The Rock Museum and Expo

We saw Joe off safely to the airport.  He made it to Las Vegas just fine.  I'm just praying that he'll have something cool to do so he won't be frustrated and bored and chew his fingernails off.  

The kids and I went to church Sunday morning and then came home for lunch.  Caylea really loves this group.  There is a great group of girls that are like-minded.  She is a very right/wrong child.  There is no gray area with her, so it's hard for her to be friends with kids her age because, let's face it, a lot of 12 year old girls are just nasty. These girls aren't, though, so I'm so grateful she'll have good friends while we're here.

After lunch, we traveled 20 minutes up the road to a rock museum and expo.  They have a lot of natural quartz and agate in this area and it is truly beautiful.  The museum guide took us to the basement where he showed us how to saw a rock in half.  He didn't know what it would have on the inside.  It looked like a big, ugly rock.  He started sawing and about half-way through it went "BAM" and exploded.  He said, "That's quartz.  Agate doesn't do that."  It was a purply quartz.  He then took a pre-cut agate rock and polished it in front of us.  The kids were fascinated.  The funny thing is, all morning Josh said, a few times, "I don't WANT to go shopping for rocks.  That's BORING."  (I guess Chloe told him we were going shopping.)  Anyway, after the explosion and seeing quartz, which he now loves, and some lava rocks, which he also loves, he decided we weren't in such a bad place after all.

We left the museum and walked up the road to the expo.  There's where they had the good stuff.  They had polished rocks in every shape imaginable.  One was a flower blossom the size of a man's fist, with multiple colors and it looked so real and it even looked SOFT but it was completely carved from rock!  Josh got 2 little rock animals, a scorpion, which he calls "squirpion" and a dinosaur, and the girls got necklaces made from rock.  They also got some gifts for friends of ours.  I guess we did do some shopping, but Josh didn't mind.  They had these "ice" crystals that looked like Superman's "Fortress of Solitude," so Josh was fascinated by that.

I think if Caylea and Chloe had brought more $, they would've gone nuts.  They had earrings, necklaces, bracelets, flowers, animals, you name it!  They have this expo every year, so if anyone loves rocks, come visit us the weekend after Memorial Day weekend.  He said it's always the same time of year.  I plan to go back next year and the kids are ready to go back as well.

Riddle me this:  If it takes MILLIONS of years (as our guide said) to form one of these rocks, how is it that they find entirely new batches in the same places every single year?  He said that they harvest the rocks every spring and fall right after the farmers plow their soil; IN THE SAME AREA OF LAND.  Farmer's plows don't dig deeper and deeper every year, so it stands to reason that they are simply turning up the same soil, albeit used, every year, and it makes sense that the rocks simply form in that time.  

When Caylea's tooth fell out in Paris I felt like taking it to the Museum of natural History for carbon dating so they could tell me it's 1 million years old (like the guy did with the pig in Georgia, I believe.)  Don't get me wrong, I love science.  I majored in Biology and Chemistry and I took all the way through Physics in high school because I love science.  I just don't believe in spouting theory as truth.  Christians can't undeniably PROVE God's creation of the Earth any more than Evolutionists can undeniably prove evolution.  Even Charles Darwin changed his mind at the end of his life.  Just think, if we could prove God is really God and He did everything he said (and by prove, I mean undeniable, irrefutable evidence), then there would be no reason for faith, no faith at all, and without faith, where is love?  There is a reason He left some things a mystery.  

Josh asked me one of those questions tonight, "Did God have a Mommy and a Daddy?"  I told him no, and that there were lots of things we don't know about that we're going to have to ask when we see God in heaven.  Josh said, "Does He eat in heaven?"  Chloe said, "No, and He doesn't sleep either."  Josh said, 'What does He do, then?"  I said, "He watches over us."  Josh said, "I would just die if I couldn't eat in heaven."  I said, "Josh, you'd already be dead if you were in heaven."  He said, "No I won't.  I'll be alive in heaven, but then I'll die because I love to eat, and then I'll go to heaven again and I'll just keep dying and going to heaven."  Then he laughed his little laugh.  I get a kick out of the kids when they do stuff like that.

Speaking of stuff like that, and now I'm on a whole other tangent, we were sitting in the metro in Paris and, amidst talk of what the smells could be from, somehow being pregnant got brought up.  I don't even know how, honestly.  Chloe said, out of the clear blue, "Being pregnant is like having a tape worm."  I can't tell you how hard we laughed at that one.  She is my witty child.  When Chloe was 4, I hugged her and her back popped.  She said, "Mommy, I'm POPular!"  When she was 5, she was reading her Scripture for the day, from Genesis, where God formed us from the dust.  She had just been to her allergist and she got this "I'm really thinking" look on her face and then the light bulb came on.  You could see the light in her face as she said, "I'm made of dust.  I'm allergic to dust.  I'm allergic to MYSELF!"  She laughed and laughed (so did I).  She has a very cute laugh.  I think all of my kids have cute laughs.  I guess that's my job, to think that their laughs are cute and that they are absolutely PERFECT.  :)