Category: Family

Last week my husband was out of town so I planned something fun for the kids and I every day (Fun Mom Alert!!) On Tuesday we got to have a really unique experience; we went to see Crunch at our local children’s museum, the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery.  (We have a membership to the Boonshoft, because it is such a great deal, and this was a perfect week to go because it was SO HOT outside!)  Who is Crunch, you might ask?  He’s this guy:

Crunch is a 165-pound Alligator Snapping Turtle and he is over 150 years old.  He was rescued by a reformed turtle trapper in 1979.  He looks really unique, almost pre-historic, and the kids and I LOVED seeing him.  I’ve never seen anything like him!  It’s hard to tell exactly how big he is from this photo, but he is HUGE!

Before meeting Crunch, I had never even heard of Alligator Snapping Turtles.  Here are a few fun facts:

• They are native to the USA and are found ONLY here. Good ol’ patriotic Crunch!!
• They are endangered, and the large ones like Crunch are extremely rare because they were hunted for their meat
• They have NO natural predators.  So, humans are the only reason they are endangered.
• They have ginormous scary claws that they use to tear up their food
• They don’t SWIM!! They just walk along the bottom of the water’s surface.
• They have this cool worm-like appendage on their tongues that they use to catch fish.

  

If you live in the Dayton area, you need to get to the Boonshoft before August 4th to visit with him. I highly, highly recommend spending some time with this big guy – he is just too cool and rare to miss!

You also don’t want to miss the opportunity to have your eight-year-old take a picture while you photobomb a 150-year-old turtle. This is the stuff memories are made of, people!

If you have an animal lover, science lover, future zoologist, or just little kids like mine who love to see a really COOL animal, head on over to see Crunch at the Boonshoft!  Make sure you read about his story and the hours he’ll be on display here.

What’s the coolest animal you’ve ever seen?

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The Boonshoft Museum of Discovery sponsored this post.  We are thankful for their continued support of Mommin’ It Up and our community! All opinions about the Crunch exhibit are my own, as is my museum membership.

Emily,

I was thinking about your birthday and about you in general and I realized that you have the distinction of being my very oldest friend. Not by virtue of age, of course, since I hang out with a ton of geezers, but I am pretty sure you were first on my friendship scene. After waiting those 20 l-o-n-g months between our birthdays, I not only got a cousin but a friend for life.
So happy birthday, a day that is truly worth celebrating, since you have affected my life in so many good ways. Not the least of which is that I know the difference between “affected” an “effected”. I love you cousin! Thanks for putting up with me all these years instead of dropping me like a hot potato and starting a blog with someone you met in preschool.
xoxo
Jenny

Yesterday we had sort of an untraditional Easter.  First, we committed sacrilege by attending church on Saturday night instead of Sunday morning. Now, we do this every week as our church has a Saturday night service, but it did feel a little odd not to be going on Easter Sunday. It did, however, feel veeery nice not have to run around Easter morning to get ready for church!  Instead we had time for a little egg hunt in the house.  The big kids enjoyed it very much.  It started at 7:30 a.m. when they bounded out of bed and downstairs like a herd of wild donkeys, and ended about two minutes later. (I only hid 16 eggs total.  Do I need my kids hopped up on sugar for the next three weeks? NO, I do not!)

Later in the afternoon, we headed over to my Grandma’s house for a late lunch. It was kind of weird because my parents took off for their “second home” in Virginia last week, and my brother and his family joined them.  Since the last thing my other brother wants to do is spend Easter with his favorite sister (and procurer of his razors and deodorant, I might add), they spent Easter with just my sister-in-law’s family.  So there was a very small crowd at my Grandma’s.  Nevertheless, my children were very entertaining and adorable.  Even though this was the best picture I could get of them:

We did get some super-fun playtime in with Jonah at my Grandma’s as well. Her coffee table is the perfect height for a game of ball! You want to watch this, it’s 15 seconds of ADORBS!

Finally, we left my Grandma Brads’ house and headed for my Grandma Burns’. The other weird thing about Easter is that we weren’t having a big meal there, since there really weren’t even enough people to cook for. So we just had dessert, which was excellent. I had great fun hanging out with my favorite cousin Anna, since her sister (whose name starts with an E and ends with a y and has an mil in between), who was formerly tied for favorite cousin, had better things to do than to join us. Her text message on the subject said, and I quote, “I was napping”. PLEASE!

{Side note: Don’t worry Mackenzie and Shelby, you are still tied for favorite cousin on the Brads side.  But let’s just keep that betwixt us, if Donovan finds out I’m afraid he’ll have a hard time finding something to live for.}

So, Easter was a wee bit weird, BUT!  We made it work, we spent time with what family deigned to be around us, and most importantly, we remembered that the grave couldn’t hold Jesus. Can I get a WHAT WHAT!?

That was our Easter! How was yours?