He Collects Sea Shells By The Seashore

This past Christmas, we went to visit Frodo's parents. They live near the beach, so of course we had to go walking and collect shells on every walk. I wish I had taken pictures of the kids' collections before they pared them down! There were thousands of shells, urchins, corals, and even a starfish spread all over the floor of my in-laws' garage... and the place smelled like fish! And there was sand. Lots of lots of sand. Everywhere. Have I mentioned how much patience my in-laws have? Lots and lots of patience. Lots. Almost equal to the volume of shells and sand that was spread over their garage floor for three days in December.

This is all very interesting, you are probably thinking. But why are you mentioning your Christmas trip and patient in-laws now? It's May. This all happened four months ago!

You have a very good point. First of all, I have been very remiss in updating my blog these last 4 months, so I have a lot of stuff that has been piling up. This is one of those things, and when I am overwhelmed with lots of real work to do, I will amazingly find plenty of time to share the backlog of events here. However, this post is not as untimely as it seems because...

Terzo and I just got around to mounting his (vastly pared-down) collection a couple of weeks ago. He chose his favorite items (we let each kid bring home their favorites from the garage floor with a max of 50 items each; the rest were returned to the beach), looked up the items online and in field guides, typed labels, and glued them into the frame. Because we mounted them with hot glue, I did most of the gluing and he did all of the sticking for each item... but you get the idea.

He cannot wait until we paint his room this summer so that we can hang the display on his wall.

Good job, Terzo!

This was not only an excellent school project, btw (not that he thought of it as school; too much fun!). He also needed to mount a collection for display as a Cub Scout project. I love educational multitasking!