The Colorado Adventure

Another co-op class that went…okay. It’s hard to hold the attention of kids ranging in age from 2 to 15.

We talked about bones today; how they hold our shape and protect our organs. How bones are stronger than steel and harder than almost anything in our body (except our teeth enamel.) We saw x-rays of the skull, rib, and arm bones.

We saw a chicken bone that had no collagen left (and broke easily), and one that had no calcium. (The kid’s thought that one was great they kept shaking it back it forth amazed at how rubbery it was.)


We talked about what happens when you break a bone and how many bones are in our body (14 in your face, 206 in an adult body, 3 in your arms and legs.) We played a game where my helper M called out a body part and the kids had to step on the right number (once he called out underwear and everyone was looking for 0!)

We saw bone marrow in a microscope and saw a cow bone.

It grossed me out but the kids were touching the marrow and getting bloody glove prints, pulling at the periosteum and whacking the compact bone to see if they could make a dent in it.

We passed around some prairie dog bones and a bone from a deer that had calcified; we looked at these with a magnifying glass and saw all the little holes in the bone marrow. The last project was to make a model of a bone. We had white pvc pipe cut into 8-inch lengths, a yellow sponge, pipe cleaners and plastic wrap.

Grace’s bone is a little colorful in the vein department.

I should have cut the sponges longer, some kids shoved it all the way in the pipe and then we couldn’t see it (but they knew it was there and what it represented, so that’s all that matters.) I had bingo boards and bone fact cards for them to take home. Oh, and we measured almost everyone’s height and they took home a chart to put that on. Hannah also interrupted the class by needing a trip to the bathroom to change her diaper. She was very interested in looking at the bones through the magnifying glass, “Bone? Bone!” was her chant after that.

We are garbed up in purple tonight for the Rockies game 2.


We were going to watch it at the park, but everyone voted to stay home. Hannah can say, “Go Rockeeee!” it’s so cute.

Tomorrow it’s presentation club and a dome tour at the capitol. Looks like we’ll have another sunny day for that trip.

Today we went to some new parks that we haven’t seen yet. This is Chessman park. Here is Joel doing the ‘flying trapeze’ on the swings. Here is Hannah swinging. (video corrupt, I’ll have to try and re-load later.)
Here is a squirrel.

Here is me!

The trees are almost done for the season; this oak is hanging onto some nice yellow leaves.

Here is Bethany playing with the sand digger.

Not too great in the playground department, but, a nice open field to fly a kite.

Here’s Grace holding the kite for Joel.

When it was Hannah’s turn Joel said run and she never looked back.

We were yelling, ‘stop!’, but she just kept running with that kite. It didn’t have a very long string so once it got up you had to keep backing up.



After chasing the kite for a while we got in the car and headed to the Hungarian freedom park. It’s mostly this fountain and a grassy space.

We passed by the Sunken gardens park, which I thought might have a garden, but it was just a playground and a basketball court. I think once upon a time it was a garden. Then we headed down Colfax and met an interesting fellow at the gas station. He asked for some money to buy groceries with (because that would go farther than a Wendy’s hamburger.) We talked about the Rockies, his surgery and his new job. I gave him some money because, well, this time I had money (usually I don’t.) But here’s the weird part- as we drove off he was in the middle of the street and we waved to him, he waved back and then as we passed him, he was gone! He couldn’t have turned left because there was a lot of traffic headed his way. He didn’t turn right because we would have seen him. I think he was an angel sent to see if I would give someone food (or money for food.) The kids think so too, Joel was looking out the back window like, “Where did he go?” Bethany said he didn’t look much like an angel (and they are supposed to look like what?) Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. It started a great discussion on how we should treat people and how God wants us to help others.

Anyway, next we went by the $1 store and then to Wal-mart. We got back home just in time for the first pitch of the Rockies/Red Sox game. Now to all those fans, I hope you watched the whole game. Yes, we lost, but I watched the whole game. I think that if they don’t put Beckett in tomorrow we can win and tie it up. Remember though the Red Sox came back to get into the world series, so it’s not a stretch to say that we could win even if it goes up to 3-0. Tomorrow we’ll be watching the game from Skyline park just off the mall. We can’t get tickets, but we can get pretty close to Coors field to watch all of the Series games! Wanna join us?

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game 1 goes to the Red Sox