Summer Break: The Last Week

Summer is winding down and school starts up again tomorrow. We had a tremendous amount of fun this summer, but I think we're all ready for the routines of the school year. Will put it perfectly last night when he said he was feeling nervous, excited, happy and sad. That's back-to-school in a nutshell.

Our last week of summer break was the perfect mix of busy and relaxing with a good sprinkle of celebrating too (Will turned nine this week, after all!).

Here's a peak at some of what we did:

Cub Scout Doughnut Ministry at church

Cub Scouts is one of our favorite things about the school year!

Building, building, building! Gene and Will made a robot spider and a model airplane this week.

We visited the science museum in Sugar Land.

And we volunteered at the food bank again. We were repackaging goods from massive boxes into banana boxes and then sorting goods by category.

Will spent Friday afternoon at a friend's house, so Henry and I headed out for some fun of our own. We ate frozen yogurt and played games at Chuck E. Cheese. Henry won 100 bonus tickets while playing Doodle Jump!

We headed to the zoo on Friday night for their Cool Nights. Unfortunately, it poured right after we arrived, so we really only ate dinner and saw a couple of animals.

Rainy day zoo visit

Good-bye, summer 2015! 

Summer Break: Week Eight

What a fun week we had! We got out and explored our city and had a blast. Here's a recap of our summer adventures this week:

Monday: The boys love to visit the downtown library (so many books!) so we headed there in the morning. On the way, we checked out three of the Houston Zoo's gorilla murals (there are five in Houston). These three are all located in downtown or midtown and they were commissioned in the spring to welcome the zoo's new gorillas to Houston.

Mural #1 by Anat Ronen, located at Richard's Antique, 3701 Main Street.

Mural #2 by Mario Enrique Figueroa, Jr., aka GONZO247, located at the Downtown Food Park, 1311 Leeland.

Mural #3 by Nicky Davis, located at 3100 Smith Street.

After filling our bag with new library books, we had a picnic lunch at Gramma and Grampa's and spent the rest of the day reading. Will just finished all four books of the Adventurer's Wanted series and now has Henry hooked on reading them! The two of them talk about books nonstop and I love listening in on their conversations.

Tuesday: The boys and I headed to the science museum first thing in the morning. They love pushing on the Kugel Ball, which weighs 5000 pounds!

Inside, we toured the energy and Egyptian halls and watched The Great Planet Adventures in the planetarium. We also saw this cool new clock with a grasshopper escapement.

After a couple hours of museum fun, we hopped over to the MFAH for lunch with Gene and to see Shadow Monsters again. 

Wednesday: We had an amazing half day adventure in the Heights! After a much-needed visit to Penzey's Spices, we checked out the last two gorilla murals.

Mural #4 by Michael C. Rodriguez, located at Jenni's Noodle House, 602 East 20th Street.

Mural #5 by Sebastien "Mr. D" Boileau, located at 2119 Washington Avenue.

If you haven't had a chance to check out the gorilla murals (or the gorillas at the zoo), they are definitely worth seeing. Henry's favorite murals were #1 and #5.

After seeing the last mural, we ventured into Glenwood Cemetery, just down the road. Glenwood Cemetery was established in 1871 and is a typical nineteenth-century romantic garden cemetery. It's funny to think that the setting was rural back when it first opened. It is a beautiful, peaceful place and many of Houston's prominent families are interred there, including the Staiti family (the Staiti House is located at The Heritage Society in Sam Houston Park).  

By this time, tummies were rumbling, so we headed back into the Heights to have a picnic lunch at Donovan Park.

I've driven by this park numerous times but we had never been. The boys absolutely loved it! It's a unique park with castles, bridges and lots to explore. We can't wait to go back again, maybe in cooler weather!

After the park, we visited the Art Car Museum. Who doesn't love art cars? They change their exhibits every 3-4 months, so it's definitely a place to revisit.

Our final stop on our funky art tour was the Beer Can House, decorated by John Milkovisch. There are some 50,000 beer cans used on the house! It is unlike anything we'd seen before and definitely worth a visit.

We ended our adventure with some frozen yogurt at Yogurtland.  

Thursday: We headed back to the Houston Food Bank for another volunteer shift. 

This time, we were repackaging brown rice into two-pound bags from a massive 2,222 pound bag! It was different from our experience last year but the boys enjoyed it just as much. We even got to wear super-fashionable hairnets this time around!

Behind the boys are some of the boxes we filled. The volunteers on our shift filled 289 boxes, each with 16 pounds of rice (8 2-pound bags), which is equivalent to 4624 meals for Houstonians in need. Wow!

We enjoyed volunteering so much that we are already signed up for another shift next month.

Friday: By the end of the week, we were all pooped, so we deemed Friday a "Do-Nothing Day," a term borrowed from Phineas and Ferb. The boys played games, read, played together, and relaxed. We didn't leave the house once! In the picture below, they were pretending to be robots and did whatever I asked them to, from drawing pictures to solving some complicated math problems.

Sometimes, after a busy week, a "Do-Nothing Day" is exactly what you need!

Summer Break: Week Ten

We had such a fun week, full of some new activities! I don't know about you, but even with 12 weeks of summer vacation, I still feel like I don't see and do everything there is to do in Houston. Our city is so full of activities for kids and grown-ups alike!

Here are some of the highlights of the week:

We made East Texas cowboy cookies one morning. They are yummy to eat but also fulfilled a Cub Scout requirement!

Speaking of food, did you know that kids as young as six can volunteer at the Houston Food Bank? The Houston Food Bank is the largest food bank in the country and it provides food to 179,000 Houstonians each week. We have supported the food bank through food drives and monetary donations for years, but I wanted the boys to see first-hand what the food bank does and get some hands-on experience helping those in need.

We spent three hours on Monday afternoon sorting groceries at the warehouse and the boys absolutely loved it! We were "second sorters" so we found gray bins full of pantry staples and sorted them into different categories, weighing our banana boxes as we went. Our shift sorted 5352 pounds of food, which will turn into nearly 4500 meals! Volunteering at the Houston Food Bank was a pretty rewarding experience for all of us and one we look forward to repeating in the near future.

Wednesday was George Hermann's 171st birthday, so we spent the morning at Hermann Park! George Hermann was an oilman and philanthropist who became a millionaire after the discovery of oil in Humble in 1903. He also operated a sawmill in what is now Hermann Park. Shortly before his death in 1914, he donated 285 acres of land to the city of Houston to create a municipal park. Today, Hermann Park is 455 acres and sees over 6 million visitors each year. It is definitely one of our favorite Houston spots!

We got to Hermann Park right before the zoo opened and spent a few minutes feeding the ducks on McGovern Lake.

  

What a beautiful part of our city!

We walked around the zoo for about an hour, and visited the enormous bugs,

Jonathan the lion,

and the new black bears. 

Then we headed over to Kinder Station to ride the train and celebrate George Hermann's birthday! The park offered $1.71 train rides, crafts, and birthday cake, though we never did find the cake.  

We also took our very first ride on the pedal boats.

It was a HOT day, but it was fun to pedal around McGovern Lake.

After two and a half hours outside in the August heat, we decided to head to the MFAH for lunch. After refueling, we checked out St. Paul's labyrinth, which is modeled after the 13th-century labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France.

Zigzagging to the center of the maze was fun.

We made it!

Our final activity that day was a visit to the library to get The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Will read the series last year, but he wanted to reread them, and now Henry's reading them too.

I love my little readers!

Thursday evening saw us out and about again. We visited Mid Main for their First Thursday evening event. On the first Thursday of each month, the shops and restaurants of 3500 and 3600 blocks of Main Street in Midtown are open late to support a select charity. 5% of proceeds for August's First Thursday events went to Young Texans Against Cancer. We started our evening with dinner at Natachee's Supper 'N Punch, which is a great spot for kiddos. Kids' meals come in vintage lunch boxes!

After dinner, we headed next door to The Tinderbox, which is an awesome store/craft studio that sells items hand-made by local artisans. I found some earrings and the boys found the free cookies from Michael's Cookie Jar! Then we found our way across the street to the Art Garden. Gene and I enjoyed the complimentary beer from St. Arnold's, the boys got drink pouches from Honest Tea, and we all played golf and cornhole. 

Hole in TWO!

A couple selfies.

First Thursday on Mid Main is such a fun event! We'll definitely go back.

On Friday morning, the boys and I ventured out to Bayou Bend for their Detective Days program.

We basically were doing a scavenger hunt and searching for trees in the garden, but we had a fair bit of difficulty as some of the gardens were not listed on our map and we just couldn't find some of the trees at all. I'm not sure if we're just not good detectives or if some of our clues had been removed! Nevertheless, the gardens are beautiful and we all enjoyed exploring outdoors.

Butterfly garden, the shape of a butterfly!

Detectives with their water canteens. 

Just to keep it real, some of our adventures end up being huge failures. Gene and I have been talking up the Houston Dairymaids for the past few months and we promised the boys a visit this summer to buy some cheese (and best of all, sample some in the store!)  We were so excited to stop by when we were in the Heights this week, but the shop was extremely fragrant that day and the boys' stomachs just couldn't handle the overwhelming smells. We had to walk back out before we even closed the door behind us. No cheese for us, at least not on this visit!

On a positive note, we found a red-bellied woodpecker on the oak across the street after our disappointing cheese-store outing. As Will said, a woodpecker sighting can brighten any day. Well, it can if you're bird-obsessed like some people around here!

Overall, we had an amazing week finding new things to do and see and explore in our city.