So excited!

It took a little coordinating to get everything lined up with dates and places, but we now have a for sure date and place...the time is still up in the air!

Yippee! We're going to have a white Christmas after all!

It's in the air!!!

We're getting ready for the most wonderful time of the year!!! We've got the 24 hour Christmas music radio station dialed in, our favorite Christmas movies lined up, 98% of our Christmas shopping done, and we are starting to Christmas-ify our house.... I love this time of year!!!

Final past due post: pictures with Grandpa

On his final day with us, Grandpa wanted to take pictues with the kids in different parts of the house - each place having a special meaning to him and that child.

 

For Teagan, they were in her room because she had let him use her room as the guest bedroom and had slept in the boys room with them so Grandpa could have a place of his own.

 He and Garrett took a picture together in the school room.

 For his picture with Emmett, they recreated the stair sliding fun they had had the night before - only this time Grandpa didn't actually slide down, he had learned the night before that if you are an adult then it really hurts to slide down a flight of stairs on your stomach!

 The shot for Owen and he was in the t.v. room with their muscles blaring. The night before they had sat in those chairs and watched Hunger Games together, so it only seemed fit.

 And since Duncan didn't have an opinion on where they should go, Grandpa chose sitting in the family room on the couch because he had gotten Duncan to sit on his lap and watch the digital t.v. picture frame scroll through family pictures the night before.

 As for me, he wanted a picture of us in the kitchen to remind him of all the yummy food we had while he was here. I've forgotten everything that I made, but I do remember that I had made him Thai one night and manicotti another...and I do have to admit, they were delicious!

 And we had to slide one choking shot in at the end - it's tradition for us.

We definitely had a great time having Grandpa here with us! The kids loved his stories and his funny, off-the-wall sense of humor and Scott loved the conversations they had. We missed having Grandma J. with us, but were grateful for the fun Japanese treats she sent us and took them with us on all our trips so we could have a little bit of her along with us at our picnics. Next time we're hoping she'll be there for real :-)

Past due post 2: Museum of Flight

Our second museum that we took Grandpa to was one that the boys and I had been to before, but even after spending three hours there we had only seen about a third of the museum. So we were excited to go back again; this time bringing Grandpa, Daddy, and Teagan with us.

In the first wing we went to, the kids got to go into a flight simulator. Owen was Grandpa's co-pilot, Teagan went with her Daddy, and Garrett was pilot to a strange lady in line whose husband was afraid to go with her. For my future pilot (Garrett) this was total heaven! Teagan and Scott had their planes doing loop-the-loops and barrels and trick flying, while the others kept their wings mainly on the horizon and went after attacking enemy planes instead. Garrett said he had wanted to loop his plane, but the lady asked him not to because she was too nervous to go upside down - poor dude.

 Throughout the museum there were so many classic, antique, modern, and foreign planes. There were planes to interest anyone. A lot of them you could go close to and look in, and some you could even get inside.

 This was Owen pretending he was about to crash this bomber after being attacked by the red baron.

 Everyone over the age of 4 had a great time and learned a lot. We were there for almost 5 hours and we still didn't get to see everything. This time we made it through about half of hte the museum, but there was still so much more to see! But the four and under crowd were restless and needing naps and we had to go set up the trunk-or-treat activity at the church, so we called it a day.

Past due post- science museum with Grandpa J.

When Grandpa was here visiting, we took him to all sorts of fun museums. The first one was one that we had never been ti either, so it was a new experience for all of us. It was the Seattle Pacific Science Museum. Among the coolest exhibits there were a human body exhibit that was very hands on and intersting, a Puget sound exhibit where they could touch some underwater creatures, a great inner workings of an engine exhibit where you learned all about the different components of a car engine through great hands on activities, and a space exhibit.

 

 But I think the most popular exhibit to our group was the animal wing with the butterfly house in it. There were all sorts of cool bugs and a (freaky) naked mole rat colony, but the butterflies were the main attraction. Poor Emme was worn out by the time we finally made it to this wing of the museum, but I think even he enjoyed it.

 Some butteflies enjoying their lunch

 

The butterfly house was a giant room brimming with exotic plants, filled with flittering exotic  butterflies all around, and chock full of humidity. It was great! Grandpa and Owen almost found all of the different species of butterflies on the list as they walked around. It was like a real life eye spy game! (Owen was Grandpa's side kick all week long.)

 Unfortunately I couldn't snag a picture of this really awesome cocoon wall without some strangers in the frame as well, but this was where they hung all the butterfly cocoons and you could watch the butterflies hatching out of them as you stood there! We got to see about 6 emerge from their cocoons while we were there. It was so interesting!

 

 I tried taking a picture from across the room when I spied no one there, but this was all I got...but the black butterfly was one that we had watched come out of her cocoon earlier and she was still drying her wings in this picture.

 While we were at the museum, the kids got to do a fun first for them. They had their pictures taken in those teeny tiny photo booths. It was hilarious watching the four older kids trying to clamber in the miniature booth with Grandpa!

Later on, Teagan and I wanted to get ours done together, too. But we wre photo bombed by Garrett and then Emmett joined us too.

I think they still turned out great!

 

Don't You Hate it When...

I could finish this sentence so many ways, but here is today's:

...your kid trips while racing a friend and slams her big toe on the concrete...

then when she gets home she tells you it really hurts so you look at it, see some swelling and some bruising, but tell her to man up and ignore the pain...

then the next morning her toe looks really swollen and you tell her to take it easy on it, but to be a man...

and then, finally, four days later you decide that maybe, since it is a weight bearing toe, and since she keeps bumping it on stairs and chairs and little boy feet, that maybe you should take her in to just be sure everything is alright...

and when the doctor reviews the x-rays he tells you that it is broken.... in two places.... one of which goes in to the joint.... and might need to be pinned in place....

at which point your 13 year old proceeds to do a "Boo-ya!" in your face?

Yeah, I hate that too!

Luckily, once we saw  the ortho doc, he decided to try and cast it for two weeks and see if it will bond properly on its own. If it can, then she won't need pins. So now I am pushing the calcium on her - second glasses of milk, extra cheese on her sandwiches, celebratory milk shakes that she didn't get pins. We're doing it all!

So now she is in a cast for two weeks, only on crutches until most of the pain is gone and then she can walk on the cast, and then after the two weeks we are hoping she moves into an air cast for another 4 weeks and doesn't need the pins.

As soon as she got home and her celebrity status began, she got her first cast signer - one of her biggest fans, Owen. He signed his name and then added, "love you, Teagan!" He also signed Duncan's name since Duncan prefers to eat markers rather than sign casts with them.

Our next plan is to use some of her nail polish and paint big polka dots on her cast.

Finally...a scout at last!

Owen has been WAITING so long to be a cub scout! He has worn his "future scouter" t-shirt for the past four years in anticipation of the time when he could retire it and put on his own blue uniform shirt like Garrett wore.

So, for his birthday, Garrett passed down his old cub scout shirt to Owen, with all the new badges and troop numbers already sewn on. It was ready for use!

Today was Owen's very first time getting to go to cub scouts as an actual scout instead of going as a scouters sibling. Being the first Wednesday of the month meant that he got to go on pack meeting night.

 I was in charge of the activity for the teenagers tonight, and was sad that I couldn't be there for his first actual scout activity, but I made sure to take lots of pictures of him at home all decked out in his uniform!

 He looks so little in his uniform! His legs are so long and scrawny and his belt wraps all the way around to his back and he has to tuck the shirt way down to his knees.

I love how the hat is still too big for him and it makes his ears poke out like a little kid whose ears are too big for his head!

He's such a cutie and he's so excited!

The Wall

When I played basketball I wasn't all that great at it. I didn't know all the rules and positions. I didn't make every shot I put up, I wasn't the fastes or the most aggresive on the court, but there was one position that I pretty good at: I was a reall good 'screen.' A screen is someone who gets in the way of the opposing team to help another player on her own team out. I was really good at getting in the other team's way and holding my position to block and protect my teammates. Tig has apparently taken after me in this regard.

Last week at practice, one of her teammates tried running past her to steal the ball and Tig held her ground and held the girl off. After running in to Teagan and nearly getting a concussion by coming to such an abrupt halt, she looked up to Tig and said, "Man Teagan, you are a WALL!"

Tig wasn't too sure how to take that. A 50lb, five-foot-nothing, blonde soccer champ calling Teagan a 'wall,' but I told her it was compliment. To be a wall in soccer was just like being a screen in basketball.

At her next game, Teagan let the other team experience her wall-like attributes and helped make way for the other girl to score one of the winning points. (This was a team they had already played before and lost 4-2, and this game they beat them 2-0!)

This game was cold, and wet, and drab, and our little family made up 90% of the cheering section for our team. But we sure did cheer them on all the same!

Teagan is loving playing soccer and wants to join another team for winter season. She is really excited that next season's soccer is indoor soccer and so are we. I am not a fan of sitting sideline with an umbrella and wintercoat on!

Now don't you feel better?

This year is a big year - it's a presidential voting year.

We've been trying to instill in the kids the importance of being informed, making wise decision, and performing civic duties. There is so much energy and tension everywhere about the candidates that even the kids have taken notice.

It would have been a great object lesson to have taken all our brewd to the polling center, standing in line for three hours in the rain, and then letting them stand on the other side of the curtain while we made our voting decision, but we thought that our sanity weighed a little bit heavier than a great object lesson opportunity and we did the early voting at home.

It was so much easier! We had a voters guide that Washington state mailed out to every household with descriptions of all the people and things we were voting about, and we had the internet readily available for us to search out each person's political stance on the issues we were most concerned about. You don't get THAT behind that little curtain at the polling center!

There were things on the Washington ballot that surprised me a little. We were voting whether to legalize gay marriage or not, which I already have firm beliefs about, but the wording was so awkward that I had to reread it a couple of times to make sure I was marking the right spot. It spoke about voting for the religious freedom of clergymen not to perform the weddings; for me that was a yes, but it was piggybacked on the vote for gay marriage. So if you voted yes to one, it would be yes to the other as well. We also voted on whether we wanted to legalize marijuana, and if we wanted charter schools in Washington. It was a fun ballot to fill out - full of excitement and variety.

It took both of us a little while to get through our last minute researching of the different state and federal level candidates, but we did each compete our whole ballots and sealed them in their peak-proof, double envelopes.

Now they are off in the mail, headed to that great big sorting room in wherever-land be counted, and the kids got to see the whole process from the comfort of our own little schoolroom.

I asked Scott to pose with me and our ballots and he couldn't understand why I was asking that of him. So he decided to do a mug shot pose with his...whatever works!