6th Birthday Celebration

Thanks to COVID, a big birthday party for Karsten was out.  And even though we have seen extended family a handful of times, we decided to keep Karsten’s birthday celebration pretty small and take her on “an adventure!”.

If you know Karsten, you know she loves science and gemstones.  We thought what better thing to do for her birthday than to go mining for gemstones.  So we took a road trip about an hour away from us and that’s exactly what we did.

I never thought I would be writing about how much fun it was to buy agallon bucket of dirt, but it is the truth! The girls had so much fun looking for their treasures. 

The place where we went gave you the option of buying fossils or gemstones. I know the girls would have loved either one but we went with the gemstones and it did not disappoint.

I wish that I’d taken a picture of all that they found, but I didn’t.  There were Rubies, Sapphires, Emeralds, Quartz crystals, Citrine, Amethyst, Garnets, Aventurine, Sodalite, Peridot, Opal, Fluorite, Aquamarine, Topaz, Peacock Copper, Tourmaline, Pyrite,  Amazonite, Labradorite and dozens more rocks. We had a sheet that shows us what each type of rock/gemstone looked like so they could identify them as they found them.

Of course the shinning star moment was finding this big thing (which has a name, but don’t ask me what it is).  We took it inside and they cracked it open for us to see all of the sparkly crystals.

We stopped for lunch/dinner on the way home and called it a day. Definitely a fun outside activity during a crazy year. And a GREAT celebration for our six year old, rock loving little girl.