Today, we built the mammoth wooden robot that Noah had gotten for Christmas. (Yes, Christmas, as in 11 months ago. It was sitting on the top of our basement toy shelves, we built the T-Rex robot that Travis had gotten months and months ago; we finally decided to break out the Mammoth today.)
Yes, we're happy!
The head and body
Diligently finding the right part
While the boys and I toiled over the mammoth, Sophie gathered all the spare pieces, and sorted them by shape.
Below is video from our Nocturnal III: The Mission race this weekend. It was a three-part race; Ben and Tiffany did the 13-mile bike race; Shawn and I did the 3.5 mile trail run; then all four of us teamed up for the night-time adventure race, The Mission. It consisted of five checkpoints, lots of traipsing through the woods, some random obstacles, a little bit of getting lost and a whole lot of headlamps. I'm a bit disappointed we didn't capture any video of me as the "injured soldier" with my ankles zip-tied together attempting to hop a half-mile to the next checkpoint, but let me assure you that was a sight to behold.
Travis finished reading Charlotte's Web last night.
He's kind of a sensitive kid; he refuses to watch Star Wars with me because he's seen a bit of it and it looked scary; he stopped reading one of his Magic Treehouse books the other night because it got a bit spooky; when Sophie and Noah get engrossed in movies like The Princess Bride, Travis leaves the room because "it just seems like lots of bad things are happening."
So when I tucked him in for bed and kissed him goodnight, knowing he was just two chapters away from Charlotte dying in the book....I hesitated.
I imagined him reading in his bed, like he does each night, coming to the realization that one of the best storybook characters of all time was not going to survive Chapter Twenty-One. I imagined his quivering lip, tears forming in his eyes.
I wasn't sure whether I should warn him of what was coming.
I didn't. Instead, I patted his sweet little head, left him to his book, and went downstairs.
About twenty minutes later, I decided to check on him.
I glanced in his room. He was up on the top bunk, engrossed in the book still.
I climbed up into the bed with him. He was on the last page of the chapter before THE chapter.
He finished the chapter, then flipped the page and kept going. I questioned him:
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Travis, are you going to keep reading?
Well, mom, I only have two chapters left and I'm not really tired. I think I'm gonna finish the book tonight.
Okay, well, I just wanted to tell you....there is something really sad that happens in this chapter. I just want to make sure you know that and if you want me to stay here with you while you read it, I will. Ummm...I think I know.
You do? I think so. Why don't you tell me what happens and I'll tell you if I'm right?
Actually, why don't YOU tell me what you think is gonna happen, and I'll tell YOU if you're right?
I think....I think Charlotte dies.
......Yes. You're right. Charlotte dies.
I thought so. But.....
Yes, Travis?
I think it's okay. Because I think Wilbur will have her babies to be friends with.
Yes, that's exactly what happens. Actually, what happens with Charlotte's babies is really cool.
I'm kind of excited to find out about her babies. I think they will help Wilbur to always remember Charlotte.
Yes, he will always remember her. And her babies are really neat. I think you'll really like that part. In fact, Wilbur gets to name some of her babies!
I can't wait to read about that. I bet Charlotte's babies will love Wilbur.
All right, well, it sounds like you're okay then. I just wanted to make sure you were prepared to read about this.
You know mom, most insects die after they lay eggs. Charlotte's not an insect, but I think it's the same for spiders too. It happens to the monarch butterfly, too, but the monarch butterfly only lays one egg and Charlotte lays hundreds!! ----------------------
Yes, Travis is sensitive. He's also incredibly scientific. Particularly when it comes to animals.
Fifteen minutes later, he came downstairs, book in hand:
Mom, Charlotte's Web is my favorite non-series book ever!
I had nothing to worry about.
-------------------------------- As a post-script: I finished reading the last four chapters to the other kids tonight. Sophie kind of lost interest, and in fact was mostly asleep by the end. Noah got a little teary-eyed when Charlotte died. Travis crawled in the bed next to him and said, "Noah, you have to listen to the next chapter, it's good news! There was bad news in that chapter, but you're going to love the good news!" Noah begged for me to read the last chapter. Of course, I obliged. He giggled with delight when the first spider babies crawled out of the egg sac, then jumped up and down when they be-friended Wilbur. When the book was over, he grabbed Travis's hand and said, "Did you hear that book, Travis? Did you hear the baby spiders?!" with such utter joy in his voice I will never forget it.
When he colors outside the lines, or makes the tail on his lowercase "a" a bit too long, he gets upset. He has to start all the way over. It is so distressing to him that he just can't move on until the error has been rectified.
So I was quite pleased when the other day, he showed some signs of being able to accept some imperfections.
We were on the way home after a long day of school and work. Usually, I pick the kids up from my mom's house and, after loading everyone up and ensuring they've all buckled and that everyone has their jackets and lunchbags and mooses and shoes, I'll sit in mom's driveway and look through the boys' backpacks for a moment. Noah's will have some bit of work that he's done at school, cutting and pasting and tracing a few letters. Travis's will have his homework for that evening and a handful of graded homework, assignments completed during school, and tests and quizzes.
I review Travis's graded work to see if there is something we need to go over. I pick out the pages with errors on them (there are usually very few, this kid's work is chock full of VG+'s, which is the A+ of today's second-grader, I don't know if that's supposed to be more politically correct or what the point is, but whatever the reason, Travis is primarily a VG+ student), just so that Travis can take a look at them and see where his mistakes are. Most of the time it's something silly (he's notorious for forgetting punctuation at the end of a sentence).
Anyway, as we drive home, I hand the papers back to him so he can take a look at what he missed. (Don't worry, parenting zealots, I also spend a fair amount of time praising him for his good work. The entire exchange is quite positive and the point is not to just be talking about his mistakes but more to make sure he's got an awareness of what he can improve on.)
Anyway, at this point in the trip, Noah and Sophie insist on also taking a look at Travis's schoolwork. Sophie wants to look at whatever page has pictures on it. Noah wants to look at the math homework.
I don't know why, that's just the way it is.
So, we invariably spend time passing around Travis's work so that Noah can examine the math work (Six plus four is ten! I knew that already! Six plus five is eleven! That one's easy because you just add one more!) and Sophie can giggle at the pictures (This frog is cute mom. He has a hat. I wish I had a frog with a hat. I wish I was a frog. Mom, I'm a frog. I'm wearing a hat.)
So last week, this routine was humming along as per usual, Noah was reviewing the math homework, when he exclaimed, "MOM! I'm good at writing the number two."
That's great, Noah.
He continued, "But I'm GREAT at writing a backwards two!"
I'm empowered by this. My five-year-old no longer considers his tendency to write certain letters or numbers backwards as a failing on his part. Now he's decided he's just particularly talented at writing them that way.
That, my friends, is a talent.
P.S. NO, I'm not worried that I'm encouraging him to not care about doing things correctly. He's so insanely concerned with getting things right so much of the time that I consider it a step in the right direction that he now has the ability to accept what it means to be a five-year-old going through the learning process. I was worried about him getting discouraged too easily by not always getting things right. Being awesome at writing backwards....WIN!
Last weekend, I signed up me and the family for a 2K Fun Run. Ben ended up being out of town, but the rest of us powered through without him.
Actually, Ben was kind of with us in spirit, and he actually got a finishing time recorded, because I had picked up his packet and his race bib with timing chip was in my backpack during the run.
Anyway, I had a super-blast with the kids, they did a great job running the race, and I was very proud of them. When we finished, Travis said, "I want to do another 2k!", to which Noah forlornly responded, "Not me. I want to do a triathlon."
Could be I'm creating some monsters.
Here we are in the photo booth pre-race
Getting ready to line up for the race. We're excited!
Sophie, plugging along
A bit of a walk break
Travis ran most of the way, and this was one of his few walk breaks, but I love the expression on his face here.
That dream was directly tied to the fact that I constantly find myself saying to the kids....
"Change your attitude!"
I say that because I want the kids to understand that they are in control of their own attitudes, that even if bad things happen to them, the way they react to that is within their complete control.
In my dream, I was contemplating how I could get the kids to actually visualize that, at any given moment, they are selecting an attitude from a random list of any number of attitudes, and that they could feasibly decide to select a better attitude from that list.
I woke up having an ah-ha moment.
My first plan was to build an iPad app. I found a free app creator and got to work. I just wanted something simple, a literal list of "attitudes" from which to select.
I had the kids help me with the list, coming up with both positive and negative attitudes.
Building the app
A preview of our app during construction phase
Here's where I ran into a snag. Turns out, you have to pay the App Store $99 in order to get a developer's license to be able to upload. I love my kids, and I like this idea, but not a hundred dollars worth.
I thought I'd be able to create a personal app, and found some tutorials for doing just that on jailbroken iPhones, but I wasn't about to go that route.
So, we re-thought our plan. Instead of an app, I just created a second page on this blog titled Change Your Attitude! that has the same code as my app.
Then we created an icon on the home page of the iPad that links directly to the Change Your Attitude page.
Due to the length of the name, the iPad icon shortens its name to Change....itude.
Thus, Travis and I have lovingly nicknamed this program Changeitude.
So it's not surprising that our kids are smart. Left-brained smart. Like, tell me how much something costs in dollars and I will tell you how many 25¢ marbles that is worth smart.
Sometimes, Travis struggles with his Math Tracks at school. This is a program the school uses that prescribes certain math work to the students in a progressive method.
Despite Travis's stellar math skills, he falls behind at math tracks, I think because he gets bored with it. As soon as we start working on more difficult stuff, he shines.
Like, for instance, last night; when we went on the Math Tracks website and did the online flash cards. When we did the timed flash-cards for the level Travis is currently at, he got 16 answers in 2 minutes. When we jumped ahead a grade level, he got 34.
Oh well. We'll suffer through the easy stuff for now. But in the meantime, as Travis and I were working on his current-level flash cards, Noah sat behind him and whispered the correct answers before Travis was able to find the right key to type it in.
7-3 =
Noah: (four! It's four!)
9+4 =
Noah: (thirteen! I think it's thirteen!)
Terrific. Seriously, this kid is in Pre-Kindergarten where the extent of math is being able to identify numbers, certainly not addition and subtraction. I have a feeling we'll have another bored kid come time for first grade Math Tracks.
I don't need much of anything to be in perfect order. My house gets messy and cluttered. My lawn is not especially manicured. My life is a series of just-enough-to-get-by moments.
So how did I get these perfectionist kids??
When Noah started pre-school last year, we quickly learned of his idealistic tendencies. If he accidentally colored outside the lines, he got very upset. If he made an "S" backwards instead of forwards, he would cry in frustration. He couldn't stand to make mistakes.
At Open House this year, his teacher showed us his seagull project. She had been astounded by his cutting and coloring abilities. His was by far the most meticulous of the class.
She also said she's learned to get him started first, before any of the other kids, because you can bet it's gonna take him a while. His careful, deliberate style is not to be rushed.
I try to gently reiterate to Noah that no one expects perfection, that making mistakes is part of learning, all that jazz.
Now...I've got another one.
Tonight Sophie was practicing writing letters. She's just 3, not in school yet, but she's interested in the letters and asked to be able to write some.
So we practiced.
I wrote an "A", told her how to do it, then gave her a shot.
That's mine, up at the top left. Hers is down at the bottom center.
PRETTY GOOD for a 3-year-old.
She whimpered, "Ooooh... mine doesn't look very good. It doesn't look as good as yours."
I said, "Sophie darling, I've been writing for over 30 years and you just started this month, give yourself a break, kid."
She gave it a few more tries, hence the little arches on the page, but every time she did one of those she stopped and said, "Ohhhhh no, mine doesn't have a point at the top. Mine doesn't look good." and refused to go any farther.
Sophie's already the kind of kid who will exaggerate claims and add drama to any situation, like when I told her she couldn't come shopping with me and my mom and was going to need to stay home with her dad, and she responded, "But dad doesn't love me anymore!!"
Maybe that's part of the reason we didn't enroll Sophie in pre-school this year. I'm just not looking forward to those calls from Children & Family Services. "Your daughter says you put her in a closet with no food and water for three days for coloring outside the lines, ma'am, you're gonna need to come with us."
Through September, I will have run 16 races in 2012.
I haven't even signed up for a Halloween or Thanksgiving run yet. And if all the cards play right, I'll be signing up for an awesome 3-part night race in October with some friends.
The breakdown: 2 5Ks, 2 10Ks, a 5-miler, 2 trail runs, 4 obstacle course races, 3 triathlons, a fun run with my kids, and whatever you call the Tap N Run (a 4K race where you chug a beer at each 1K stop).
How on earth does one capture the memories of all these awesome races for perpetuity?
I'm a TERRIBLE scrapbooker. (Hence, this blog. It's my way of making up for the fact that I couldn't scrapbook my way out of a paper bag.)
SO, I let someone else do the scrapbooking for me.
Enter, Laura Elaine Designs. She makes running scrapbooks. I buy them. In my last order, she custom-made me one that had the cover I wanted. She asked what color scheme I wanted, but I had no answer, because I don't much care about colors, perhaps being one of the reasons I am so bad at scrapbooking.
I glue my bibs and pictures into the scrapbook, add in some detail about the race, the date, my finishing time, etc.
Voila. A super-cool scrapbook that took almost zero time and effort on my part. (Aside from, you know, running the races.)
My and Travis's new hobby: Imagining what an NFL game would be like if the teams WERE the mascots.
It started with last Sunday's Colts season-opener against the Bears.
Travis, what if this game was actual colts versus actual bears? Who do you think would win?
Well, mom, that depends on whether or not they knew how to play football.
Okay, let's pretend that it was actual colts versus actual bears that all know how to play football.
Bears can run about 30 miles per hour. How fast do you think colts can run?
[I trust him when he says this stuff. His mind is a steel trap for random animal facts.]
Let's look it up. It looks like....anywhere between 40 to 55 miles per hour, as long as they are only running for short distances.
Okay, so the colts would probably be faster than the bears. But I think the bears would be able to throw the ball easier.
That's true. So it may depend on whether they are trying for a running game or a passing game. Who do you think would be better on defense?
Umm... probably the bears. They fight a lot. But if the colts are faster than maybe it won't matter.
That's a good point. And I wonder if the bears would get distracted quicker, and run into the stands and start eating the people.
And the colts would stay on the field, because they like to eat grass!!
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In the end, we decided the colts would pull off an unlikely victory against the bears, given their speed and intellect, and the bears' likely propensity to dine on the spectators rather than play a stupid football game.
As we were watching the real Colts game (which unfortunately did NOT work out in the way our make-believe one did), Travis came up to me and said:
Mom, I saw a commercial for the Eagles vs Cowboys game. Who do you think would win that one?
Oooh, good question. What do you think?
Well, eagles can fly, which would be a big help to them because it would be so hard for the cowboys to catch them.
You're right. That's a pretty clear advantage. But cowboys normally have guns, right?
Yeah, but I think it's pretty hard to shoot birds. They probably wouldn't be able to do it very well. The cowboys might be able to use their lassos to catch the eagles, but I bet the eagles would be able to fly faster and get away from them. I think the eagles would definitely win.
This weekend was another one of those madness-filled weekends where at least once during the packing/planning/travel stages, Ben and I look at each other and sigh, "What are we thinking?!?" BUT it was also filled with lots of fun, adventure, friends, and merriment. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Except for maybe a vacation home in Hawaii. I'd probably trade it for that.
It started off at Ben's newly-built high school for the home-opener football game. As in, the first-ever-played-football-game-at-the-new-forty-million-dollar-St.-Joseph's-High-School. It was a pretty big deal.
It was also decidedly NOT a good night for football watching. At least, not in Davidsonland, which includes one energetic three-year-old and one feisty five-year-old, neither of whom are interested in SITTING STILL on metal bleachers to watch a bunch of big people run back and forth on a field for three hours. And particularly not when the formula also includes steady rainfall and a weather forecast showing 80% chance of thunderstorms for most of the evening.
We stayed for the first quarter.
Here's what we missed:
Let's just say that new field worked out pretty well for our team.
After the game, we packed up and headed down to our friends' house about 90 minutes away to begin phase two of our weekend. We got there just in time to get everyone snuggled into sleeping bags for bed before turning in ourselves.
In the morning, I left Ben asleep in a houseful of five kids (60% of whom are carrying his DNA, and the other 40% having no idea they were going to wake up with both parents gone and some guy in charge of them) while Tiffany and I drove down to Indianapolis for the Color Me Rad 5K.
This was Tiffany's first race, it was one of those where they spray or throw color packets made of corn starch at you every so often.
(Open your eyes, Courtney!! Nobody's throwing anything at you anymore!)
It was fun.
Next, we headed back to Tiffany's house, dropped the dads off in Fort Wayne for some male bonding time, and took the kids to the Columbia City Art Fair, where they painted rocks, danced, ate some cookies, and rode a carriage.
Raccoon face
We spent the evening back at Shawn & Tiffany's, with Mexican food, wine, and trampoline jumping serving as the highlights of the evening. (Not at the same time. That would be a recipe for disaster.)
In the morning, we packed up our families and made our way to the Fort Wayne Zoo. Some pictures below, and you can see evidence of what Noah has decided is his "happy-pose".
Lanston, the happiest baby on the planet
Noah's happy pose #1
Noah's happy pose #2 (and a thumbs-up by Sophie)
Noah's happy pose #3
Enjoying the monkeys
The Friends in the log-boat, minus Ganon, who was an honorary Davidson for much of the weekend.
Tiff & Tanner in the bumper boat. You mean these aren't bumper boats? DID YOU HEAR THAT TIFFANY!??!
Me and Sophie on the log-boat, and Travis's arm behind us
The family....plus our two surrogates, Tanner and Ganon
The kids, minus Tanner, and plus another one of those happy poses.
Finally, to round out the weekend, we headed over to another friends' house to watch the Colts get demolished by the Bears. Watching the Colts lose isn't exactly my favorite thing to do, but it was a nice time and we got to eat Tammy's famous chocolate chip cookies, so it wasn't a total loss.
Come to think of it, maybe I wouldn't even go for that vacation home in Hawaii.
It's pretty much not physically possible for us to have crammed anything else into our weekend.
I got off work a couple hours early on Friday, and headed home to finish packing for the weekend. I did not have to go pick up the kids, because they all stayed at my mom's house for the bulk of the weekend.
I got home, and found Ben in frantic-panic mode.
You see, he just purchased a double-decker pontoon off of Craig's List, had met the seller during the week to check it out and pay a deposit, but was supposed to meet the guy in Angola that afternoon to complete the sale and get it dropped off in our lake.
But see, I hadn't gotten off work as early as he'd anticipated, so we were getting a late start. And the guy was already in Angola, and we were still a good hour away from even leaving our house, which put us about two and a half hours away from meeting our new boat.
Ben and Pontoon Guy tried to work out an arrangement, and the guy actually agreed to just leave the pontoon at the lake access point, and we could mail him a check for the amount we owed him.
This is a pretty trusting guy.
Since we were a bit freed up on time, I drove to Meijer to order Noah's birthday cake for his party on Sunday and pick up a few other necessities.
As soon as I got home, Frantic Ben was back, as he'd gotten a phone call from pontoon-seller-guy, who instead of dropping the boat off for us to pick up, was going to stay in the area for dinner and wait for us.
Maybe not so trusting after all.
So we hurriedly finished packing and made our way to Angola, where we picked up the boat and deposited it at our pier.
I tried to get a video of Ben going down the slide into the shallows, but I apparently didn't capture it. Instead, here's a photo:
It took a bit of time to get the boat into the water, towed back to our pier (it has no motor), then deposit the trailer back in our lot. We still had a four hour trip ahead of us into central Michigan. So we hit the road.
This was a mini-anniversary-trip for us, as last weekend was our 11th anniversary. For Father's Day, I had purchased Ben a new GoPro Hero 2 helmet-cam, so for our anniversary I decided to book us a trip where we could put said camera to good use.
Without going too overboard, I found a zip-line tour at a place about four hours away from us, then booked a canoe trip for the same day. I found a nearby campground and booked us a site.
We discussed bringing the pop-up camper, but given that we were only staying for one night, and were gonna get there super late, we decided to opt for just the tent.
At 10p.m., when we pulled into our campsite and unloaded our tent gear, we re-thought even that. It was super late and super dark, and our tent is ridiculously big.....so we decided to take the seats out of the back of the van, blow up the air mattress, and sleep in the van.
Yep, we're hard-core.
In the morning, we called the canoe guy, who runs a pretty nice little operation, and got our canoe drop-off scheduled for 10 a.m. We had breakfast at Burger King, discussed the merits or lack thereof of the new bacon sundae, then met our canoe guy.
Our trip down Cedar River was lovely, and mostly uneventful except for the one time when Ben decided to get OUT of the canoe while I was deep in video-concentration-mode, leading to this priceless caught on tape moment where I got dumped in the water.
After canoeing, we cleaned up a bit, had some lunch, then headed for our zip-line tour.
Zip lining was quite enjoyable, we had a great time, as can best be demonstrated by our video here:
Thanks, GoPro, for the excellent footage.
After ziplining, it was time to make the trek home. We were four hours away from home and knew we wouldn't get home until too late for it to make sense for us to pick the kids up from my mom's.
Ben said, "Let's go to the casino. It will take us less time to get there than to get home, and we might as well do something besides just drive all evening."
And since I'm a sucker for doing random crap, we called up some friends who were agreeable to meeting us at Four Winds, we gambled some money away, had a nice evening, and then made the drive home at one in the morning.
I got up at 7:15 to pick up the kids, because I missed them for heaven's sake, and because we had to get a jump start on the day, because, of COURSE, we had a jam-packed schedule what with Noah's birthday party at the baseball diamond in the afternoon.
The party was a big hit, our local minor league ball park has done a lot of work over the last year to make the Cove an awesome family experience, the kids played in the bouncy houses and inflatable obstacle courses, watched the game, ate as much popcorn as they could, splashed in the splash pad, climbed in the playground, and watched Noah on the JumboTron as the audience sang him happy birthday and Swoop gave him a special birthday baseball.
