3 is a Magic Number

I sometimes wonder why I stubbornly cling to this blog when I find it such a chore to update lately.  I also forget about it for days at a time.  I don’t delete it though because I know I’d regret it.  Been there, done that.  The blogging bug always comes back around like it has today.

So what have we been doing for the last two weeks?  Well, Brenna is still doing school about 3 or 4 mornings per week.  I am schooling through the summer although not with any sort of real intensity.  I never push things past noon either.  The girl across the street that Brenna has become good friends with usually comes to the door around then anyway if not earlier.  Brenna’s primary focus in life these days is wondering if Red is home and available to play.   Although there have always been kids around in the neighborhood we haven’t ever truly befriended any of them before for various reasons.  So I am glad that Bren has such a good friend right across the street now.  I’m not comfortable using her real name because I don’t know them very well and not sure if they’d be okay using her real name online so I have decided to just call her Red for obvious reasons. 

Maybe the most exciting thing I’ve done is I went to play bingo with a friend of mine.  It was really fun and interesting.  I didn’t bring my lucky troll dolls which worked out because no one else did either.  Bingo is no longer like it was portrayed on that one hilarious Roseanne episode.  It’s also gone high tech.  Everyone had these cute little machines that keep track of the calls.  It was all actually rather confusing when we got there since we didn’t understand the lingo or what was what.  We ended up accidentally buying way too many games to play at once and it was VERY difficult keeping up.  I guess that is why people use those machines.  A nice lady across from us helped us and didn’t seem annoyed with us despite all our giggling and joking around.

Let’s see, what else.  Brenna’s summer bowling league started last week.  It’s “cosmic bowling” which seemed like a great fun idea but the reality is that it’s very hard to visit with friends under those conditions.  LOL

She also started swimming lessons but I am extremely disappointed with them.  We tried them at a different pool than we usually go to.  It was a bad idea.  The lessons are taking place in the splash pool at the bottom of the slide.  I am not kidding.  The water is maybe 4 feet deep and it’s only maybe 8 feet across.  By the time Brenna pushes off to do whatever she’s already on the other side.  The lesson description said it was for intermediate swimmers ages 6-12 but honestly this area isn’t suitable for any child who already knows how to swim or beyond the age of maybe 7.   There are also six kids in the class making it even more cramped.  What a joke.  Not only that they cancelled lessons last Thursday because they closed down the pool for maintenance.  Lame.  I’ll take her to the last two weeks but I cancelled for the July session and luckily they had a slot open back at the other place we usually go to.   It’s a huge pool and they limit the class numbers to four which is much better for real instruction to take place.

We haven’t been to our neighborhood pool yet because it’s been stormy pretty much every day for two weeks complete with heavy rain, hail, and tornado warnings.  It’s a really freaky June around here.

On Friday we went to the cheap theaters with friends to see Race to Witch Mountain and it wasn’t too bad.  I enjoyed it and so did the kids although Brenna got a little scared at bedtime thinking about some of the violence in the movie and the alien “terminator” character especially really freaked her out.  She’ll be fine though.

Tom is still working on his flying lessons and was actually set to do his first solo on Thursday but the weather didn’t cooperate and the same thing happened on Friday so he’s hoping to do it this week.  I’m a little nervous about it but am trying to take heart that his instructors wouldn’t let him do it if he wasn’t ready.  I just wasn’t expecting it to happen this fast.  Initially they all thought it would be August but he’s really been studying a lot and also cramming in a ton of flight lessons every week.

I can’t think of too much else really.  It’s been a fairly relaxing June so far which is exactly what I was hoping for.  I noticed that when I extremely back off on scheduled activities life seems to naturally fill in the blanks  and we still get “busy” but it’s much less stressful.

Tags: life

After promising for months on end we’d try the diet Coke and Mentos experiment today was the day.  It worked and we had enough stuff to do it twice.

Brenna is on the left in purple.  They’d just been riding bikes hence the gear.

Tags: Brenna

We had a pretty good weekend.

Friday we met up with friends to see the Hannah Montana movie which actually ended up being much better than I was expecting.  I didn’t expect to like it.

On Saturday Tom’s car was scheduled to get window tinting down at the dealership which is WAY WAY WAY down south.  The dealership gave us a loaner car for the day so we went to breakfast at Mimi’s Cafe then headed over to Amazing Jake’s.  Brenna went there last year for a Girl Scout reward field trip and has wanted to go back ever since.  She had a total blast but was a little bummed the laser tag was closed.  We also ate lunch there at the buffet which isn’t that bad for buffet food.

On Sunday Brenna went over to a neighbor’s for a playdate and was gone most of the day.   She had fun playing and they also made little baked clay miniatures.  After she got back we went to dinner at Red Robin then went to see Night At The Museum 2.  Brenna absolutely loved it and was tickled that the Jonas Brothers are the cherubs and also sang the closing credits song.  Tom and I were annoyed by several things in the movie but we thought it was okay.  It’s definitely not as good as the first one though.

Tags: life, Movies

Recently Brenna became fascinated with something one of her neighbor friends has.  I haven’t seen it but I guess it’s a shallow box filled with sand and rocks with a little rake.  She said they rake it, dig and arrange the rocks, and so on.  It sounded simple enough so I told her we’d put one together for her soon.  Well, we were at Hobby Lobby today and in the unfinished wood aisle we found a shallow little box with a sliding lid.  She said it was the right size for a sandbox of her own, the lid was “awesome” and begged to get it.  It inspired me to do a little more than just sand and rocks.  So we walked around the store and in the dollhouse aisle she fell in love with a set of miniature garden tools and decided to make her box a garden theme.  Also in the dollhouse section we found a set of cute tiny little vegetables, bunnies, and things like that.  Instead of sand we found something in the toy train aisle.  It was a small bag of dark brown sand-like substance but not sure what it is.  It seems cleaner than sand but it’s fine and about the same texture.  The project cost about $20 which isn’t bad for all the joy and entertainment it’s given her.  It seems such a simple thing but she was so ecstatic about it.

Here is a close-up of it.  Since this photo she’s added some small clay projects to it like a flower for the pot.

Tags: Brenna

Today we went on a homeschool field trip to downtown Denver and Little Man Ice Cream. It’s the most adorable little ice cream shop ever!  I had peanut butter chocolate gelato which was YUM and Brenna had chocolate ice cream.  It’s a bit of a hike from where we live at around 23 miles away but we hope to get down there again this summer.  There is a great little park directly across the street so the kids had a lot of fun playing over there for a couple hours.  Even better is the huge free parking lot right next door.  Heh.

Tags: homeschooling

In our current study of the Aztecs, I came upon this cute craft idea to make Aztec “feather” fans.  She cut feathers from construction paper and glued them around a paper plate, made a butterfly for the middle, and used a wooden kebab skewer for the handle.

Tags: homeschooling

For the first time in my life I had jury duty today.  I didn’t end up serving on the jury though for which I was really glad because it was a three day criminal case.  What happened was that when I first got there I was in a waiting area with about 100 or more other people.  After almost an hour I was called to join a group of 40 or so into a court room.  I got nervous at this point because most people I know that reported for jury duty were actually dismissed from the waiting area.  LOL   This actually happened to Tom only about a month ago and he was home within 90 minutes.  Well, from the 40 of us sitting in the court room they called 25 to sit up front in and near the juror area.  Those people got drilled by the judge and then by both attorneys that were present in the case.  Two of them got sent home  for various reasons and they called two more from the rest of us.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it wasn’t ME.   Apparently from those 25 they were going to pick the final 13 for actual jury duty.  The question and answer session went on and on and on.  My ass started to get sore from sitting on that hard wooden bench for about three hours.  Finally at around 12:30 the judge dismissed those of us that remained in the audience area of the court room.  WHEW!  The entire thing took about 4.5 hours from start to finish.  It was boring as hell and I was so beyond relieved when Tom came to pick me up.  He had taken the day off to watch Brenna and he knows how much I detest driving in Boulder so he had dropped me off that morning.  After leaving we had lunch at Panera and ice cream at Cold Stone so at least it wasn’t a totally bad day.

Tags: life

On May 19th Brenna was Humpty Dumpty in a homeschool class play called Mixed Up Fairy Tales (or something like that, they were skewed to be funny).  I forgot my camera so these were taken with my phone camera so that with bad lighting didn’t make for great shots.  Better than nothing though!

The steps were supposed to be a wall.  Kinda lame.  LOL

The class taking their final bows.  She is on the far end.

The view of Brenna walking in front of me to the car to change just completely cracked me up, no pun intended! LOL I had to snap a photo.

Tags: Brenna, homeschooling