journey: a lovely afternoon

after a long day at home where the hours seemed to stretch and we'd already done everything there was to do (including reciting and acting out nursery rhymes like "walking through the jungle," "one potato, two potato," "5 little monkeys," and more, bake spring flower cookies, trace and color in a favorite page from bernard most's book "if the dinosaurs came back" we headed down to our beach to blow bubbles.

the conditions were just right and the wind blew them up toward the hotel villas on the beach.

ezra called out, "go higher bubbles, go higher! come on wind!"

we drew in the sand. i made numbers out of dots and ezra connected them.

we also walked all the way down the beach together over those rocks and to the white buildings you see in the distance and back. when we returned our friend and neighbor amanda and her dog layla came walking by.

at first ezra was wary of layla, but amanda showed him what a friendly dog she is.

she is what they call a coconut retriever - an island dog that amanda and her husband jamie adopted since moving to st. maarten where jamie goes to school with michael.

amanda is a super friendly gal as you can see here. i wish she had been my neighbor the whole time we've been living here. it was just what i needed yesterday to have an afternoon chit chat with this other lady while ezra threw layla bits of coconut to retrieve, (she really does retrieve coconuts!)

and dug a hole in the sand,

and barked at the cat that sailed by (hee hee)!

ezra had a good time too!

on our way back home we saw some of the hotel cats and said hello.

"hi kitties! meow, meow, meow."

then ezra said, "look at those ants mama!"

can you see just above the blue tile's upper right corner there is a group of worker ants carrying something back to their queen at their nest. science lesson for the day ✓.