My Kids Ate Crickets On Two Consecutive Saturdays!

There...now that the headline has gotten your attention, I'll elaborate.

It's finally time to start blogging about March. And it's only March 21st, so I have tons of time to get caught up, right?? To be fair, the first half of the month hasn't been terribly eventful...mentally, we were all preparing for Spring Break. The girls and I crave Spring Break as a respite from the busy school schedule; Nathan welcomes the opportunity to sleep in a little on the weekdays, in a week without early-morning seminary teaching.

Without volleyball, our weekends have gotten somewhat less hectic. However, it is March in southern Arizona...one of the nicest seasons of the year in our neck of the woods. As a result, the first two weekends of March both managed to be fairly eventful. And both weekends, by an odd coincidence, had our girls eating chocolate-covered insects! Among other things...

Weekend #1

On March 7th, our LDS ward's Relief Society scheduled a trip to Mesa, Arizona, so we could visit the temple there and do an endowment session as a group. As a rule, our ward schedules these ladies' temple trips about twice a year, and I am always happy to go! I don't have much to say about the trip itself; it was a wonderful chance to visit the house of the Lord and take some time for quiet meditation, instruction, and prayer on behalf of my loved ones. There were about seven ladies who went, and it was wonderful to talk to all of them and get better acquainted with them. I sometimes think of myself as a "tomboy" or a "loner," but the truth is that I really enjoy the company of the Relief Society sisters and I welcome the opportunity to feel the Spirit of the Lord with them on occasions such as this. After the temple visit, all of us visited Cafe Rio for lunch, then headed back home. We made it back by mid-afternoon, just in time for me to prepare a salad for our dinner with friends that night.

There, that was my Saturday; now let me show you what Nathan and the girls were getting up to while I was away.

We'd recently become members of the International Wildlife Museum, a small museum in west Tucson containing hundreds of taxidermied animals, in a variety of poses and dioramas. It's a fairly low-key destination, but our kids really like it. On March 7th, the museum hosted an Outdoors Day, in which they organized a bunch of additional activities designed to encourage visitors to experience the great outdoors. Nathan decided to take the girls to the event, along with Grandma Barrett...after a delicious chili-dog lunch at Pat's Drive In, of course!

It was a busy day at the Wildlife Museum; apparently, a lot of visitors had decided to bring along their vintage cars to show off as well.

There was also a tent set up inside the museum (to simulate the "great outdoors"?? Hmmm...odd), but the girls of course used it as an excuse to roughhouse...

They also goofed off amongst the museum animals as well.

Since this was a special event, there were opportunities to look at some live bugs, like this scorpion:

Ick! No thanks. I am terrified of scorpions. I am glad I wasn't there.

And, of course, the first bug-eating experience of the month...vendors were offering chocolate-covered crickets for everyone to try!

I love Lorelai's facial expression here. Such a tumult of emotions, from curiosity to terror, to disgust! Her bravery won out, in the end, and both she and Celeste sampled the candy-coated bugs (with Nathan eating one as well, in solidarity). Their verdict: just "okay." They mostly only tasted chocolate. Aurora steadfastly refused to eat the crickets, then happily accepted a cookie from the same vendors...only to be told the cookie had been made out of cricket flour! She ate one bite, then gave the rest to Celeste. Aurora is definitely not yet a culinary adventurer on the level of her sisters.

All in all, the family had a wonderful time, and presumably they will have a great bug-eating story to tell their friends in the future. Which brings me to...

Weekend #2

The following weekend was similarly jam-packed, but at least it was all fun family stuff. I started the morning early, picking up groceries, but soon after, I got the kids all dressed and ready to go, and we headed to the Tucson Festival Of Books, a really large and fun event hosted by the University of Arizona. Lorelai and I had attended the Festival of Books last spring, and this year I wanted all the kids to check it out; I figured there would be something for each of them to enjoy!

This weird climbing sculpture on campus was one of their favorite parts

We ended up staying for a little over two hours, and managed to circumnavigate the whole festival! This made Aurora tired, and she started getting pretty complain-ey towards the end, but otherwise they all enjoyed themselves. Plus, everyone got free stuff, which is always a plus.

First of all, each girl got to pick out one free book. I love it when we get free books, and I love going to places that hand them out; it makes it feel like Christmas all over again! There is nothing like getting a new book, whether you are a kid or an adult.

Other than the free books (and the Pima County Library's Bookmobile, at which we all checked out a book), we didn't do a whole lot of "book-related" activities at the Festival Of Books. There are lots of vendors who hand out free stuff, so we got lots of swag. This included: balloons that flailed around madly in the air on that windy morning, and driving everyone around us crazy; coupons for free McDonald's smoothies; coloring books; invitations to puppet shows put on by local theater troupes; and kazoos for each child (which we thankfully got on our way out of the festival, since the girls were making such a racket with them that they could have annoyed half the city of Tucson).

We spent most of our time in the science section of the festival, which had lots of cool activities for the kids, including...

...pedaling a bike to generate electricity. As participants pedaled, a small blender attached to the top of the bike was activated, and a smoothie was blended! It was a cool way to learn about kinetic energy. Best of all; smoothie samples were handed out afterwards.

And in a nearby booth...

...yes, the chocolate-covered cricket dealers were back! Lorelai even recognized the insect peddlers as the very same people she'd seen the weekend before at the Wildlife Museum. Do they just travel from festival to festival all year long, foisting their creepy treats on as many people as possible? They also had books trying to encourage people to adopt the bug-eating lifestyle...it was all I could do not to back away slowly.

The bugs were in that tiny Dixie cup...eek!

But Lorelai sucked me in by instantly demanding that I eat a bug, and who was I to refuse my daughter? I was definitely scared, but popped it into my mouth as quickly as possible, so I wouldn't have time to think about it much. Texture-wise, it was a little chewy and stringy, which I tried desperately not to think about as I swallowed it down. As for the flavor, I only tasted the chocolate (thankfully!). After this experience, I felt bold enough to try one of the cricket cookies (yes, the bug-eaters had baked another batch of them for this event). Those cookies were a little dry and crumbly, and had no awesome flavor to speak of. Oddly, I found that I preferred the chocolate-dipped crickets. Life is strange like that sometimes.

After spending a few fun hours at the festival, I bundled everybody quickly into the car, and it was dash-dash-dash for the rest of the afternoon. We first stopped at CostCo, to get each of the girls a spring dress. Immediately after that, it was back to Sahuarita, just in time to get some food at our LDS stake barbecue. The barbecue had started at 12 noon, but we didn't get there until just after 2:00 pm. No matter; the food was still stacked high on several tables! This was a Mexican barbecue, which differs significantly from an American-style barbecue. No ribs or burgers or even barbecue sauce here; just lots and lots of carne asada, tortillas, rice, and vegetables. They supplied some tortilla chips and nacho cheese for the gringos, but I mostly stuck to the carne asada. It was simply divine. The Nogales Ward (which sits on the U.S./Mexico border) was assigned to provide the food, and they did not disappoint at all. In fact, there was so much left afterwards! We would have taken some, but we had to save room that night for...

This year, I made a pumpkin pie and a peach-raspberry pie, which was amazing.

...Pi(e) Day! Yes, it was March 14th, which is apparently a holiday for math nerds. Luckily, we live in an area with lots of math and physics nerds, so I was introduced to this wonderful holiday for the first time several years ago. I can't say I'm the world's biggest fan of mathematics; but I do love any excuse to eat pie!

This year's Pi Day was of particularly significant import; the date (3/14/15) lined up with the first several digits of pi, the mathematical constant (3.1415...). It was thus mandatory that Pi Day be celebrated! I sent out the invitation, and that evening several friends met up with us at the park, each bringing their own type of "pie" to share (one enterprising couple brought a pizza pie, which everyone agreed qualified).

It was a great way to wind down a busy day, eating delicious pie and chatting with friends, while all the kids played on the playground. It sure beat eating more bugs! Hopefully I won't have to do that again for a while.