The Grunion run

A fun activity we learned about here in Southern California is something called the Grunion run. Grunion are a kind of small fish that come up out of the water to breed on the sandy beach. The eggs are left buried in the sand until ready to hatch. It was fascinating to learn about and see happen. Each of those lines of silver light in the photo below is a Grunion.

The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium had a great program for the run. As we were exploring the Aquarium we found a photo that looked a lot like Levi!

During the program we got to see some of the eggs hatching. Here is one of the eggs on Matt's finger.

It was open season for the Grunion, so Levi got to have fun catching some for us to bring home and eat. He did a great job, especially for having to catch them with his bare hands!

He learned how to clean the fish and we all enjoyed eating them.

The run happens at night, so during the day we enjoyed exploring tide pools in the area and playing on the beach.

It was a beautiful area and absolutely perfect weather.

Camping and dinosaurs

We had a great time at Levi's cub scout camp. It was at camp Emerson in Idyllwild and was a nice cool temperature during the day. At night it was a bit too cold for Ember, so we opted to stay in one of the small cabins there.

Ronan had a wonderful time exploring nature and Levi had a blast enjoying all of the fun cub scout activities. Towards the end of the camp out Levi did take a nasty fall on the bridge and skinned up his knees rather bad.

The main event of this camp out was the bridging ceremony. Levi went from Bear to Webelos. Only a year and half left for him in cub scouts. Crazy how time flies, it seems like only yesterday he was a brand new Tiger cub scout.

On the way back home from camping we stopped by the large dinosaur statues in Cabazon.

Ronan just had a dinosaur themed birthday party not too long before this trip, so the stop seemed like an extension of his birthday celebrations.

There was a gift shop inside the  Brontosaurus. You can climb up into the mouth of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. That one you have to pay for, but included with that is a cool little indoor set of animatronic dinosaurs and an outdoor dinosaur statue park.

Ronan was torn between fear of the large moving dinosaurs, and elation of being surrounded by his favorite things.