Mama On The Move

Last night after dinner, I was cleaning up the kitchen. Emily walked in and said, "You need to go do something else. I'll clean the kitchen." "What?" I was completely baffled. Usually I don't get help unless I specifically ask for it. "God was just really tapping me on the shoulder and saying, 'You should not be sitting here playing solitaire while your mother is cleaning up'. So go sit down and watch television or something, I'll clean up." I looked over at Ben who was still glued to a computer. "What about you, Ben? Is God telling you to get off the computer and do something?" "Nope," Ben replied. "God is very pleased with me already. Emily probably just wants something, but she doesn't want to tell you yet. Tomorrow she's going to ask you to buy her something." "And I'll buy it for her too."

Last night around 9:00, I took Rigger out for his last walk of the day. We were standing in the front yard in the dark when two teenaged girls walked out of the house across the street. One of the girls lives there and one must have been a new friend. Rigger of course stopped and watched them walk out, as he is always interested in what is going on in the neighborhood. The two girls walked out to the center of the street at which point the new girl spotted Rigger, screamed bloody murder, took a step backwards, fell, and then curled up in the middle of the street and laughed for two minutes straight. Rigger, when she screamed, skittered backwards a few feet himself before he realized he wasn't in any immediate danger. The teen girl's mother had come outside to find out what the commotion was all about. She looked over at me and called, "I think you startled her." Yes, well she quite startled the heck out of us as well.

Not too long ago, we threw a birthday party with a 70's theme for one of the moms in our group. They asked some of the men to dress up like The Village People and do "YMCA" as a surprise for everyone. Guess who was asked to dress up as the soldier?? This actually happened a few months ago, but it took a while for me to convince someone to let me use the video on the blog!

9:00 Dentist 10:30 Take Ben to bus stop 12:30 Take Emily to speech class 1:30 Pick Ben up at bus stop 2:30 Pick Emily up from speech class 4:00 Take Katie to dance class 5:00 Ballroom dancing for Ben and Emily 7:00 Sign language class. Somewhere in there, I have to actually homeschool the kids, cook, clean, and maybe breathe. Also, I'm in charge of writing a play for our co-op to perform, and teaching a speech class and a class on Ancient Mesopotamia that I have to prep for sometime this week. This is why I barely have time to write on the blog. * as a side note, Emily hates speech class again.

When you go see the Breath of Life show at the Polynesian Cultural Center, they sell ice cream at intermission. The best part of that (besides the ice cream) is watching the guys bring it in. They run down a flight of stairs with a heavy tray of ice cream. For some reason, I could watch this over and over. You have to wonder if any of them ever trip and just tumble down those steps with all that ice cream.

Katie is studying ancient Egyptian history right now and in the interest of making it more "hands-on" for her, we've joined a co-op at our church. We've been part of the co-op for a long time, but we've not done history with them until now. I was in charge of this week's craft project so I had all the kids make maps of ancient Egypt out of cookie dough. Katie and I made one at home for practice, then we made one again at co-op so the pictures look different as I used some photographs from each session. Each child started out with one full tube of sugar cookie dough. They pressed each one out into a 10x6 inch rectangle as if it were clay or play dough. We used toothpicks to outline where we wanted land formations to be. Then we outlined the Mediterranean Sea with a blue gel. And filled it in with blue icing. We used Twizzlers to outline the Red Sea. Although the Red Sea isn't actually red, there is a seasonal algae there which is red in color. I thought the...

The kids learned this routine a couple of years ago. Apparently it's still entertaining! I wonder if, when they are my age, they will be sitting around saying, "Remember that thing we used to do with the cups? How did that go? Does anyone remember?"