Every 17 years, billions of Brood X cicadas emerge from underground in the Eastern U.S. for a period of weeks to experience adulthood, breed, and die. As part of finding a mate, the male cicadas make a lot of noise, and with that many males clamoring to get the females' attention, the sound can surpass 100 decibels (slightly less than a rock concert with no exaggeration). We have been in cicada season recently, and the kids have enjoyed learning about them and finding them in our yard, along the walk, and everywhere we go. At first, they were scared of these insects like other bugs, but now they have no fear of picking them up, flipping them over if they are upside down, moving them to a tree, or otherwise touching them.
Karina had some landing on her at the bus stop one day.
Here are some pictures of the cicadas from our yard. When they first come out and shed their exoskeleton, they are white. Incidentally, this is supposedly the best time to take them for eating, if one were so inclined (we weren't).
You can see this one coming out of the exoskeleton well.
After a few hours, they are black, though they still maintain their creepy red eyes.
Lydia went to a birthday party for Mariana, a friend in her class, at a local farm with all kinds of animals. She got along very well with the goats.
The Giffords, friends in our neighborhood, got a new puppy named Renni and they brought Renni over to play. The kids were thrilled to have an energetic puppy bounding around (and had fun playing with the Gifford kids too). Renni kept approaching Snoopy, possibly trying to get Snoopy to play, but Snoopy wasn't interested and ignored him.
Lydia and Tanja played Jenga and made it to 34 levels high before it finally collapsed.
Then Lydia and Derek played together and built with the blocks.
The kids took part in a virtual STEM science fair in school and were presented with several options of projects to choose from. Derek chose to make a pirate ship that could float in water while carrying 10 pennies and was able to sail with wind power. With Tanja's help, Derek covered a Hatchimal eggshell with foil to make it watertight, then attached two sails and floated his ship with pennies in the bathtub without sinking.
Lydia chose to make a lunar lander that would keep a toy astronaut safe inside a capsule (plastic cup) without tipping out when the lander was dropped from a large height. Her design with a paper platform reinforced with cereal box cardboard to increase the drag and slow the descent kept her astronaut in the cup even when dropped from our upstairs down to the main level in our open foyer (drop of more than 15 feet).
Karina made a robotic hand out of paper cut out in the shape of a hand, segments of drinking straws to make the hand stiff and serve as bones, and string run through the straws and tied off at the fingertips so she could pull the strings to make the fingers move and try and pick up objects.
In other science-related fun, Derek and Lydia made coronaviruses again out of clementines and cloves.
The girls continue to work hard developing their talents on the piano, and they have done great. Tanja has done a great job teaching them. They recorded songs they were working on for a talent show for one of their church activities. Karina played "The Entertainer" and Lydia played "O Sole Mio" and "Oh Susannah."
Watching the kids play soccer has been fun this spring. I pulled out my phone during one of Derek's games to try and get a video of him scoring one of his many goals - at his age, the kids who are aggressive enough to go after the ball usually end up scoring some goals and having grown up with two older sisters, he is not afraid to push his way into a crowd to get the ball. While I didn't end up getting a video of any of his goals that day, I did capture him with an impressive kick that went just over the goal and a hilarious sequence of him almost scoring, so figured I might as well share.
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