Samantha's first blog

pamelamyers | July 2, 2018

In our quest to not let Sam get bored this summer, my mom and I took her to the Legoland Discovery Center for the day. I have been meaning to take her for a while, and never got around to it. It was a bit expensive, but Sam loved it and it was totally worth the trip for her.

My favorite picture of the day is this one, outside the Center entrance. How great is that?!

I think the thing that Sam looked forward to most was the polar exhibit. She just loved this bear!

We spent a bit of time in the Lego Friends area, of course. She loves the Lego Friends…

Speaking of Lego Friends…there was a huge figure of each one of them! And yes, Sam had to pose with them all. I will spare you all the photos….

In one part of the exhibit, the kids could use all the various Lego pieces to build a car, and then they could race their car on the slide right behind her. Sam beat her car, every time!

One of the most impressive parts of the place was a huge room filled with models of Philadelphia. It was insane. They were so detailed.

We saw a 4D movie, Sam built things, we did a Lego Ninjango laser maze, and overall, Sam had a blast. It was pretty fun. I mean, Lego is a hit in our house, for everyone!

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pamelamyers | June 30, 2018

We signed up Sam for Camp Invention this year, a STEM camp that just arrived in our school district last year. It is a national program, but just sort of showed up in our district last year. It seemed like something she would love last year too, but we had already signed her up for two weeks of camp. This year, we jumped right on it. There is a lot of robotics and things she already loves involved, so we knew she would love it. I wasn’t there, obviously, but the “camp mom” who is the mom of a kid who was in Sam’s kindergarten class, posted a ton of photos.

Here is Sam’s group! We found out not long before camp started that one of her BFFs, Alaina, was going to camp too. The girls were thrilled to death to be in group together all week!

This was the whole Camp. There were a lot of kids!

In the Mod My Mini Mansion part of camp, the kids built their own “smart homes” any way they wanted. I loved some of the features Sam had, like a rain barrel, LED lights, and other cool gadgets.

Here is some of Sam’s group, and her favorite counselor, Lizzie.

Creating the best dog park!

Sam won the contest so she got to bring it home! It was a doggie pool, complete with swim noodles!

The kids really learned a lot. They even worked on learning binary code!

They ran around and played games a lot too, made some sort of magnetic slime, catapults, and created a robotic arm.

Some of the campers. 🙂

Sam and Lizzie on the last day of camp.

I think Sam’s favorite activity was robotic pet vet. I knew this would be the best thing about camp for her! The kids took apart robotic dogs and compare their inner mechanics to the anatomy and physiology of a real dog, used spatial reasoning and design engineering to construct what they thought would be the best dog park, explored circuits used to make the dog move, bark and light up, and best of all — customized their own robotic dog to take home!

One of the activities was to build an Optibot, a small self-driving robot that senses changes in light, and can follow a path. They designed tracks for their robots to follow, learned about impact sensors using a small-scale crash test dummy, and made their own line tracing robot to take home. Zach wasn’t too sure he liked it. Looked too much like a little critter for him to munch!

This was the path Sam’s group made for the Optibot to follow. Sam got to bring that home too! She totally scored!

Camp Invention was a big hit. Sam learned a TON and I don’t think she realized that she did. Best kind of camp! If she is interested in going next year, I’m all for it!

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pamelamyers | June 29, 2018

Last night we spent a great night at Tyler. One night a year, for members only, you are allowed to bike in the park. Sam loved it last year and the night of the ride, it was raining, so it was cancelled. She was brokenhearted! Thankfully, the raindate was the next day and it was a perfect night. Not too hot, not raining, just perfect.

At the starting point, someone was there giving the kids pinwheels to attach to their bikes. Sam picked a pink and red one. She was so funny. She was riding along pretty quickly at times and the wind had that thing going. It was making that typical noise pinwheels make when they spin fast and it had her totally freaked out. She kept yelling, “Pinwheel! Be quiet!” She was convinced it was going to fall apart and we told her that is just the noise pinwheels make. I guess she hasn’t had many pinwheels in her girly life.

Off we go!

The goats were back at Tyler this year and Sam had a good time with her list of pictures trying to find every goat. She did!

Sam was already tired before we even left, but she kept saying she wanted to ride 10 miles. We thought she was insane because she’d never make it, and besides, Tyler doesn’t have that much paved trail! We’d be going round and round forever. We wound up doing a few miles at most, but that was enough.

Our little goofball loves to make silly faces.

We made a few stops at some of the treehouses, just to give her a little break. She likes this one that is supposed to be a fort. I think this was her guarding the door pose.

Mark wanted to veer off the path and head down into the meadow a bit, his favorite place. Sam was game! It is quiet as can be in there and we hoped to see some deer, but no such luck.

By the time we left, Sam was exhausted and wanted to go home, veg out and eat ice cream. All in all, a good night!

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pamelamyers | June 23, 2018

It took me a while, but I finally found someone to give Sam private art lessons! Who knew? There is a woman who does them out of her house, literally directly across the street from Sam’s school. She had her first lesson in drawing and I have to say, I am impressed! Go Sam!

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pamelamyers | June 21, 2018

One night recently, when Sam was sleeping at my moms, Mark and I started talking about the house and I said that if I could do things differently, I would have. For example, I would have never hung that useless mirror over our fireplace, that does nothing but reflect the ceiling fan back at us. I would have put a flat screen TV there, and had our family room be Sam’s playroom. It turned into a much bigger discussion about how we don’t get any use out of our living room, which is insane since we are paying for the house and if we get no use out of a huge room in it, what a waste! Mark has been wanting to find a way to get music in that room, and after much discussion, we decided to completely update our living room. We never sit there other than when our Christmas tree is up, or we have a fire, and that was going to change!

We made a lot of decisions including getting a new TV, surround sound, recessed lighting, etc., and after the electrician was done, but before the stereo people came, we had literally one weekend to get the room and hallway painted. Sam was going to sleep at my mom’s the whole weekend so we could really focus, but before she went, she wanted to help paint. Mark showed her how to roll and although she thought it was hard, she liked it. She was not too happy to say goodbye to our orange walls, but she is getting used to our new look.

One of the new additions to the room was a pretty large rug, which the cats appreciate very much!

Here it is! There is a TV over the fireplace and a bunch of  speakers, but this is what Sam helped to do. It’s our new favorite hangout spot in our house and we all love it!

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