A Little Catching Up

 I mentioned the other day that my mother in law took us to dinner at the fancy restaurant on the lake.  I forgot I had these pictures on my phone.  The five year old thought he was pretty cool wearing sunglasses.

 The view out the window next to our table.

 Tuesday we had therapeutic horseback riding for the five year old.  He has been obsessed with cats lately - meowing constantly.  Bugga (his grandma) and I were trying to convince him to purr instead, but then realized he probably had never heard purring.  When we got to the horseback riding arena, Paws was there, and willingly showed him what purring was.

 Unfortunately then Paws thought he should just make himself comfortable on my lap and purr through the whole lesson.  We used to have a cat that looked a lot like this - her name was Polly because when she was little, she would sit on my shoulder in the rocking chair, so it was "Polly wanna cracker?"  She reminded me of the parrot.

 Lessons went amazingly well - better than ever.  He connected the bridle by himself, untied the lead rope, and led the horse into the arena completely by himself.  His helper was over at the gate - probably 15 feet away from him, letting him do everything himself.  He was pretty proud of accomplishing that.

 They played a sorting game today, going around the arena to buckets that had grooming tools in them.  He had to pick up all the tools that went in the red grooming bag, then weave his way through the cones to come back and put them in the bag.  He has been reluctant to do any reining on his own, but this week she showed him how to switch the reigns back and forth in his hands to reign with one hand.  He did it!  We were both shocked and pleasantly surprised.

 After they had all the grooming tools collected, it was time to sort them.  She gave him the option of getting off the horse to sort, or staying on.  He chose to stay on.

 So she showed him how to turn around backwards in the saddle and use the back of the horse as a table.

 Then they discussed which brush is used first, what each tool is for, etc.

 After the lesson, instead of tying up the horse like normal, they took off the saddle and reins in the arena.  He unhooked the reigns on his own.

 Sadie had been kind of itchy and they hoped she would roll in the dirt for him to see, but she waited until we were on our way out of the arena, and then hid behind some stalls where he couldn't see her.

Thursday morning the Forest Service hosted an event at the library to celebrate Smokey Bear's 70th birthday.  They told the story of the real Smokey Bear...

  ... and they had a puppet show about campfire safety.

 And then Smokey showed up.  The boys were too shy to go see him.  Neither of them would go so hi, despite the fact that the three year old told the five year old, "It's not scary. It's just a guy."

 After that, we dropped Bugga off at physical therapy and headed to the park.  It was chilly but we've got to get out while we can.  We saw an interesting X in the sky from where two planes had crossed paths.  The boys were very impressed.  :)  This is the biggest letter they've ever seen.

 It was interesting to watch it move with the jet stream too.  I guess I'd never really thought about those jet trails not being a fixed point.  The X was 90 degrees to the left of where I was standing to take this picture when we got to the park. By the time we were ready to leave, it had squished down and moved to in front of me.

See how far it had moved just in these two pictures?  That was 10 minutes or so.

 We had snacks at the park - chocolate milk and pretzel crackers.

 He was very excited to have a milk mustache and insisted on not washing before school, so the bus driver and teacher could see it.  Oye.