Peanut's Post #1

Peanut's teacher gave her an assignment to keep a journal on our trip. She's 7.5 and would be in 2nd grade, but the kids go to a Montessori School where grade level is pretty irrelevant. Anyway, she's been pretty faithful, writing snippets nearly every day and drawing a picture to go with it. I told her that she could "blog" whenever she wanted and today she handed me her journal!

I'll conveniently let her pick up where I left off at Canyon de Chelly. Let us know if you enjoy her input!

***4 excerpts from Peanut's journal, spell checked and typed by CurlyTop***

We went to Canyon de Chelly and it was sooo windy that if the walls weren't there I would have had to hold onto my mom or I would have blown into the canyon! We saw a cliff dwelling but this time it was different from the others (which I didn't tell you about). On the other side of the canyon there are big stripes (black) that look like rain.

After windy Canyon de Chelly we went to mom's friend's house and spent a night there. She had a big cookout in their desert backyard and all their neighbors came with all their kids. We could just run around the neighborhood into the other kids' houses! We made s'mores and jumped on a very high trampoline. The cat there was so nice. He understood everything I said to him. When we were ready to leave, mom's friend's husband gave each of us some petrified wood from his yard because now we were going to the Petrified Forest. ps: the cat was actually a neighbor's cat.

At the Petrified Forest you aren't allowed to take anything because it's protected. President Roosevelt made it protected because he's the one who cared about the environment and made National Parks. We know why it's protected. Because it's so beautiful and there are also stories about taking pieces of the wood and bad stuff happening to you. Petrified wood is wood that is so old it turns to stone. And there were really cool drawings on some rocks, called petroglyphs, from when the Native Americans lived there and they didn't have any paper.

We saw the Painted Desert and it's called that because it's full of hills of sand and every hill is a different color as far as the eye could see. And mom took a picture so I can paint it because I love to paint.