Mama On The Move

That's some good sleeping right there.

Katie is taking an art class. I am loving this class and wish I had found it sooner. When Ben and Emily were little, I had lots more free time to plan art projects for them. Now that I am homeschooling three different grade levels and centering my life around carting them to their various activities, art time is not so easy to plan. Thank heavens I can outsource some subjects. Their first project was printing with ink. All projects this session revolve around dinosaurs which is not Katie's favorite subject matter for art, but she's trying to be nice about it and not complain (too much) to the teacher (yet). First, they covered a piece of plexiglass with black ink. Then they would use Q-tips and napkins to draw a dinosaur design in the ink. Next, they would crank it through a rolling press to transfer the design onto paper. The first drawing here is a "ghost print" which means it was the second run through the press. The second drawing is a first print, and...

THEN NOW Yes, that's his tongue. *on a side note, after I uploaded this picture, I noticed Ringo peeking in the window between Emily and Katie's heads. He doesn't like to be left out.

I told the kids to go through their drawers and get rid of all the clothes that don't fit or that they just don't wear. Ben and Katie each filled a garbage bag full of clothes. We took them to our church to give to the needy. There are a group of us who all meet and sort out the food and clothes which have been donated. While we all chatted, I sorted through the clothes we had brought, folding them and separating them into sizes and styles. In Ben's bag, I found a pair of Kerry's shorts, one of Kerry's shirts, and two pair of my jeans. "Ben!" I glared at him while holding up the clothing I had just rescued. "What are these clothes doing in the give away bag?" "You told me to get the stuff I never wear, and I never wear those!"

In case you ever wonder........ If you are vacuuming your daughter's room and you accidentally run the vacuum cleaner over a pen, the pen will snap in half and spew black ink over about four feet of light beige carpet. The spinning brush of the vacuum will grind the ink in quite well. In case you ever wonder....... A mom who has just smeared ink into the carpet, can sprint through the house and hurdle over a very large dog in search of a can of aerosol hairspray and be back to the mess in about fifteen seconds flat. In case you ever wonder........ A can of aerosol hairspray and a carpet steam cleaner used 27 times can get all traces of black ink out of a light beige carpet. In case you ever need to provide such information on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" - I could be your phone-a-friend.

Many years ago, when we lived in North Carolina, Emily took dance lessons. She had a very good friend who was also named Emily. That's My Emily in the center, leaning on the star. Her friend, Also Emily, is on the far right with her chin on a star. Aren't they cute? When we moved to Hawaii, Also Emily lived here already. We were thrilled to have friends here who could show us around and help us get settled in. We call the girls "The Emilys" or "Emily Squared". See how they have grown!! Now it's time for Also Emily to move away again. It's one of the hardest parts of military life, leaving our friends, or having them leave us. And maybe in a few years we will have another photo of The Emilys when they are in high school and I will be able to embarrass the heck out of them with their dance photo. Won't that be fun !?

Let me start by saying I did not invent this. I'm not sure who thought this up, but this is the way we review science with the middle schoolers at our co-op. All the other moms have been doing it this way, and as I was teaching the module on fossils, I did it this way too. I just wanted to share this in case anyone else needs a good way to review a subject. First, take colorful post-it notes and lay them out in rows and columns on a flat surface. I used a white board but it was very humid and some of them did not stick so well. There should be three post-its of the same color in each spot. On the top post-it write the point value of the question. In this version, the easy questions were worth 100 points and the hardest questions were worth 500. You can make as many rows or columns as you need. It's easiest to have a different color for each column so the students can call out, "Yellow for 400, Bob!" Underneath the point value on the second post-it, write the qu...

Kerry has been diagnosed with Plantar Fasciitis . He has to wear this brace whenever he can lie down during the day. Mostly he is supposed to wear it at night. It has three very wide, VERY LOUD, velcro straps which hold it in place. It sometimes takes him a little while to get it adjusted properly and he has to keep readjusting those VERY LOUD velcro strips until it fits just so. And he's also wearing these new shoes which have individual toes and make me think of the new Tron movie. They also make me giggle like mad. When he was fitted for the brace, the sweet lady who was helping him told him, "Hon, this is going to make your foot feel so much better! When you fall asleep at night it will be giving your foot a really good stretch and it's going to feel wonderful and then about two hours later you'll wake up and you'll want to RIP IT OFF because it's going to hurt so much!" And she smiled. She was right. Kerry managed to keep it on until 4:00 AM at...

We ate at Cheeseburger In Paradise this week when we were down in Waikiki. (We were on a field trip ~ and you can't say we weren't. I'm the teacher, I decide what's a field trip and what isn't.) I had one of the best hamburgers I've ever had in my life. It was truly excellent. The service was great, our waitress was super friendly. But the highlight of the meal was.......... .........the waiter who carried everything on his head. The kids were fascinated every time he came out of the kitchen. Sometimes he carried drinks.......... Sometimes he carried food. He even carried four drinks on his head at once. He has to be fairly confident that he's not going to drop that on some unsuspecting customer. How does anyone ever learn they have a talent for this????

I guess one of the side effects of homeschooling is that sometimes there are things that my kids don't know. Things they would have picked up from other kids at school. We often do not know who the latest celebrities are or what they are wearing. By the time we heard of Justin Bieber he was already something of a joke and my kids disliked him on sight without ever hearing anything he sang. ***************************************************** Katie and I were eating lunch the other day when she looked at me and said seriously, "Did you know people from Paris are called Parasites?" "No they aren't," I laughed, "they are called Parisians." She looked at me as if I were making that up, then burst into hysterical laughter. " Parisians ? That's even funnier!" She laughed so hard she couldn't finish her lunch. Every so often she would gasp out the word, "Parisians!" ***************************************************...

I'm sure that in most parts of the country right now temperatures in the lower 60's would be a welcome relief from the cold. But in Hawaii, where we are used to the temperature being 82 degrees pretty much all year round, getting down into the 60's is very, very chilly. I can't say cold because certain people in my household (masculine type, one each) freak out if I say it's cold . And it's not cold. We lived in Alaska for three years. I know cold . But it has gotten down to 56 degrees here and our blood has thinned over the last two years and it is very, very chilly. Very.

This was sent to me in an email. It's too funny not to share! Lesson 1 1. Go to the grocery store. 2. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office. 3. Go home. 4. Pick up the newspaper. 5. Read it for the last time. Lesson 2 Before you finally go ahead and have children, find a couple who already are parents and berate them about their. 1. Methods of discipline. 2. Lack of patience. 3. Appallingly low tolerance levels. 4. Allowing their children to run wild. 5. Suggest ways in which they might improve their child's breast feeding, sleep habits, toilet training, table manners, and overall behaviour. Enjoy it because it will be the last time in your life you will have all the answers. Lesson 3 A really good way to discover how the nights might feel. 1. Get home from work and immediately begin walking around the living room from 5PM to 10PM carrying a wet bag weighing approximately 8-12 pounds, with a radio turned to static (or some other obnoxious sound) playin...

Okay, I have fixed the fireworks video so it plays in the correct post now. If you couldn't see it before you can now!

Katie has been eating everything in sight lately, so I measured her again this week. She has shot up over an inch in the last couple of months. When we were in the kitchen, I noticed that she is able to reach the cabinets now. Usually it is her job to put away silverware and casserole dishes but not plates or glasses because she's never been able to reach high enough to put them away. When I realized how tall she had gotten I said, "Wow! You're tall enough now to be able to put away bowls and glasses!" "Yay!" she said, grinning at me. Then her face fell. "Darn!"

Our back lanai has gotten pretty grody ("to the max"). Between the doves who walk all over the roof and coo coo coo and the trees which drop leaves all over it and the rain, rain, rain which has turned everything to a muddy mess, the lanai has turned green in some places and black in others. (A lanai is a porch in Hawaii. In our case, it's a slab of concrete surrounded on three sides by the house and fenced across the end.) We borrowed a pressure washer from some friends and Kerry set to work cleaning the concrete. He'd done about half of it when Ben came home and Kerry handed the task over to him. I looked outside a little while later to see Ben using the pressure washer to clean up the crud, and one of Ben's buddies squatting on the ground watching the point at which the water was making contact with the concrete. He was literally just a foot away from it, staring intently as if it were incredibly fascinating. A short while later, I looked out to see four ...

Every New Year's Eve we go out to dinner with a big group of friends. Then we go downtown and check out the results of the wreath competition. Some are incredibly beautiful. Some are incredibly creepy. Then we check out the Christmas tree decorations. This one was decorated completely with origami. This one was decorated with flip-flops (slippahs if you're local). Then we check out all the Christmas lights which includes seeing Santa and Mrs. Claus starting their Hawaiian vacation now that the busy season is over. Then we head over to a friend's house to watch fireworks. The fireworks in Hawaii are an amazing thing to behold. Even average citizens come up with an amazing amount of firepower on New Year's Eve. However, after an intensely heated debate, fireworks will now be illegal in Hawaii. There have been too many accidents, too many homes set ablaze, too many injuries. I believe the professional fireworks shows will continue, but ordinary ...