Yes, I’m late again. I don’t know why I can’t get my crap together to get this posted in a timely manner… Though, it honestly doesn’t matter that much since they’re all posted on the blog.
Year: 2015
Apparently it’s family couch day.
Tom is watching the MSU game, Katie is watching a movie on the iPad, Owen is watching the game and Katie’s movie, and I’m writing the blog (with Maggie on my lap).
I’ve walked 250 miles since June!
Since I’ve started tracking my steps with the Fitbit in June, I’ve walked 250 miles:
Owen at bat…in slo-mo.
See, I told you. The second game? No pics and one measly video. 🙂
Kidisms 16
Katie: I don’t have to throw up on the ground like Maggie and Charlie and Bella.
I was playing Legos with Owen.
Me: I love your brain.
Owen: I know. My brain is creative.
Me: Alexa, shuffle music.
Alexa: /plays Christmas music/
Me: Christmas music?! Owen, do you want to listen to Christmas music?
Owen: YES!
That’s my boy.
Katie: I’m a good doctor for animals and toys. This is my clinic.
Our first homemade ice cream!
I’ve had a simple/inexpensive Cuisinart ice cream maker on my Amazon watchlist for awhile now, and it hit it’s lowest price ever the other day, so I finally bought it. I figure we don’t eat that much ice cream anymore, so why not be able to make whatever flavors we want in much smaller quantities when we want it?
So we made peanut butter Oreo tonight. The kids helped me get the mix ready (no pics of that because I was too busy helping hold the mixer) and they were EXCITED.
She would have spent the entire 15 minutes like this if we let her. 🙂
I didn’t get any pics of the end product or of us eating it because we snarfed it down pretty quickly. (Also, we all had very small portions—maybe 3-4 spoonsful—with the rest going in the freezer.) It was quite tasty—and a soft-serve consistency which I really really like (similar to a DQ Blizzard!). So it was a success!
Katie finally got a bank!
Seeing Katie play with Owen’s bank, we realized she didn’t have one of her own so we’ve been on the lookout for one. We finally found one last night so we had her move all her money to it.
Owen’s Good Character Award
Owen’s teacher emailed me last night to let me know he was getting the award this morning and that he didn’t know about it—so she left it up to us whether or not to tell him. We opted to keep it a surprise—and Tom was luckily able to make it, so we kept that a surprise, too!
He doesn’t see us…
Doesn’t see us…
Then sees daddy!!
Such a happy little boy!
Owen’s part is about at 2:11.
Mrs. McLenigan and Mrs. Stulman did a great job with the kids—all four 1st grade award recipients were from their kindergarten class!
A new family picture!
Tom was home this morning…because he was going to surprise Owen at school for Morning Program (Owen was getting a Good Character award—which was also a surprise for him!). So I took advantage of us all being home to snap a new pic! It turned out great!
These were the other pics I snapped beforehand. You see what trying to get a picture of the kids together can be like? Not one “good” one in the bunch. 🙂
#MomLife
Hallelujah and amen.
Taking 1st grade math…to Facebook.
As briefly mentioned in the last post about Owen’s homework, Tom and I were both somewhat baffled by the supposed answers for his pattern homework.
I actually had to ask Tom about the first incorrect one because I read it (and answered it!) the same way Owen did! 🙂 But, the teacher was right—there should have been one number on each line (he did the same thing with the third line—put too many numbers on the lines, even though he had the right numbers!). But Tom and I still weren’t sure about the wrong triangle and why it should be a square. So I took the question to Facebook. My question was answered, but you can see the types of discussion it brought about. Egads. All this over first grade math homework. Can you imagine what it will be like going forward?!?!?
Here was the worksheet.
And here’s the Facebook discussion!
Owen’s first week of schoolwork!
I won’t be doing this every week, but there were a few good ones this past week (they got sent home today).
(Click to see a bigger version.)
I had to get a few translations:
- HOME: My family picking trash with me.
- SCHOOL: My whole class is picking up trash. (Grades are the numbers above their heads. 1G is the 1st grade teacher.)
- NEIGHBORHOOD: I am lawnmowering my house. (My favorite one. Lawnmowering.)
- BUS: Everybody stays seated.
I actually had to ask Tom about the first one because I read it the same way Owen did! 🙂 But, the teacher was right—there should have been one number on each line. But Tom and I still aren’t sure about the wrong triangle and why it should be a square. He did the same thing with the third line that he did the first—put too many numbers on the lines (but he had the right numbers!).
He didn’t quite circle the correct words. When I asked him about it, he said he was circling friends. Earm? Koln? Then he said “Well the teacher marked it TERRIFIC!” And I said yes, but she probably just looked to see he had circled anything and didn’t look for the right words.
I didn’t notice until looking at this one a third time that he attempted to write his middle name on the Name line. 🙂
Owen’s first fall Nationals t-ball game!
The first official game was rained out last Saturday, so tonight’s game became the first actual game! It was held at a field in a neighboring city (if you wonder why it looks different). As usual, the first game has many more pictures than I’ll post for subsequent games! 🙂
Tom is the Assistant Coach this season! The fall season isn’t as big as the spring season, so no official shirts for the coaches (boooo!)—only hats. (The kids also just get plain colored tees with the name of the little league county on it instead of a team name and logo.)
Once more, he’s a head taller than everyone else on his team!
Of course she doesn’t ever really watch the game, and tonight she was exploring a new park—throwing stones in the river.
(No, he didn’t have to go potty. Apparently he’s a natural at the baseball moves.)
Me: Katie, don’t play in the dirt.
Katie: Mom–it’s sand!
How did she get to be such a smart[ass] little girl? 🙂
They’ve been trying to teach the catchers to tag out the runners (it still doesn’t count as an out since it’s t-ball) so Owen is doing his best…
And actually CHASING them down. 🙂
Hurry up, Halloween!
This is a 3T (bought last year and didn’t wear) and it’s a little tight.
You had ONE job.
Resurfacing all the streets in our community…and they spill right at the corner I have to walk by four times a day (bus stop). It drives my OCD insane.
This is what usually happens when Charlie sits on my lap.
Bathing Beauty
Homework time!
Frozen underwear!
Gramma Jean sent Katie some Frozen-themed underwear to hopefully get her interested in her upcoming potty training! Katie loves them, of course…so fingers crossed it helps!
Kindergarten Artwork
I’ve been working on Owen’s kindergarten Shutterfly book and found these. I love them all.
Water sticks nuts squirrel day moon dad
(This is Owen sitting on the couch in front of our TV playing xbox with daddy behind him.)
Tree flower house stairs house (not sure what done is—maybe down as in downstairs?)
Me and my mom play Robot Turtles. The flowers are blue purple yellow.
I am at the pool after dinner.
(More Xbox—that’s our entertainment center and the colored letters on the Xbox controller.)
If I had a tall black hat I would keep Legos in it.
Kindergarten Teacher Letters
As I was making Owen’s kindergarten book, I realized I hadn’t taken pics of what his teachers wrote in his memory book!
My Little Diva
Holding my sunglasses while I tried something on.
What I like best about school.
I like to go outside for recess. I like to play with my friends.
Post-bus stop playground visit
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
We went to get something out of the garage freezer for dinner…and it was open. Apparently one of our guests last night opened the freezer thinking it was a fridge…and didn’t shut it right. (It has a baby lock on the top, which would have had to be opened first…so they had to have known it was there…but then pushed it closed with the latch in the way.)
So it had been open 24 hours. 😐 Everything in the front 6″ was completely thawed and warm. Thankfully a bit farther back stuff was still cold and frozen.
Oh, you’re saying, haven’t you been through this exact scenario multiple times? Didn’t you get an alarm so it would alert you when the temperature changed? Why, yes. Yes we have. And yes, yes we did. And the alarm was installed…BUT TURNED OFF. I’m sure one of us did it but I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would’ve turned the alarm off so who knows. As soon as I turned the alarm back on it started beeping exactly as it should! GRRR.
We tossed at least $100 worth of food—sucky, but it could have been A LOT worse. And then the decisions—in quick succession:
- We need to get the coolers down and start emptying the freezer.
- We need to start cooking some of the stuff to save it (I was on the stove, Tom started the grill).
- We need to start defrosting the freezer (we might as well since it needed it and there’s really no better time). Thankfully (?) I’m well-versed in this procedure and knew it wouldn’t take long.
- And then finally…yeah…let’s just go buy a new freezer. (We’d been talking about it but obviously wanted to do it on our own terms…not this way.)
And we couldn’t really even wait until tomorrow because—as luck would have it—our street is going to be closed for two days for resurfacing so we couldn’t even get to our driveway with a freezer if we wanted to! And we have two coolers full of frozen food right now! We bought the freezer at our first house in 2003…so at 12 years old it was time. And we figured a newer one would be more efficient. Unfortunately, all the easily-available freezers today are bigger than what we currently have…which means we now get to reconfigure everything (shelving, etc.) because it’s all arranged Tetris-style to be able to fit in as much as possible and there’s no easy wiggle room for an additional 4″ of freezer…plus we now have to move the dorm fridge because it was on top of the old freezer but the new freezer is too tall.
As expected, it took under an hour to defrost the whole thing. As I said, I’m a pro at this.
Tom was back with the new freezer within a little over an hour and we had it plugged in immediately. Amazingly, it was down to temp within about an hour (!) so we loaded it up. The one good thing about a bigger freezer is that everything fit in there with room to spare. Now, we just have to not fill it up!! (Actually, we were already on a freezer-goods-purchasing-freeze so the ultimate goal is to leave the empty space so we can actually see what we have at all times.)
The one saving grace is that we got rid of the old freezer within a few hours. I posted it on a Facebook yard sale group and a friend in the neighborhood actually saw it and came and got it!
Monkey Toes
Katie and Owen were playing with the checkers when she says “Mama! Look at my toes!”
Yep…like mama, like daughter. 🙂
Fall Festival
Our local town center was having a small fall festival so we took the kids since it was a gorgeous day. When I saw small, I mean small—there were about 10-12 booths on the outside edge (cotton candy, face painting, Pampered Chef, jewelry, etc.) and there were a few kids projects in the center island. It was perfect—the kids had fun and things didn’t take too long. 🙂
Eating his special chocolate-covered Oreo treat once we got home.
Katie graduated to Turtle 1!
Pllaying before lessons started.
Then Katie had some successful jumps…
…and she graduated to Turtle 1 (red cap)! (It took her 11 classes, or just under 3 months of classes!) Unfortunately they were out of red caps, so hopefully she’ll get it next week and then we can take her official photo!
Now I just hope they can rearrange some students so that their classes are more convenient—there’s no Turtle 1 classes adjacent to Owen’s Shark 1 class so we have to be there from 11 (when his class starts) to 12:30 (when her class ends). They said they’d try to get us something better so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.
Sunday morning walk
It was just me and Owee this morning. I was feeling good in my new walking outfit—XL pants and XL shirt!!—after hitting 60# this week…that I had Owen take my picture!
Then I wanted a nice picture of him. This just reminds me of a senior picture…which is far away but will be here before you know it. /sniff
Quick Katie cuddle
After the challenging day we had with her yesterday (she had a major tantrum when she didn’t get to do something she wanted because she didn’t listen and follow the rules), it felt so good to have her be happy and smiling and cuddly. 🙂
