The Simpson 6: Treasure Found

I took the kids over to Compton Gardens and the Crystal Bridges walking trail yesterday. Bentonville is doing an amazing job of creating an interconnected series of trails through downtown, the coming soon Crystal Bridges museum, and Memorial park. It was quite hot yesterday, but we needed something to do and I figured most of the trail was in the shade but is also paved so I could push the stroller, so it was a better alternative to some of the trails around us. Anyway, it was really quite beautiful, and the kids enjoyed getting to know the different kinds of flowers and plants as well as seeing how far the construction work has come since Aug (when we were there last.) We even got to see a deer hiding in the trees. Thankfully this one wasn't hurt, unlike our last experience with one! A story for another day...On our way back to the car, the kids were walking on the bike trail which runs parallel to the walking trail, but is certainly more fun to them since it includes tree trunks and huge boulders! At one point Jack excitedly yells to me that he's found an arrowhead. He runs to me and shows me the above photographed flint. I am skeptical, but tell him it's nevertheless a cool find. Fast forward to this morning. We had planned on taking the kids to the Museum of Native American History, another little gem here in Bentonville. The couple who own it have done so with their own money and keep it open at no charge. They recently remodeled it and it's really a very nice and manageable facility. We told Jack to bring his arrowhead with him, in case there was someone there who could help us identify it. We were the first ones there this morning and had the place to ourselves for almost our entire visit - which was nice with the kids! They were amazing by the way - really behaved themselves and had a good time with the learning wands provided. When we first got there, we explained about our find and she said she would call her dad to have him come in and take a look at it. He arrived about 15 minutes later and when he inspected it he confirmed that it was indeed a real Native American arrowhead and astonishingly, it is probably about 10,000 years old! How cool it that! We credit Poppy's eagle-eye training in hunting for shark's teeth:) Needless to say we were all very excited and I told Jack I would get a shadow box to put it in with a little snippet about the story.

The first exhibit is this Mastodon skull - quite impressive! Especially with Jeff's head in the back:) Ella-Kathryn is in trying to blow a bubble for the camera and Will is saying "cheeseburgers!"