My Early Mother's Day Gift

I thought I had done a pretty good job of hinting to Stuart about what I wanted for Mother's Day.  But when he mentioned something about flowers and chocolate covered strawberries I knew I hadn't tried hard enough.

He was thoughtful and all but this year I was looking for something a little less traditional for a Mother's Day gift.  I told him I liked his ideas but I like things that last a long long time.  He paused for a moment and then his face lit up when he thought of Color Me Mine where the kids have custom decorated pottery for me in the past.

Oh, how I love gifts from the kids from Color Me Mine.  But no, not this year.  I told him that I liked things that lasted a long, long, long, long, long time.  Nicholas caught on first and shouted "fossils!"

Yep, I'm all about fossils this year so I want a rock hammer for Mother's Day.  What???  That's not what you were planning to give your mom for Mother's Day???

Stuart took today off to just have some fun with the family and go to a homeschool book fair with me.  But first, we decided to stop by Nature's Gallery in Carrollton so I could pick out my own rock hammer gift.   Yay!  I love this place.

Nature's Gallery is a great place for anyone who loves rocks, gems, and fossils.  There are lots of them on display and for sale.  You will also find a selection of books and supplies for the collector.  Of course, I found my awesome Estwing rock hammer there.  I'm so excited!

While we were there we bought a big geode for the kids.  We love that they will let you take the geode home to crack open or they will use their press and crack it for you right there in the shop.

We opted to let them use the press on ours.  How cool!


Next we headed to Arlington for the bookfair but since we were all getting hungry we stopped at Simply Burgers for lunch.  It is neat revisiting places we used to hang out at back when we lived in another town.  We ate a Simply Burgers probably once a week when we lived there and this lunch tasted just like I remembered it.  Yummy!

We finally made it to the homeschool book fair.  This bookfair comes once a year and includes about 250 vendor booths selling all kinds of homeschool curriculum and supplies plus they have a full line up of speakers covering all kinds of topics related to homeschooling, organization, marriage and family.  Wow!  But somehow we let the day slip by and we only had about 1 1/2 hours to spend there.  That was really probably enough since we did have both kids with us.

I had a great time looking at books and finding out more about companies I had never heard of.  We found a  neat program for teaching etiquette that I intended to buy but somehow we never made it back to the booth. We spent a lot of time at the J.M. Cremps booth...an adventure store for boys.  We got a beginners whittling kid, some paracord, a book that we will be using in Konos that I can't find at our library, and two sling shots.  Yep, most of that had nothing to do with homeschool.  Maybe the whittling could be wood shop?

I got excited at the booth that was all about science.  They had buckets of owl pellets to explore and lots of cool things to dissect, even some fetal pigs!

The fair was just about to close when we stumbled upon Midwest Bioservice Company that was selling new and refurbished microscopes.  A whole table of different microscopes!  We oohed and aahed over them but the announcement came over the speaker that the show was closed.  We started to leave but then magically got pulled back to the microscopes and swooped one up for ourselves before they kicked us out.  It is an awesome microscope by Swift (the "Nikon" of microscopes or so we are told).

I'm almost as excited about the microscope as I am about my Mother's Day rock hammer.....nah, the rock hammer really rocks!

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