Lately: Rain, Rain and More Rain

This May has been the rainiest one I can ever remember! While we are thankful for the cooler temperatures the rain brings, everyone in Houston is ready for a few dry days.  

Here are some highlights of the past week:

We found the first cherries of the season at the grocery store. We love summer fruits!

Gene and I celebrated our 11th anniversary last Friday. While my folks watched the boys, we enjoyed dinner at Sorrento, one of our favorite restaurants (we celebrated our second and seventh anniversaries there as well). Fun fact: Disneyland's 60th anniversary was also on May 22!

Saturday night saw us out at the science museum for another members' event. We viewed the new Hamman Hall of Texas Coastal Ecology.

This boy is enamored of sea turtles right now. A kind lady heard Henry talking about turtles and suggested we take a trip down to Galveston to visit the NOAA Fisheries for a sea turtle tour. It is now on our summer/fall to-do list!

Monday was Memorial Day and we had a free morning, so I suggested a hike at the Houston Arboretum since it wasn't raining and it wasn't too hot. Fortunately, my crew is almost always up for an adventure. It was a great way to spend a spring morning.

Henry loves trumpet flowers

and roly polies!

We ended Memorial Day weekend with a cookout in the backyard. Henry also received a very special gift (a 15th century Portuguese coin) from a Portuguese friend of Pop's. Pop's friend was taken with Henry's research of Henry the Navigator and sent this very unique gift to him. Henry was thrilled and it is something he will always treasure.   

Some incredible storms sat over Houston Monday night, causing major flooding and closing area schools on Tuesday. Fortunately, our house and street remained dry and we were safe, so the boys and I took a bike ride around the neighborhood in the morning. We saw evidence of street flooding nearby and the school playground had turned into a lake!

Here's hoping to some dry days in the near future!

Lately: Getting Out and About

Last weekend started with a bang, literally, as Henry ran into a playground pole (again) at recess on Friday. I got a call from the school nurse just as I was heading out the door to meet a friend, and instead of visiting the MFAH with my friend, Henry and I visited the ER! Fortunately, the cut was just below his eyebrow and they were able to use Dermabond glue instead of stitches. This sweet boy and I were starving after all of that, so we popped into the Corner Bakery for lunch afterwards.

And then, because I wasn't taking Henry back to school, we decided not to waste our free afternoon together and headed to the zoo in the drizzling rain! It was perfect because the rain sent most folks home and we just stuck to mostly indoor exhibits (plus the meerkats and sea lions, who didn't seem to mind the rain!). 

Fruit bats.

Even though having to visit the ER is no fun at all, Henry and I turned what could have been a miserable day into a really fun afternoon.

By Friday evening, the rain had cleared up just in time for us to head to the science museum for a members' event.

We enjoyed Chinese food and visited the new exhibit, China's Lost Civilization: The Mystery of Sanxingdui. The exhibit was fascinating and afterwards we all made masks like those found at the archaeological site.

Despite a very rainy week, the boys and I have been getting out on our bikes as much as possible. We bike around the neighborhood and usually end up at one of the nearby parks. One of our favorites these days is the "Treehouse Park" because it's not crowded and the kids have plenty of space to run and play their games (which somehow involve me being a blue crab!?!).   

The boys enjoy biking so much that we even biked to Math and Science Night at school on Tuesday!

We're hoping the rain lets up a bit this weekend so we can squeeze in a few more biking adventures!

Summer Break: Week Three

I truly enjoy summer vacation with my boys. Our days are full but our pace is generally more relaxed and we get to do all the fun things we don't always get to during the school year.

Summer vacation is 12 weeks long this year and the first two were spent in Portugal or re-adjusting to U.S. time, so I'm picking up with our activities from last week (week three). After lugging my big camera all around Portugal, I happily placed it in the cupboard at home and only took it out a couple of times. Phone pictures are not half as good but they sure are easier! (I didn't even break out my camera on Father's Day, which we enjoyed with all of Gene's family.)

Right after we got home from Portugal, Gene treated us to a complete Portuguese meal! We had soup of the day, broa (a dense cornbread), linguica, olives, Portuguese wine and even salt from Aveiro on the table. It was delicious and we all joked about how excited we were to eat Portuguese food before 7 pm!

The clean-plate club.

Monday was our first day to really get out of the house and the boys requested a trip to the zoo. They both had some specific animals they wanted to see, so we visited the komodo dragon, primates, elephants and sea lions. It wasn't insanely hot and we even ran into some good friends!

We love Tuesdays because they are full of cheap entertainment: dollar movies and kids-eat-free-at-Ikea. We saw Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (despite the fact that the boys watched it four times on the airplane!) and then ate meatballs at Ikea. 

On Wednesday, the boys tagged along to my monthly breakfast with friends and then they started their first swim lessons of the summer! We're at a new swim school this year with hopes that we can continue swim into the fall.  

On Thursdays in the summer, the MFAH has activities for kids, so we got our passports and did some sketching in the galleries.

It wouldn't be summer without bike rides. On the way to the park, we first heard and then saw a hawk in a tree that was being attacked by blue jays! Of course it reminded us of our hawk from last summer.

Friday morning was our first visit to the neighborhood pool. We met up with some friends there and ran into more unexpectedly -- the best part of our little neighborhood!

Our weeks are falling into a predictable pattern of planned activities in the morning followed by a quiet afternoon at home with piano lessons, library visits, bike rides and swim lessons sprinkled in in the late afternoon or evening. Summer is always a much-needed break from the busy-ness of the rest of the year and it's off to a great start so far!

The Weekend: Museums, Art and Bikes

Our three-day weekend was the perfect combination of busy and laid-back. Gene was out of town until Sunday afternoon and then had to work on Monday's holiday, but the boys and I got out to two museums and spent a lot of time outside, enjoying some beautiful spring-like weather.

On Friday night, we headed over to the Health Museum to check out their new Microbes exhibit during the members' preview party. My boys are fascinated by microbes so it was the perfect exhibit for them! We learned about good microbes, like yeast,

and nasty ones like germs that cause diseases. The exhibit is very hands-on, with lots of buttons to press, doors to open, games to play, and phones to pick up.

The preview party also included some hands-on activities, like looking at microbes through a microscope. The boys even rubbed their fingers on petri dishes and brought them home. The germs from their hot little hands are growing, growing, growing! 

On Saturday morning, I took the boys to the MFAH to check out two exhibits. Earlier in the week, they had Hands On Art at school, where they learned about sculptor Alexander Calder and made fish mobiles out of wire and "found" objects.  

Henry's fish:

Will's fish:

At the art museum, we checked out Calder's The Crab from 1962, which is right in front of the museum.

Inside, there were two exhibits that I wanted them to see. The first is a digitally animated wallpaper by Christopher Pearson in the Pattern Repeat: Wallpaper Then and Now exhibit. This wallpaper, inspired by a William Morris design, is projected on the wall and is constantly moving and changing. The boys loved it, as I knew they would.

The other exhibit is Antonio Berni: Juanito and Ramona, which I wanted them to see because Berni, an Argentinian artist, used found objects in his assemblages, just as Calder did (and in fact, they were contemporaries). Berni's assemblages are huge and created out of trash and everyday items.  

The boys' favorite part of the exhibit were the 3-D monsters, which haven't been displayed outside of Argentina in over 50 years.

After visiting the art museum, Will requested a trip to the library to find books about diseases -- inspired by the Microbes exhibit at the Health Museum, of course! This child is now an expert on all sorts of illnesses and can tell you your risk factors, should you be interested in that kind of knowledge.

Sunday and Monday were gorgeous days here in Houston, so we took full advantage of the sunny weather to get outside and ride our bikes. 

On Monday, I packed a lunch, and we rode way to the other side of West U for a picnic at Colonial Park. (Will specifically asked if we could ride to the farthest park from our house, and since it was 75 degrees out and sunny, I couldn't refuse!) We spent two hours outside, riding and playing and truly enjoying our day off from school.

I have so much fun with these little boys, and having an extra day off from school is always something I look forward to. The only thing missing was having Gene around for all the fun.