Last Saturday we went to the Audubon society’s annual raptor weekend. Lots of raptors including: a Gyrfalcon; an Eagle Owl; a Bald Eagle; a Kite and a Baird owl and others. As you can see Li Li was able to get inches away from these awesome birds. Besides the live raptors they had lots of activities throughout the Audubon center. We went walking on their boardwalk down to the beach and got see to see many great examples of funnel web spiders along the walkway. We stopped to tap a web and watched the spider come scurrying out of the funnel to look for the latest victim.

Li Li was a little scared by the owls at first.

We also spent an hour dissecting an owl pellet. For those of you who don’t know. Owls don’t digest the bones, fur and feathers of the animals they eat.

Li Li conducting her first dissection. You can see the little rodent bones and fur on the plate.

 So they collect them all and cough them up in a tightly packed chunk about the size of your thumb. We got to dissect one – It was Li Li’s first dissection and she really enjoyed teasing apart the pellet and picking out the bones.

This is a european eagle owl. It looks a lot like a horned owl.

Despite the rain it was a good day and we spent about 5 hours hanging out with the birds.

On a different topic. The blog back-end has been updated so the updates should be more frequent and may even include video. More on that later. -t

LiLi is becoming quite a good helper in the kitchen. She can clean lettuce, take the skins off of garlic, take the ends off of asparagus and crack eggs. However, she has not done a lot of baking because that is not my forte. This weekend, however, we made whoopie pies and LiLi enjoyed every step of the process. We made the cakes on Saturday and as you can see below, she really enjoyed tasting the batter. Then we frosted them on Sunday. Initially, she had trouble with frosting the cakes and her first couple of whoopie pies were a little skimpy on the icing but as time went on she got better and better. Here is LiLi enjoying the fruits of her labor(actually, the only person I know who does not like whoopie pies is my mother).

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LiLi, Thom and I went in search last weekend for parts for my Australian grill. You have to know that I love my grill but it is no longer made and the company that made it is under new management and there customer service is lacking. Anyhow, because it is australian and no longer made and I had to get a new flame tamer type, I have spent the last 2 months on the internet trying to figure out what I need because none of them big box stores carry anything remotely similar. I finally decided to see if I could find a store in Massachusetts and I did up in the Braintree area. So all three of us headed that way(I am not sure why all of us had to go but it did end up being a nice day). We told LiLi that we would take her somewhere special after going to get mommy’s grill parts. We hit the jackpot, I found all the parts I needed to rebuild the inside of my grill and some great customer service.
Then we headed over to the mall which has a Lego store. As I thought, LiLi loved this store and spent at least 45 minutes playing with the legos and looking in the little windows to see the creations. The problem was that the holes where slight too high for her to see into so I had to lift her at an odd angle or when I turned around she would be precariously standing on the shelf to look into the window. I think her favorite part of the store was the back wall where they had all the small legos that you could buy. She has the duplos but seems even more intrigued by the smaller legos. We ended up getting a large building base and some zoo animals. While we were in the Lego store, Thom suddenly remembered that there was suppose to be an Asian supermarket in the area and he found it on his phone(sort of, it is a good think I have a map book in my car). We decided to head over there and have lunch and then go shopping. We found out there was a China Pearl in the same shopping plaza so we ended up having Dim Sum. I happened to look over at LiLi during our meal and there she was with the body of a fried squid inside her mouth and the legs dangling on the outside chewing away and looking around the restaurant at all the people trying to get someone to engage with her. It was quite a sight. Unfortunately, when I tried to take a picture with Thom’s phone the moment had passed. After lunch, we went shopping and then headed home exhausted.
Since that trip, I have a grill that once again works as fabulously as it is suppose to work and we are continually tripping over huge Lego creations made by LiLi. It was therefore a fabulously successful trip.
Random picture

Aunt Brett called me last week to tell me that she had found a new dress pattern for a kimono dress that she thought was perfect for LiLi. Because of her fabulous ability to choose fabrics, LiLi was delighted with the creation(well that and the fact that it has purple in it which is her favorite color.