wild (life) adventures

I've been so busy with end of the (CC) year stuff that I did not have time to post about our back yard wild life adventures last weekend!  We started the day last Friday with a cat rescue from the neighbor's tree.  This poor kitty had been stuck up there for more than 48 hours.  Both the fire department and animal control said they don't rescue cats from trees :( and that eventually he would come down on his own.

This gives you a better perspective of exactly how high up he was in that tree.

Finally, after we had listened to his pitiful cries for two whole days his owners found him and brought their ladder for a daring rescue.  It took some coaxing, but I am glad to report that the rescue operation was a success!

Then, that afternoon the boys discovered a swarm of honey bees in our tree!  A quick google search led me to a local bee keeping couple who had already relocated one swarm that day and said they could come right away to help with ours!  It was a field trip in our own back yard!

So this is what 15,000+ bees looks like when they are protecting their queen and waiting for their scouts to find them a new home.  Pretty amazing!

The bee keepers got all suited up, climbed up the ladder with their vented Rubbermaid, and started shacking the tree branch.

A lot of bees made it into the box, but a lot fell on the ground or stayed in the tree, so they got out their bee vac and started vacuuming up the rest of the swarm.

They said they were pretty sure they had gotten the queen because so many of the bees were all over the box - the bees are drawn to the pheromones the queen releases.

Bob and Susie were so patient answering all my many questions and not minding us all standing by and watching the whole process.  It really was fascinating! 

last day of CC

I just realized I never published this post!  Oops!  Anyway, I am back dating it and posting now!
 
Yesterday was our last day of CC!  The past two weeks have been spent in a flurry of end of year activity including Memory Master proofing, End of Year Celebration planning, Tutor gift sewing, and other misc. things.  Over the past 6 weeks the kids have been making bridges from straws, rubber bands and clay, and egg boxes for an egg drop out of popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and napkins.  Thursday they got to test out their creations.

These were hard projects for my class of 8/9 year olds as the adults were not supposed to help.  They still had fun doing it though.  I don't have any pictures of Regan and her friend Emily's egg box, but apparently theirs won the campus wide contest!

Here's my class with their bridges...

For the end of year celebration our class sang the president song and (most of) the kids dressed up like one of the presidents.

I had such a great time tutoring these guys this year, they were a super fun bunch of kids :)

thank yous

Its that time of year again.  I've spent the last week sewing lots of end of year thank you gifts! 

This is just 11 of the 13 bags I sewed.  I used this pattern.  I am sure I will make more of these, they were pretty simple to make and turned out really cute.