A Week of Firsts

If July was a relaxing month for me, August has made up for it! I have been busy and am beginning to wonder if I have over committed myself. I'm the secretary for the Awana club at our church. Right now, that is a busy job, but last year, after the initial weeks, my job was not that demanding. Plus last year I didn't really know what we needed to have on hand, so I was constantly having to order more materials. This year I had a better idea of what we needed (and what we didn't) and made a single large order before the club started up again. Also with the year starting back up, I needed to organize the student registry and arrange for a parent meeting.  I also made a student recruitment video and spoke in the chapel at our church's school.  The parent meeting will be next week, and the club started last week.  In between PEP started, where I'm teaching a 12 week class. So all these things are 3-4 days apart and I'm just dealing with "whatever is next" to keep from getting too crazy.

All that said! PEP started today.

A: Excited - mostly about her backpack.  C:  Apprehensive - mostly about his taekwondo class  N:  Pretty pleased to have Mommy all to herself!

The first day went well.  Annalise...she is a complicated kid.  When I picked her up I could tell she had a nice time, but she didn't say much.  Later I told her, "I'm glad you had a fun time" and she answered (with no significant emotion), "I had a SUPER fun time."  She made a paper brain hat and a 3-D bird.

Caleb - very much enjoyed the taekwondo class that he was so nervous about.  I am teaching his class's 3rd hour and I can already tell that I am going to enjoy that all those boys just spent an hour in taekwondo!  Last year I taught the 3rd hour after no physical activity.

The class I am teaching is called My America.  I have to do some classes about the election process, but mostly it just has to be about American things.  I'm doing the first 3 classes on Songs and Symbols.  Today was the flag and The Star Spangled Banner.  I found this great flag craft online and I reeeeeally like how the kids flags turned out. 

Before class I penciled in the corner square and made stripes with masking tape.  Today they used a white crayon to draw stars in the corner and then painted over the corner with watered down blue paint (alternately you could use watercolors).  The white stars just appear as you paint - the kids loved that and it looks nice too.  Then they could paint on the stripes between the tapes.  This one is actually Caleb's, he decided to just paint all over the tape too, but most of the kids didn't.

This is an example of how they look with the tape removed.  I brought them home to take off the tape because in my trials at home, the tape sometimes tore the paper.  I thought that if the kids did it, they would tear a lot.  If you remove the tape very slowly, it helps a lot.

Some of the kids could not draw stars, so I told them to make asterisks. 

We also read a book about the American flag, watch a video of someone singing the national anthem, tried to sing it ourselves, learned how to fold an American flag, and looked at pictures of old flags.  I have no idea how we fit all that in, but that was all I planned too!

Next week is the State of Liberty and My Country 'Tis of Thee.

Posing with Isaac

Caleb has his arm on Isaac's "shoulder".

We had a very backwards weekend. A much loved lady in our church died and the funeral was yesterday, so on Saturday we went to church. Today church was cancelled because of the tropical storm, so it felt like today was Saturday. We got what they call a "glancing blow" from Isaac. I think the nearest the center passed was over 100 miles away. BUT, we got some impressive winds as we are on the east side - aka the "dirty" side of the storm. It came in squalls, not non-stop and the kids got to play outside in it some. We went to our local park (the one that floods chronically, where we got the tadpoles) for a little while between weather bands. 

Annalise on the Value of Good Night's Sleep

"I feel like a new person!  I feel like 15 bucks!"

Anniversary

Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew - something that even to me, being a person who did not experience it, seems hard to believe!  The part of Miami we live in was one of the most affected by Hurricane Andrew, so we know many people who experienced the storm.  Thinking about the storm reminds me of stories people have told me about it, and I think today is a good day to retell them.

Ginny, an older lady who used to go to my church, had gone out of town with her husband to help their son move into his dorm for college.  While they were gone, Andrew hit.  Their house was destroyed.  They came home while others were trying to escape and had no home to go to.  Their insurance company provided a trailer which was parked in their front yard for months while their house was rebuilt.  I'm pretty sure they still live there today.

Suzie, a woman I used to work with, had just had a baby.  He was 6 weeks old when the storm hit.  As the storm got worse, they hid in a closet.  Water poured down the walls of the closet and she held on to her baby.  When the storm passed, they came out of the closet to find the house a wreck, but the closet had kept them safe

Patty, a good friend of mine, was in high school.  She and her mother and sister went to a local shelter, but her dad stayed home.  When they went home after the storm, the house had fallen in on her dad, but he was OK.

These pictures are all from our area.

A Few from the Zoo

We are taking most of the week off of school to get a grandparent fix :) Very good timing - we went to zoo yesterday and since it is the first week of traditional school, there were no swarms of kids of field trips and no day camps. Nice. It was however, HOT.

Meerkats - Natalie, "So cute!"  Annalise, "They hold their hands like a princess!"

Water station, no one cared about being soaking wet - even Grandma made a run through the water!

Our zoo has two big water play areas, this is the newest one.  I really liked watching the kids stand under this bucket dumping thing. 

Veeeeery close to a clouded leopard!

Annalise's goal for the day was to feed a giraffe.

The gal at the entrace told us to watch out for several babies - and there were lots of babies!

Even the warthog babies were "so cute" - you couldn't help but smile at them.  But I have to ask, how many of you moms have ever felt like this warthog mom?  Yeah, me too.

Wild Creatures being Treated as Pets

It's about time for another pet update around here.  We still have two frogs.  My favorite - Tad - hopped out of the aquarium one night when I was feeding them.  He (or she) made two enormous hops into the darkness and that was that.

Toad (on the rock) and Rog (in the rock).  Also a little plant that is growing in the coral rock.

Toad is voracious and eats almost all the bugs before Rog gets a chance.  Especially when we feed them crickets because they are sitting ducks and Toad jumps in the box and gobbles them up.  Toad is 3x bigger than Rog and there is a real chance he will eat Rog.  He certainly is almost big enough to do it.  It is fun to watch them eat when we feed them flying insects, not so much when we feed them crickets.  They will eat just about anything - beetles, flies, mosquitoes.

Also we have noticed that the frogs change color from speckled (like in the above picture) to a pale green.

In the bottom of the aquarium there are about 3 inches of water.  Rob and Caleb caught a fish and 2 water snails and they live there too. 

Snail - the smaller one.  We didn't name them.

The fish had babies and so now we have about 30 baby fish too.

Aw, so cute!

The fish and the snails in the aquarium are no maintenance pets.  They eat the gunk growing in the bottom and keep it pretty clean, even without a filter.

And when we buy crickets, we buy about 50.  I had trouble with them dying so the guy at the reptile shop gave me some cricket keeping tips.  It worked, but I am starting to feel like we are running a zoo!

The kids would really like to catch a lizard and add that to the mix somehow, but I am at capacity when it comes to special needs pets that don't earn their keep - at least Mako guards the house and provides entertainment.  I think the aquarium/terrarium contributes to our schoolwork.  Caleb really enjoys observing the fish and the frogs.  It's a temporary zoo anyway.

Hooray for Fabulous Homemade Math Games

I found this great math game on a blog I usually read because of the fantastic Bible memory ideas for kids (Mother's Bible).  Caleb looooooves this game and I think it has done much more for his understanding of place value than all those lentils we glued to popsicle sticks.  It cost exactly $0 and took about 2 minutes to make.  I cut 20 small rectangles and let each of the bigs write 0-9 on half of them.  You put all the numbers in a bowl and each player draws 2 numbers and makes as big a number as possible with them.  Then you compare and whoever has the biggest number wins that round and gets to collect all the numbers played.  With 20 numbers there are only 5 rounds and there is never a tie.  By the end of the first game, Annalise was reading numbers bigger than I've ever heard her read, so it's helped her math skills too.  Pretty soon we can add another set of 10 and do the hundreds place too.

Kid Thoughts

If Caleb likes to do art, he likes to think about numbers.  This week he said, "Mommy, did you know when one number is even, the next one is odd and then the next on is even and then odd and it just goes on like that!"  I had to laugh even though I told him he was right!

The other night we had Shepherd's Pie for dinner and the kids wanted to know why it was called Shepherd's Pie - they thought shepherds only existed in Bible times.  I don't know, but I'm guessing it's because it's sometimes made with lamb, but ours was beef.  It was inspiring none-the-less.  Annalise declared, "I know a Bible story about a shepherd - there once was a a shepherd who lost a sheep and he went off to find it and when he found it there was a burning bush and it was GOD!"  Rob and I giggled at her later for combining two stories, but then I looked it and wouldn't you know - Moses was tending sheep when he saw the burning bush.

The bigs think Natalie is fun some of the time, but usually not when they are setting up legos or blocks or such.  They got into the habit of telling her "Mommy has a cookie for you!" to get her to leave.  You'd think a 2 year old would have no real concept of someone telling the truth, but it didn't take twice for her to see they were lying!  I am kind of amazed at how she can act on an abstract concept like that even though she can't express it verbally...and she is pretty verbal!

By the way, the bigs were corrected for their lying, but that's another story.

I was doing some thinking too.  We just finished reading Genesis during our morning Bible study time, so we spent several days learning the story of Joseph.  And here are some observations:

* Joseph is a great story because you can relate to it - I mean with 12 brothers you have to find someone you can empathize with!
* God never speaks verbally in the Joseph chapters.
* In the story of Joseph, life is not fair, but God is still good.

Indiana...Iowa

Ahem...Indiana, I apologize.  There are some states which have unfortunate timing in our schedule and show up at an especially busy month.  That was you.  2 VBSes, new baby frogs, a wildy addictive slip and slide.  I make excuse.  I wish we could have dug deep enough to really get to know you.

Is he gone?  ok,  there is another reason we didn't do much Indiana (but the busy factor was the biggest) - Indiana also turned out to be not all that different from Illinois.  More Lincoln, more corn.  They're even right next to each other!

We did read a book about the Indianapolis 500.  And Indiana has Hoosiers, which unfortunately has no interesting story behind it.  No one actually knows where the name came from.  But we had Hoosier Pie at the end of the month anyway.  It was very good. 

And speaking of corn...we moved on from Indiana to Iowa.  Iowa was a little more interesting.  July was a pretty calm month for us too. 

Iowa is the only state whose east and west borders are both rivers.  Probably the most interesting thing we read about in Iowa was a book about the Neal Smith Prairie Preserve. 

A friend of mine lived in Iowa for a couple of years and she assured me that people there most commonly eat meals made with condensed soup and have large amounts of jello for dessert.  I thought about it and decided to make pork with apples and onions and corn of the cob instead.

For dessert I scoured the internet, very much hoping that Iowa was well known for its double fudge brownies or its molten chocolate cake, but I only found Iowa Applesauce Cake - and it turned out we all liked it a lot :)

August finds us in Kansas and I'm already looking forward to the smoked BBQ we are going to have for dinner in a few weeks!

Week in Review

This week we...

proved imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

found a tiny alligator in our yard.

ate lots of apples

made pharaoh hats

caught, loved on, and sometimes unintentionally injured tiny lizards

used a magic eraser way past the "throw away" stage pictured on the box

lost another tooth

and tried to catch a bird :)

By the way, we did not catch a bird.  I'm sure your are surprised after seeing our sophisticated trap.