This week I got out the paint with water books for Adelaide to 'paint' in.  She loved it!

There has been lots of Civil War themed activities going on.  Gavin set up this reenactment of Pickett's Charge on the train table.

We went to the park to play in the creek.

The boys build a canal (we drove next to the Erie Canal for a while on our journey).  You can see the canal on the left side of Austin.  Then they were sailing their acorn 'ships' down the canal to see if they'd make it or be grounded.

As we were leaving the park we saw a flock of about 15 turkeys.

Adelaide had a bad diaper rash so she went pantless for a couple of days.  But even she got in to the Civil War spirit.

She spent a lot of time being the drummer girl.

Yesterday, Gavin and I went to a special Civil War exhibit that just opened at our library.  When I walked in I thought it would take about ten minutes and we'd be done.  An hour later we left.  I was sitting on the couch playing on my phone watching everyone else come in and out.  Gavin read every exhibit and watched every video they had about each battle that took place in Missouri.  He had a great time and I was glad we went.

While we were in Gettysburg we stopped at a hobby shop that just sold stuff for military scenes.  I'm sure there's a name for it but I don't know what...kind of like hobby trains but with army people.  Anyway, we saw where they had set up some battle scenes and thought we might be able to replicate it. So, we found  piece of scrap wood in the garage, bought a roll of fake grass at Hobby Lobby with a 40% off coupon and hunted around the neighborhood for some good rocks.  We glued the grass down, then used spray glue to glue across the board and spread some sand on top that we found in the garage left over from other projects.  We brushed of the access and Gavin ended up with a really nice road (he really wanted a road for some reason).  At first we were going to hot glue the rocks down but I suggested leaving it so that he could move them around for different battles and he agreed that was a good idea.  Here's what we ended up with.

Gavin is very excited about this and has big plans on making more.  I'm pretty sure when he grows up his basement is going to be nothing but little battle scenes like this one.  At Hobby Lobby they had kits where you could make cliffs and stuff.  I told Gavin to start saving up his money because these hobbies get expensive really quickly.