Party

Two of Grant's buddies from school had a joint birthday party at Marbles.  Their class is all boys, and they broke out in a crazy game of tag:
 

 

 

 

 

 

Museum Adventure

Kyle and Grant had MLK off, so we went on a family trip to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.  It was our first time there, and it made me so proud to be a resident of NC!  Love this state and that museum!
 

The whale bone collection was incredible:
 

More whale viewing:
 

Checking out some frogs and carnivorous plants:
 

Next time I'll have to write down the name of this creature and take more pictures, because this was Kyle's and my favorite exhibit.  It was some sort of gigantic tree-eating beaver/armadillo type mammal that was native to North Carolina millions of years ago.  It sort of blew our minds that this giant creature had existed and we had never heard of it and knew nothing about it (...and still don't know it's name, doh! **Update! Kyle found the name: "Megatherium" aka Giant Ground Sloth**).
 

This dinosaur atrium was another great room (I had to be sneaky about taking Grant's picture--he'd given me explicit instructions on the drive over not to take his picture).
 

 

 

Looking down on the dino room:
 

Checking out some giant germs.  Grant was concerned these might make him sick.
 

Watching a scientist at work:

Afterwards, we caught the end of the MLK parade and went to Beasley's for chicken & waffles.  Grant's favorite part of the trip was watching a silent movie about the Titanic and when we asked Hayes about his favorite part of the day: "Waffles!"

Hello "Snow"

After last winter being snow-free, the boys were so excited to hear about our overnight forecast of 3-6" of snow.  Unfortunately, it just snowed a couple of inches, then it turned to rain, and then it froze.  The ground looked fairly snowy from their windows when they woke up in the morning, so they raced outside and were very confused by the crunchy, hard ice (which is actually what I remember snow looking like the few times it snowed in Texas).  They checked it out for a few minutes, attempted to pick it up to make snowballs, crunched around in it, and then headed back inside to hope for something fluffier before winter ends.
 

 

 

Mall train

Our mall doesn't have a train,  so the boys built their own.

Butterfly Release

Despite our many trips to the Durham Museum of Life + Science, we'd never made it for a butterfly release until today.  The boys watched the staff member gather the butterflies...

Then they waited incredibly patiently for the butterfly keeper to place one on each of their hands...

It really was amazing to see them wait so long...

Grant's first one flew right over to Hayes' shoulder...

I've never seen such patience and gentleness from Grant.  He had a clear-winged one that flew over to me next...

Then Grant and Dylan both got butterflies that didn't want to fly away...

We waited several minutes and snapped lots of pictures before the boys finally had to nudge the butterflies off onto some leaves so we could get going before Hayes got too handsy with the new butterflies.