End of the Summer Excursions

On August 12, Gramma, Cousin Chloe, Kate, Maggie and I took a trip to Berkeley to the Lawrence Hall of Science.  This was a special field trip for Camp Gramma.  We had a ton of fun exploring all the exhibits and experiencing a 3-D movie about the Deep Sea Challenge and 2 presentations in their planetarium about the eclipse and the stars.  

One of the biggest hits was this 2-sided peg board.

Ready for the 3-D movie!

This was a neat experiment....if you hit the drum hard enough it makes the purple flag blow in it's wind.

Making movies 

The scenery outside was a perfect backdrop to lunch.

This DNA sculpture created quite a fun climbing area in which all 3 girls spent a huge amount of time going from one end to another.

Can you spot Kate next to this blue whale? 

Human body puzzle

Feeding a tortoise dandelion leaves 

Experiencing the grip of geckos 

Shortly after we were playing around with the gecko activity we entered a room filled with exhibits all about movement....solar powered planes, air plane simulators, remote-controlled hot air balloons, etc.  One exhibit especially caught Kate's eye...the hover disk.  This particular exhibit had a long line for parents to push their child on this large hover disk around a small arena.  Once it was Kate's turn she begged me to go faster and faster and to spin her around.  Before I knew it, I lost control of the hover disk and it came swinging directly into my toe and this happened...

I dislocated my big toe and now I am required to keep my toes taped and in a special boot for 6 weeks to allow the tendons to heal and to prevent it from popping back out of place.  This certainly made our trip memorable!  Gramma drove all the way from Berkeley to the Woodland ER with me icing my toe and trying not to think about the pain.  Praise God she was there to help me!!!

A week later, we decided we needed to get out of Davis for our last weekend of summer so we headed up to Tahoe, puppy and all.  Penelope was a bit nervous about the car ride, but she made it through, cuddled up on my lap.

Penelope decided she LOVED Tahoe and all the exciting things to sniff and explore.  Since she is still a puppy, we kept her on a leash the entire time outside so we spent a lot of time walking around the cabin area with her tugging on the leash to keep going.

Kate and Maggie spent a lot of their time helping Papa work on the creek.  They moved dirt, threw rocks and placed large branches to help dam up certain spots to encourage a good flow of the creek.

Kate LOVED the purposeful work.  She had so much fun getting wet and dirty.

A girl and her puppy

Exploring

Swinging with Gramma

After Gramma and Papa headed back to Davis we headed to Heavenly for some fun.  Both girls got to do the big trampoline. 

Maggie did so many flips in the air while jumping.  She was so proud of herself. 

After Heavenly, we went miniature golfing.  We had so much fun doing the dinosaur course.

After miniature golf, we stopped at our favorite pizza place for dinner.

When we got back home from Tahoe, the very next day was the solar eclipse.  Camp Gramma was all about the solar system this year so the last day of camp was watching the solar eclipse.  Gramma bought the girls special glasses to watch the sun.  It was a very cool day!

Kate and Maggie even made solar eclipse picture frames to remember the day!