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While traveling you eat at a variety of restaurants but usually the kid’s menus only vary slightly. Last week I read an article criticizing the high amount of calories in an average kid’s meal so when the kids browsed the menu at the Irish Pub we ate at I was not surprised to see a crazy fried concoction called cheese macaroni bites. They took the default mac n’ cheese and fried up spoonfuls of it to make little cheesy macaroni nuggets. Unfortunately the girls really enjoyed the chef’s creative creation.

My dad has been retired for about 9 months now. He has taken over some
of the household chores that my mom has been doing for 40 years. He
believes he has perfected many of the typical kitchen skills
including loading a dishwasher and making ice. His boasts would make
you believe that loading the dishwasher is a technical skill requiring
years of training. Many would think it is impossible to screw up
ice… not my dad. His ice cubes go through a thorough quality control
process. Ice cubes are rejected if they exceed a certain height and if
they crack up during the removal process.

Monti loves doing sewing projects with my mom. They decided to do a
quick project for Dahlia's birthday. Monti went through the attic and
found an assortment of metallic colored fabrics. She decided to make a
gold and silver birthday dahlia flower for her sister. Dahlia proudly
wore it all day in her hair.

Gabe told us that the mama polar bear is in the process of weaning her
baby polar bear. When we first saw them, the mother was trying to get
away from her son who just wanted a little food from his mom. Hudson,
the baby bear, is the tubby one in front. It looks like he has been
well fed.

The young volunteer program that Gabe has been involved in this summer had some great hands on experiences set-up around the zoo. In this spot kids were able to test different tools that represented a variety of birds beaks. The flamingo’s beak acts as a strainer to catch their food. Dahlia experimented with her flamingo beak to catch all the floating goodies in the water.

Brecken pretended he was a woodpecker fighting to get a bug out of a tree. His woodpecker beak consisted of a set of tweezers. He was a very patient little bird.

Gabe’s little girl cousins were so excited to see Gabe at work. He walked with us around the zoo on his lunch break.

It was Gabe’s last day working at the Brookfield Zoo this summer. We were disappointed that we never saw him truly in action.I know he would be great. This week he was named Young Volunteer of the week out of 90 working volunteers.

Someone once complained to me about truck traffic in Seattle. I could
only guess they hadn't ever lived in the Chicago area. This is a
picture from the toll road at 11:00 am on a Wednesday. We were in dead
stop traffic surrounded by trucks plus we had to pay for the privilege.

While we were camping we stopped by the picnic shelter to do camping
crafts. They had bowls of beads and pieces of Sassafras wood set out
on the tables. The Sassafras pieces are soft in the middle so you can
push a stiff wire through them. Everyone was given a wire to thread
their selected pieces on. We all ended up with very unique and sturdy
bracelets.

All the girls wore red, white and blue to the party. Monti and Dahlia
added cut outs of the Beijing Olympic mascots to the bottom of their
dresses to spice up their Olympic wear.