Graduation Sunday

We had an eventful yet relaxing graduation Sunday. I apologize in advance for the long winded post, it has been a while since I last updated the blog.

With the return of warmer weather we've been including more frequent walks, trips to the zoo, and bike rides into our daily life. Michaela is now riding a tag-a-long, which stresses Christine out when she watches. Last weekend we rode up to buy flowers for Mother's Day and rode to the zoo.

We cut the yard for the first time this year, needing to pick up all the sticks and disposing of them at the composting site from winter. A new spark plug and sharpening of the blades and the landmower worked wondefully.

My last exam is offered on Wednesday of this week, and another semester is nearly completed. Today we had graduation, and I was awarded the teaching excellence award by the student body. With a ton of nice wonderful teachers as colleagues I was very surprised.

What would a Malcolm Post be without birds? The past two weeks I offered a bird walk through the campus arboretum. I found 40+ species this last week and less than 30 two weeks ago in snow flurries. Unfortunately no one attended.

Today I woke up early and went for a walk, finding over 50 species of birds across the road next to the city's drainage ditch. It was the most warblers (both in variety and numbers) I've seen since moving to Marshfield. I came back home and sent Christine over with a camera to take some more pictures. Below are some from this morning.

May 1st Trip to Stevens Point

Today we bummed around Stevens Point. The first stop was the Children's Museum. Christine and the girls hopped out of the car and spent an hour there while I went looking for birds.

After I spent the better part of an hour I joined the girls at the Children's Museum. No great finds, but a nice variety of waterfowl and a flyover by a Peregrine Falcon. The girls love the place and went their own directions with two parents to look after each alone.

Michaela asked to go to the BIG McDonalds. The girls played at this location a while back, but were scared by the play area and ended up in tears during the last visit. This time they did well and went down both slides. Michaela was a real pro and a wonderful big sister, helping Danielle climb one particularly challenging step routinely to reach the top of the green slide. She earned an extra story tonight, which actually turned into three extra stories when the time arrived.

After returning home I realized that we've never transferred any photos from Christine's phone to the computer. Thus here is a slideshow of some phone pics. There is even one that begs the question of nature versus nurture...of Michaela holding a .....snake! (Don't look at this link if it will gross you out, it is removed from the slideshow though.)