Collect Acorns Day

September 16 is Collect Rocks Day.
Before school, I wrote messages on the kids' sandwich and snack bags for them to collect.  "Have a rockin' good day."  "You're a rockstar!"  "You rock!"
After school, I mentioned to Nichole that it was Collect Rocks Day.  She said, "Oh, that's why you had the word 'rock' underlined on all those notes."  I guess she didn't look at the calendar this morning.
While the older kids were at school, Jr. Jr., Lucky, and I went to Highland Glen Park.  We remembered how last year we went on a big walk on Collect Rocks Day.  It has been too rainy lately to make a big walk like that again (didn't want to get caught in the rain too far away from shelter on the walking path) so we stuck to walking around a place where we could get back to the van easily enough if it started raining hard.  The boys had fun at first collecting rocks (we remembered to bring a baggie to put the rocks in since it was such a success last time) but after a while they discovered... ACORNS!

Forget rocks.  Let's collect acorns.  Jr. Jr. started calling the holiday Collect Acorns Day. 
They had a blast with that.  I had a blast watching the terns flying around the pond and diving in to get fish.  And discovering a new bird I did not recognize.  I first heard it while we were on the opposite side of the pond.  Some sort of chittering critter.  Finally when we had walked around to the other side, I saw it sitting in a tree chittering away.

Jeremy later identified it as a belted kingfisher.
You know I like bird watching.  It was a gorgeous morning for it.

Once again we left the rocks and the acorns at the park when we went home.

This evening for Collect Rocks Day, Jeremy had some special presents for the kids.  They unwrapped them and found... rocks.  Well, fossils.  Each child got a group of 6 fossils from the gift shop at the Museum of Ancient Life.

The kids were very interested in them.  Lucky mostly because he could take them out of the container and put them back in again and nobody told him, "Don't touch those.  Put them down."  The other kids enjoyed comparing their fossils to their siblings'.

It was a good day for collecting rocks and acorns and pictures of birds.  I even got some videos of terns diving into the water.