Pismo Beach

The day before New Year's Eve, we found an owl pellet in our yard from the Great Horned Owl that hangs out in our tree.  I was way more excited than I should have been.  (I'd never seen a real owl pellet before.)  Basically, owls swallow their prey whole, digest everything possible, then cough up the leftovers.  We used some twigs to pull everything apart and see what the owl ate.  (Supposedly, you can reconstruct a whole skeleton this way if you're into that sort of thing.)  I'll spare you the suspense: it was a small rat (or maybe a big mouse.) The kids were a little grossed out, but they thought it was cool that we could find so many kinds of bones.  Then I sent them online where they could do a video game version of the same thing.  Educational, right?
  

  
Also, for his school project on fossils, Connor soaked this bone-shaped sponge in salt water for a few weeks to show how bones get replaced by minerals as they fossilize.  (It just makes a salty, hard sponge, but I think he got the idea.)
  

   
In mid-January we took our second family trip to Pismo Beach.  I really love that place.  They have a winter Monarch butterfly grove there, and a beach you can drive on.  It's the perfect kid beach because the slope of the sand is so shallow - the waves really don't sneak up on little kids like they do some places.  Connor played wave soccer, Elise overcame her fear of the water and looked for shells, and Evan got soaked.  Yay for January in California, huh?  Oh, and our hotel was amazing - we could see the water right from our room.  We even spotted a sea otter from our balcony.  The trip would have been perfect if Connor and Elise hadn't gotten the stomach flu.  They puked all over the hotel beds both nights we were there.  Oh, well.  We left a tip for the housekeepers.
  

Butterfly Grove

Sea Otter

Sea Otter Close-up

Evan would wake up in the morning and stand by the window, saying "Wah-wah" over and over again.