Good Practice

Took the kids on a 'training run' for our 2K Fun Run this weekend.

They started off pretty pumped.

This is awesome!!

Then they got a bit worn out.

How much farther??

Then they asked me to carry them.

I did not.

He's an Expert

Noah is showing Sophie how to trace letters on our dry-erase letter flashcards.

Sophie turns to me and says, "Mom, Noah's just a good 'B' maker. Right?"

Why yes, he is.

Parenting in the Next Generation

Yesterday morning, I woke up with an epiphany.

I'd had a dream.

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.

 The kids pointing out the Changeitude "app"

Noah selecting an attitude

Feel free to check it out.

I'm officially frightened.

Alright.

Ben's a smart guy.

I'm pretty mathematically inclined.

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.

My kid is a geek.

The five-year-old and the dad are playing the Skylanders video game on the Xbox.

The seven-year-old is reading a book on the couch.

Noah has just made the characters exit the game because he's almost out of life. He wails, "Dad! I need life! Help get me life!"

Ben says, "I will, Noah. Get me back into the game and I will get you life."

Travis glances up from his book and says, "Kind of like a symbiotic relationship."

Then he goes right back to reading.

Geeks are awesome.

If you can't do something well, learn to enjoy doing it poorly.

I am NOT a perfectionist.

I'm more like a mediocre-ist.

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."

I don't even know what a Cricut IS

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).

That also doesn't count the 3.5ish mile race around the lakes that I did with Ben, because we didn't get a bib, and if you don't get a bib, it's NOT A RACE.

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.)

I'm not sure what this would look like on the Vegas line

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!!

------------------------------

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. 

Agreed.

-----------------------

I can see this becoming a Sunday tradition.

Not Hawaii, but still pretty fun

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.

That tastes periwinkle.

No, I haven't posted much lately.

I'm kind of on the fence about what I want this blog to be.

We'll see where that goes.

But in the meantime, tonight, I was cutting up some apples for the kids. The exchange went like this:

Noah:  Travis's favorite apples are yellow apples.

Me:  Yes, I know. These apples are called Golden Delicious apples. What do you think, are they golden and delicious?

Noah: Um...I don't know.

Me:  Well, are they golden?

Noah: Yes, I think so.

Me:  Do they taste delicious?

Sophie: YES! They taste delicious! They taste golden!!

Me: [laughing slightly] Oh? You can taste colors?

Sophie: YES!

Noah: Nooooo... Sophie can't taste colors. But Canada can.

Me: [blank stare]....uh....he can?

Noah: Yes. He eats crayons.





It's true. My dog loves to eat crayons.

And yet another video....Warrior Dash 2012

My sister and I completed the Warrior Dash Indiana yesterday. 3 miles of muddy obstacles, muddy trails, muddy pits, and then more mud.

It was fabulous.

Urban Adventure 2012 - The Video

Boat Buying, Canoeing, Zip Lining, Gambling, Partying. Welcome to the weekend.

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.

Happy Birthday Noah!!

I have a confession.

I work out a lot - generally, five or six days a week. I lift weights three times a week.

But I cannot do a pull-up.

This isn't all that horrible, and not that uncommon for women in their mid-thirties, to be sure. But I've decided it is high time this comes to an end.

I will be able to pull-ups.

At least five. Unassisted. Thus is my goal.

I recently accomplished my last stated goal, which was to be able to squat 150 pounds. I set this goal for myself about seven months ago, when I first started my weight lifting program, and I was squatting merely the 45-lb bar. That goal seemed like an impossibility back then.

Last week, I squatted 3 sets of 5 reps at 155.

It was very empowering.

Now, on to that dreaded pull-up bar, which mocks me every day at the gym.

I will conquer you.


If Sophie can do it.....