On the week of Karneval, the kids had a school holiday. They mostly enjoyed the time off relaxing at home, but they went to an indoor water park and did a few other things. The weather started to get nice - not warm, but comfortably cool enough they could go outside and play. On Friday of that week, Heidi left on a two day shopping trip with some friends - to an area about 2 hours south of here. I worked until noon that day, then came home to be with the kids. That Saturday we all went out for a bike ride. As we were going through one of the forests we stopped for a while to let the boys run around a bit (Mallory had fallen asleep in the bike trailer at this point). Luke found a large mound in the forest, and when we went up to it, we found out that it was a huge ant hill - made out of dirt and pine needles. Ants were swarming around that place. We were all pretty surprised to see it there.
One of the boys got the great idea to present the ants with an offering - a portion of one of the cookies we had brought along with us in the trailer for a snack (Mallory never lets us leave home without a snack and a bottle of water). So, Grant crept up and put half a cookie at the entrance to the ant hill.
The ants loved it.
Ants were crawling up the boys shoes and pant legs, and they each claim they got bit a few times, so they kept marching in place to try to keep them off.
We then continued on our way to find the thing we had set out to see -- I had noticed a stone, round, theater-looking thing a ways off one of the roads around here. It turned out to be a memorial to people from the villages around here who died in WWI and WWII.
The kids had a good time climbing around the hills in the forest.
