a bakery, and even a candy shop. To get to the cave you have to walk down a spiral staircase consisting of 73 steps. Now, it is dark and damp going down these stairs. The kids were very brave and with a little coaxing from Mom and Dad made it down into the cave. The cave was amazing. There was an underground waterfall that we walked over, rim dams, soda straws, and so many other formations. It was really worth the drive to see the caves.

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Beka and Jared have inherited a love of Fishing from their Grandpa Westberg. Grandpa and Grandma Westberg bought them their first rod and reel and will forever be their heroes because of it. Jared and Beka just love to go to the pond and fish. The pond in the neighborhood is wonderful for kids fishing. There are a lot of hungry little fish, so you never have a long wait between casting and pulling out a fish. Andrew gets run ragged putting worms on the hooks and taking fish off the hooks. I can put the worms on but I still haven’t figured out how to get the fish off. To give Andrew a bit of a break and to spend sometime together, Grandpa and Grandma came over to fish with us. I think a good time was had by all.

We caught a glimpse of a turtle while we were out there.

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Beka and Jared were bugging me incessantly to buy some worms so we could go fishing (which will be a different post). So we bought some worms, but in my house you can’t just leave the worms alone. We got the worms out, put some non-toxic paint on paper, and then the worms crawled through the paint to make a painting. To make an extravagant painting you would have to have much more patience than Beka and Jared can achieve.

While I was cleaning up the paint, Beka and Jared decided to have worm races.

And, just to prove that Beka plays with the worms just as much as any boy would. And bribe material for when she is 16.

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I posted on facebook one day that we were making elephant toothpaste. Steve Spangler has a great kid-friendly way to make it. We followed his directions and it worked out perfectly. Beka and Jared’s faces tell the whole story. We will definitely have to try this again sometime. It was a blast and actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.

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Beka and Jared are very close in age. So most things they do, they do together. Most things are grouped by age and when you are only a year apart a lot of the time you are grouped together. And with them being so close, I have a hard time telling one that they can’t do something the other one is doing.

But this past week, Jared to his utter delight has been at Sports Camp without his sister. He has loved it. Not just the time away from family, but the camp itself. The camp is through the parks department and every day for about two hours, the kids focused on a different sport. Jared did tee-ball, soccer, flag football, cheer leading (not his favorite), and several other games. There were probably 6 groups of about 8 kids. It was a big enough group to do the team games, but small enough that they could work on skills too. The best part….Jared has been happy and exhausted everyday when he gets home.

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Over the 4th of July weekend, the kids and went to Quincy to visit the grandparents. Beka and Jared had two requests for the visit. One, they wanted a pretzel from Auntie Anne’s pretzels. Two, we had to go play at Dewey School because they have the cool old school merry-go-rounds. We accomplished both of those. Plus, we made mud souffle a la worm. I, also, had the opportunity to visit with most of my extended family that I hadn’t seen in a very long time. It was a wonderful time.

In the picture below, Grandpa is pretending to go across the monkey bars, but he is really cheating because he is waaay too tall to actually have to work at the monkey bars.

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We traveled back to Peoria to participate in Richwood’s picnic. It was a wonderful day. We were able to re-connect with so many people and had a lot of great conversations. We really miss our church family there and were so glad they didn’t mind us crashing their picnic.

Jared was a little leery of going at first. "Mom, it’s juuuust a picnic." But then we arrived and there was a bounce castle thing and all was well. I think he spent most of the afternoon in there. Beka was all about the face painting. I felt so sorry for the ladies in charge of the activity…Beka basically stalked them until they painted her face. There were so many other activities: pinwheel making, beaded bug making, and balloon animals. It was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday.

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