Some wonderful soul went as a Yip-Yip for Halloween.
Marsha T. Cat supervises Poppy’s vocabulary work.
Cubs won! Cubs won! Holy cow, Cubs won!
I made Freddie Prinze Jr.’s carne asada tacos for dinner. They were delicious.
I caught a Meowth at soccer practice.
Pete has been asking for a pool party for his birthday for years. It finally happened.
This was my third year (2014, 2015) participating in Laura Tremaine’s One Day thing on instagram. I’m writing this at 1am, right after the Cubs won the World Series — the Cubs! They won the World Series! — and I am so tired and emotional that I can hardly string a thought together. Rockford has been a Cubs fan for more than 30 years. This was a big, stressful, amazing day.
Our regular learning activities haven’t varied all that much from the norm over the last few weeks. We’re reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows,” and Pete is reading a Tom Swift book. Poppy is working on exponents in math, and Pete has joined a math club that meets once a month. We talked about crystals in science, and all of our experiments failed. (That part wasn’t very exciting.)
We did, however, add a few new things to our repertoire this week.
There are a ton of opportunities for hiking and exploring nature in our area. Because of some anxiety issues on my part — no bathrooms! bears! tickborne diseases! no bathrooms! — I haven’t done a terrific job taking advantage of that. I’m going to make an effort to change that, though, by planning a (maybe) weekly hike into our schedule.
This week the kids and I went for a short hike on some nearby national forest land. I couldn’t find the trail I’d intended for us to hike, and judging by the ruggedness of the path and the number of people on mountain bikes we saw (10) as compared to other people on foot (2), I’m pretty sure the one we ended up on was primarily a mountain-biking trail. But we crossed a small creek via a very small fallen tree, we stumbled upon a lake, and I was pretty much OK save for a small moment of panic.
Midway through our hike, Pete said: “You know, I’m actually enjoying this.” I actually did too, pal.
On Tuesday my friend Robin shared on instagram that she was going to participate in Elle Luna’s 100-day project. Robin is an artist, so it makes sense that she would sign on to create some sort of art every day for 100 days. I am not an artist, but I do have a couple of kids who love to do art projects. And so I decided that the for the next 100 days, the kids and I would do an art project.
Perhaps it wasn’t wise to decide on a whim to do something for 100 days in a row, but so far Poppy, Pete and I have had fun with our projects. Here’s what we’ve done thus far:
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