White Sands National Monument

A week's worth of exercise in 1 hour.
Out in the middle of nowhere are these massive flaky white sand dunes. Next door is a military missile testing site which temporarily shuts down sections of the area every day for testing. While at the nearby petroglyph site we saw two different jets fly by and a minute later heard the massive boom of a blast.

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Home to thousands of petroglyphs, this site was a fun stop. We made it through most of the route. We turned back when a step toward a large rock by Bailey signaled a warning rattle.

Ruidoso & Cloudcroft

These two little mountain top towns were crisp and cool and really hard to leave. Our stroll down a Cloudcroft trail was made even more exciting after passing several "Bears have been sighted in the area today" signs, although if you were to ask, the kids would probably say they were more hoping to see some mountain lions.

Bottomless Lakes State Park

These giant sink holes are spring fed and have a system of underground tunnels that take the water to who knows where. Really. No one can figure out where the water empties. When we got to the state park, we were the only ones there. It stayed that way for nearly 3 hours- we had the entire lake to ourselves.

Roswell

A real place that really believes aliens landed. There is an honest-to-goodness museum that scientifically documents the alien events that occurred around Roswell. And down the street, there's the Alien zone, where you can pose with these creepy guys... We ate at the spaceship themed McDonalds, stayed at a nice hotel whose sign was held up by an alien, and got gas with little aliens looking down on us.

Dinosaur Valley State Park

The first stop of our recent road trip was here, southwest of Fort Worth. It had a number of nice swimming spots and great ledges to jump from. We stopped to watch a couple of paleontologists who were making molds of some recently unearthed dinosaur tracks. Jack, after crossing several swift moving parts of the river by balancing nimbly on slick rocks, declared "I'm good at this!"

Back to (Home) School

Getting MY classroom ready for another homeschool year.  Since it's super helpful for me to not have to create EVERYTHING I want to use or display in our school room, I'll post some of the things I end up making.  I love finding shortcuts courtesy of others willing to share so any of the images marked "Ten Feet Tall" at the bottom are mine, and you can copy them. Since I don't need 20 kids to see what I put up on the walls, regular ed. posters are usually bigger than I want (although I do have some that are great) hence the recreation effort onto standard size paper. Hope it's helpful!

Trey and Bailey were selected to perform in this year's talent show.  After much deliberation, they chose to perform "Dynamite".  They did a great job and by the end of it had the whole school singing along.  They've already started planning for next year.

Trey and Tyler played both soccer and baseball this spring. Too hard to choose, we let them do both knowing that spring soccer is pretty relaxed. Tyler once again played on the team I coached as well as practicing with and regularly guest playing for 2 other teams. This meant that with occasional double headers, he played as many as 5 games in a single day.

And what do Jack and Bailey do during all this? Jack is perfectly content with a bag full of super heroes, cars, and a ring pop and sno-cone from the concession stand.

Bailey was never without little gal pals who also tagged along to big brothers' games. It meant frequent play dates with some of her best friends from school and girl scouts. Not a bad way to spend an evening!

Well, June finds us Rickers busy with nothing.  I've kept our summer clear of all the usuals to allow for all the unusuals that tend to pop up.  Other than Merit Badge camp that Tyler will attend next week, we don't have anything firmly planned.  So far, for the 2 weeks we've all been home together, we've visited the library, played at the fountains, museum hopped, hung out with the local astronomy club to view Venus, fed police horses, played at the beach, and super thoroughly organized our game room.  The kids are enjoying their weekly piano recitals, late bedtimes, and lots of dad time.

New page design.  Proof that I am working on this. I'm giving myself one week to get up to date.  You'll be sick and tired of us by the time you finish going through all of the posts that are about to come. 

Date With My Girl

For Christmas, my sister and I decided to take our girls and mom to the Houston Ballet's performance of the Nutcracker.