Sea Monkey Castle

There's one of our little friends, just floating around the castle.  His name is Nicolas, and he's one of the at least three sea monkeys we can see floating around the castle now with our naked eyes.  A magnifying glass sure helps though.  In fact, that's what Daddy used to take this photo:  he put a magnifying glass in front of the camera and snapped a few attempted shots.  It's neat that you can really see them in there - Madison wanders over to their castle aquarium from time to time.

She also goes over to check out the ant farm.  Want to see it?

As you can see, the network of tunnels is much more expansive now.  The ants are generally more active at night time, although you can see a few stray workers doing some clean-up during the day.  Those must be the "third-shifters."  But I just now noticed something - maybe they're trying to spell out something with those tunnels - a message to the other ants outside?

Maybe that's just my active imagination.  Surely they aren't calling out for help, are they?

One more note from the "farm."  We'll take photos in a bit, but we moved the hanging chrysalides (yes, that's a real word).  They are now safely hanging in the butterfly tent, where we also placed plenty of branched-out twigs for the young butterflies to perch on.  Madison and Daddy carefully hung them on the sides, and in two cases, we used dot glue to fix them to the ends of twigs, hanging down from the center (this was because they fell off the paper ceiling earlier).

Anyway, today was a day to seriously rest.  There was a little bit of work to do towards the service tomorrow, but everyone is largely wiped out from a very intense week where many of us got very little sleep.  Fortunately, last night we were able to sleep.  One of the guys working hardest of all this week was Josh - he is currently sleeping upstairs as I type this (and it is already 1:00 in the afternoon).  He basically did not sleep Thursday night, and got very little sleep the rest of the week as well.

Later on...

Here's a photo of the guys in somewhat of a traditional place.  We always head to this Mexican ice cream store on the other side of Gainesville.  It has absolutely delicious flavors of ice cream there - Daddy got himself some pina colada and pineapple, and Madison got chocolate as usual.  She's really excited about chocolate ice cream - it's her new thing.

ANOTHER thing we did was this:

We went to see the Lorax.  He was there at Lakeshore Mall, and has evidently grown somewhat.  Also, he's a lot quieter.  Daddy couldn't resist an opportunity to take Madison to meet the Lorax, and as you can see above, Madison was alright with it too!  Just afterwards, we even worked together to make our own commemorative Lorax plate set!

Madison did a good job with hers!  We hung around for some storytelling, as there was a girl dressed up as the Cat in the Hat telling various Dr. Seuss stories.  It was a fun atmosphere, and a good idea by the folks at this mall.  Earlier, they had Iron Man there - we missed him, and Daddy is kicking himself for that.  But we got there today to see the Lorax, which was fun for both of us.

After that, it was time for a bit of work.  We set up for the day tomorrow, and pretty much went straight to bed after that.  It was a long wait, and time for long summer nap.