martinzoo

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that phrase being yelled by a crowd from my tv while my husband watches his favorite basketball team, the Boston Celtics.

Rajon Rondo is the point guard and he’s quite the scrappy player.

But now the phrase gets to have a new meaning for me.

Meet our Rondo!

These are the two puppies that we had to choose from. The other puppies had already been snatched up. And believe it or not, one of Rondo’s littermates has been named Kobe. Are you seeing a coincidental trend? Rondo is the one on the left.

Rondo is a doxie-chon. That’s a hybrid doggie composed of dna from a dachshund and a bichon frise. I have horrible allergies and this is the only way I can have fluffy dogs. This picture is of Rondo’s mommy. She’s a miniature long haired dachshund.

Peatsy is still getting used to the little whippersnapper. But Rondo already adores him.

Rondo is probably the smartest puppy I’ve ever seen. The VERY first day that we had him, he learned how to use Peatsy’s doggie door. He has learned ‘lay down’, ’stay’ and ‘go get your toy’. We are working on ’sit’ and ‘come’. He has also been truly amazing about pottying outdoors. I had to clean up an accident today, but that’s because I had the doggie door shut and he’d been out of his crate too long. It’s an owner issue, not a puppy issue.

It’s been well over a hundred degrees every day this week and Rondo is not thrilled with the heat. But when the sun goes down, he just loves being out in the yard and fetching a ball or a stick.

My daughter, Tiffany, took the following pictures while we were at the swim meet the other night.

I mean, look at this face. Is he not the cutest puppy you’ve ever seen?

The nurses were so taken with him today at the vet’s office that two of them went and got cameras to take his picture. See! Even our Rondo has paparazzi!~

Last weekend, my friend, Holly, invited me along to the American Library Association’s annual convention, which was being held in Washington, DC this year. She told me and told me that this would be an unbelievable, amazing trip. And she was so right.

Our first chuckle of many came as we were exiting our hotel to go check in at the conference. We were staying in the middle of Chinatown. This sign, on the side of our hotel, advertising the Irish pub, flying the American flag WITH Chinese letters to translate, was far too funny to not capture on film.

Imagine this same picture, but ten times bigger. That is how big this place was. And it was filled with FREE books, authors and publishers. Everybody was peddling their books and the focus was on the nice librarians. But you know what I found out? This is a spectacular way to get tons and tons of free curriculum. When I told them that I wasn’t a librarian, but merely a book loving homeschool mom, they all sweetly told me that their programs were ‘perfect’ for homeschoolers.

I got a free month with Encyclopedia Britannica and a free month with Grolier and Learn a Test, which will come in handy. One other company that gave me a free trial was NBC News Archives on Demand, which I can use to retrieve film clips and transcripts of historical footage.  I also got a month with Mango, an online language class, AND Aha Chinese, so Cade can choose. We can watch hundreds of videoed science experiments, done by real scientists at Jove. There was a math program there that I could have tried, but I’m too much of a Math-U-See fan to switch, even temporarily.

This is Oscar, he’s from Emery-Pratt. He was totally hysterical.

I also met The Cat in the Hat.

And Darth and the Storm Troopers came to cart me away from the convention, since I wasn’t really a librarian.

Duff’s team from Ace of Cakes, brought a cake to celebrate the 90th birthday of Bound to Stay Bound Books.

They paid $5000 for this amazing cake!

I came home with 44 books for me to read, ALL free, and 14 books for Cade. I got 8 signed childrens books for the littlest kids in the family. And I got a few signed for people who seemed to go with the books. It was so cool to see all the authors and publishers. I met Jacques Cousteau’s grandson,Philippe, who has written a book called Going Blue, for kids who want to help save our environment and world.

But the highlight of the three days of bookful bliss was meeting Adriana Trigiani. I loved her book, Big Stone Gap. She was the warmest, kindest author there. She spoke in a personal way to everyone and genuinely thanked everyone for loving her books. Her newest book is called Brava, Valentine.

My friend Holly, is in the purple blouse, standing behind Adriana. We were both beyond thrilled.

Next year the convention will be in New Orleans. I wonder if I could swing it. I may have to wait till it comes back to DC.

Our next adventure started with a sweet surprise. We were out in the wilderness with only one port-a-potty, so needless to say, the line for it was quite lengthy. One of the moms couldn’t wait so she decided to take a small excursion into the woods. And she came upon this tiny little newborn deer.

She came and got some of us to quietly come peek. The children (and adults) were enchanted. And everyone behaved. Nobody yelled or crowded closer than necessary. When we came back from the cruise the deer was gone. It’s mama had probably been watching us and decided that this wasn’t such a safe spot.

Anyway, we boarded our research vessel and headed out.

This was a flat bottomed boat, so it didn’t go too fast. But they still wanted everyone to stay seated until we got to the testing area.

Very windy and quite chilly.

Our first station involved using a Van Door bottle to collect water from different depths. We had learned about this piece of equipment the first night we were here.

The two plungers on the ends close to trap the water inside before you haul it up to the surface.

Mikaela is sending down the messenger, which closes the plunger.

What seemed boring in the equipment lecture turned out to be fascinating upon implementation.

Once we had collected our water it was time to test it.

At the next station, the kids tested the temperature and the pH of the water.

Conner is gently tipping the test tube back and forth to mix the chemicals. Ava is supervising.

Then they all check on the pH tester to see what they have and record it on their statistic sheet.

Cade is using a refractometer to check the salinity and density of the water.

Did you know that if all the salt in the ocean were removed and spread out evenly across the Earth’s ‘land’ surface, it would form a layer more than 500 ft. thick?

At our third station the kids tested the transparency and color of the water using a secchi disk and a Forel-Ule scale.

In the final station they checked the water current direction and speed using a current cross, compass and stop watch.

At this point in the trip we were lucky enough to see a bald eagle chasing some other birds. They made a loud racket as the flew by. I guess the eagle was protecting her nest. I wish my picture was better.

When the water experiments were over, the kids and moms, with the help of the educator, threw out a trawling net.

After hauling it back onto the boat, everybody sifted through the contents to find more things to identify later. Check out Katerina’s get-up in the blue. She got so chilly that she put her sweat shirt on OVER the life jacket. We were all cracking up because she’s such a skinny little thing, but looked like a female version of the Hulk….LOL!

It was slimy work!

This was Captain Jimmy. He brought us in and out of the harbor safely. I think all the kids had a blast and learned a lot from this research cruise.

Next up: Micro and Macro Organism Labs

When we first began this adventure I wasn’t so sure about Cade’s state of mind. He was kind of grumping – he didn’t want to get wet, he didn’t want to get slimy, he was cold, yada, yada, yada. But boy, when he got into it, he got into it. It was the coolest part of the trip, I thought. We spent several hours wading through the tidal area to gather fish, crustaceans, sponges, mollusks, plankton and we even found a diamond back terrapin turtle.

(Andrew and Cade)

We used sieve boxes to hold the mud that we shoveled in and then sifted around to keep only the cool stuff.

(Conner and Cade)

The kids used the shovels to get VERY deep….LOL!

Cade couldn’t keep his hands off this turtle that he dubbed ‘Scratchy’ because it was trying to scratch his way out of the bucket.

We also got another chance to see the wild horses. This time we were up close and personal with them. The other day we were on a bus and our glimpses were quick.

The next activity involved using a seine net to trap some of the swimming creatures.

These children formed a chain across the channel and walked slowly towards the net, encouraging the water creatures to swim away from them.

And these children held the nets in place for the creatures to unwittingly swim into.

Once they came together they closed the nets up and dragged them ashore to see what they got.

Katerina and Mikaela learned how to hold a blue crab so that it wouldn’t pinch you.

All the critters were put into buckets and collection jars to be brought back to the lab and identified later.

Our next activity on the agenda was a trip to Tom’s Cove at the Assategue Island National Seashore.

Eric, our educator from the MSC, let the kids play in the touch tanks and then he gave a chat about the different critters in the tanks.

Have you ever seen these tubular, fuzzy things on the beach? I never knew that they were the home of larva conch. The egg mass, which can contain up to 400,000 eggs, grows in here and after time they break free to make their way in the big, bad ocean. Many of them don’t make it, which is why we find so many teeny, tiny ones on the beach. The ones that do make it grow into the big snail you see in Cade’s hand in the picture above.

We also learned about the beach and marshlands. The islands of Assateague and Chincoteague are slowly moving westward. This means that they’ve had to move the Tom’s Cove visitor center three times since it was built. The winter of 2009 was really hard on the beach and it was really devastated. This spring they began rebuilding the beach and maintaining the habitats of the creatures who make their home there. I got these photos from their website:

This is the traffic circle that leads to the beach from the entrance to the center.

This one is a picture from the high tide during a Nor’easter in November 2009. The water has totally flooded the parking lot, which is a good distance away from the beach. We had to walk on a long boardwalk to to get to the beach.

Even though we’ve been having temperatures in the 90’s, our trip to the Eastern Shore had chilly, breezy weather and the kids needed jackets.

This laughing gull let me walk right up to him and snap his picture. And he didn’t laugh at me – bonus!

As you can see, the beach is all cleaned up. They brought in a bunch of sand from the ocean floor and spruced it all up. It was quiet and clean. I’d love to go back with the family.

I love my homeschool group. We have such an amazing group of women who keep this group fresh and interesting for the kids (and the moms). One of the women in our group, Maureen, found out about this great trip to the Eastern Shore.

We came back from Disney and just two short days later I was packing for this trip. I was worried that I was too tired to get much out of this trip. Boy, was I wrong!

We went to the Marine Science Consortium, which is a residential environmental learning center and field station on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. We left on Monday.

One of the first really cool things we did was cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. It was selected by the American Society of Civil Engineers as “One of the Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World” in a worldwide competition following the Bridge-Tunnel’s opening on April 15, 1964. It is 17.6 miles long from shore to shore, crossing what is essentially an ocean strait. Cade and I were so excited while crossing that the miles just flew by. I thought that it was a pretty easy trip, even though it was so much driving. We only took two major highways, 64 and 13. And once we got on 13 it was like we had driven back through time. It was so quiet, with hardly any traffic.

Since I was still so tuckered out from Disney, we decided to spend the night in a hotel and resume our travels the next morning in time to get to the Consortium by 11:00. Cade always enjoys staying in hotels and this was a pretty nice one. The Eastern Shore isn’t the most modern place on Earth, I’m just saying, but this hotel was very comfortable and new.

Cade was quite disturbed the next morning to drive by the processing plants of both Purdue and Tyson. I kid you not, you could smell the blood in the air and it was nauseating. He had such a stricken look on his face that I almost pulled over to hug him, but I thought it was better to get him away from the area.

Luckily, he doesn’t dwell on unpleasant things too long. I did have to listen to a dissertation on the evils of factory farming for the rest of our trip. I was very happy to finally pull into the campus of the consortium.

Right now they are going through a major expansion. It’s the most adorable, small learning campus ever. It used to house military in World War II and then it housed workers from NASA which is right next door to the consortium.

Our dorms were brand new, as was the cafeteria. But the labs and offices were downright ancient. The instructors and the program director were absolutely awesome. And the whole time we were there we followed a well thought out schedule.

The first thing we did, after lunch and orientation, was to travel to the island of Assateague where we visited the Chesapeake National Wildlife Refuge. We watched a movie and learned about the Eastern Shore and their attempts to repopulate endangered species such as the Delmarva fox squirrel and the bald eagle.

Then we went on a bus tour to see the wild ponies of Chincoteague and Assateague Islands. Some people believe that the wild ponies arrived on the islands when a Spanish galleon cargo ship (with a cargo of horses) sank off the coast and the horses swam to shore. Others believe the wild horses arrived there via early colonial settlers who didn’t want to pay taxes on their livestock. Recently, in 1997, a Spanish shipwreck was discovered off Assateague Island, which lends credit to the first theory. In any event, the ponies have become well adapted to the seashore ecosystem where they feed on saltmarsh cordgrass, dune grasses, bayberry twigs, rosehips, and persimmons.

Most of the ride was filled with vistas like this one; beautiful green marshes, natural coastal forests and blue skies.

Many of us noticed the horses distended stomachs, and in fact, I had noticed the same thing when Cade and I went on the wild mustang tour in Corolla, NC. It turns out that it’s because there is so much salt in the grasses that they munch on.

Egret

Kristi, one of the moms that came with us was a very knowledgeable bird person and she kept pointing out all these cool birds. Unfortunately, their names went in and out of my ears. But they were really cool to look for.

We had dinner when we got back from the horse tour and then we went off to an equipment lecture. I’ve got to say that this was the only part of the trip that we didn’t like. The kids were too tired to sit in a classroom and learn about the equipment that we would use the next day. But we got through it, and when we finally laid our heads down we were out like lights.

Day 2 tomorrow!