Thursday, March 14, 2024

Finally Some Free Time Again

 Wow, it's been a long time since I posted anything.  I was assigned to teach a temple preparation class in our ward and not just any class, but a four week class of my own design.  I was tasked with creating the curriculum using any church sources I wanted and design a class for both new members and lifelong members seeking to further their temple experience.  Needless to say, my month was immediately booked.  Every single preschool class time, I went to Kelly's bishop's office, because it's a quarter mile from preschool, and worked on my lesson until it was time to pick him up.  That left the evenings for everything I would normally have done during preschool and it felt quite hectic all month.  I have no regrets, though.  The class went wonderfully and I have never loved and understood the temple, its history, its purpose, and the doctrine taught there as well as I do now.  It really strengthened my testimony of Jesus Christ and his all-encompassing love for us.  Plus, now the curriculum is set - all the slide shows, videos, hand outs, and lesson outlines, etc. so I could teach it again and again with minimal additional effort.  All of that to say, sorry for the long hiatus and let's get to the photo dump, shall we?

Lifetouch, the company that does school photos, has been emailing me trying to get me to buy old pictures of my kids.  No, thank you, Lifetouch, there's a reason why I didn't buy those prints in the first place.  However, thank you, Lifetouch, for the adorable collages you've created for each of my kids!  I'll just screenshot those and be done.

Isn't it so amazing to see how much these kids change in so little time??  But you know what doesn't change much - Benjamin's shirts.  I think it's hilarious that he wore white three years in a row and then only barely changed for the next four after that.  The kid really takes after me.

The ridiculous hat picture in the last one of Benjamin's is a senior tradition - wear something ridiculous because it only shows up on your ID card.  They use a different picture for the yearbook.




Benjamin is in the middle of preparing his missionary application.  For that purpose he had to get his hair cut.  Not something he wanted, but missionaries aren't allowed long hair.  It took the barber 70 minutes to cut it, but the result was quite nice. 



Peter loves to play video games with his big brothers.  It's really cute to see them together.



The weather has been so unbelievably mild this winter.  Some days it's been quite hot by our standards.  On one such day the boys asked to have a water balloon fight!  Water balloons in February!  They had a great time and came in completely soaked.




Bella and Christian competed in yet another year of Piano Federation.  Bella felt great about her performance and Christian felt terrible, but in the end, they both got the highest marks a judge can give.  I'm always proud of how much work they put into this competition.  The tradition is that no matter how they did, though, we all go out to eat sushi afterwards.  It makes any bad scores melt away in a sea of soy sauce and miso soup.  No one can stay depressed when you're eating tempura fried banana rolls.



Cutie Peter - he loves to play with the toys at the library.


He has to do chores before screen time.  He regularly vacuums, folds laundry, cleans the bathroom sink and mirror, puts away the groceries, unloads the dishwasher, and puts away his own laundry and toys.  I'm learning from the mistakes I made with the others.  More chores at a younger age would have really benefitted my other kids, I think.  Peter gets a big kick out of getting them done.  He hates doing them but he always feels so good when he's done them, as I often remind him when he's complaining.


Christian had an assignment to go visit the archeology museum at the University of Michigan. Peter wanted to go too and didn't want to take off his iron man costume.  Everywhere we walked people would say, "Oh look, Iron Man is here!"  or "Hey Iron Man, thanks for keeping us safe!"  Peter loved it.  What a great age - go in public dressed as Iron Man and every one just thinks you're adorable, not crazy.  

I was excited to go to the museum, but I couldn't get the parking meters to work for me so I parked without paying and spent the entire time in the museum stressed about it.  We finally left early and I came out to find the parking meter reader writing me a ticket. Luckily he was super nice about it and helped me with the meter and didn't give me a ticket.  






























Friday, February 09, 2024

He's 4 and 1/2!

My little buddy gets bigger and bigger every day.  I'm amazed by him and his maturity and intelligence. His primary teacher said, "He's just like a little man the way he sits there and stares into your soul."   He's also sometimes truly a crazy little 4 year old who loves to dance naked when he should be getting dressed for bed or who throws fits over the craziest things.  

He celebrated his 1/2 birthday in school because he's a summer birthday.  I got to come in for a few minutes and watch.  He placed paper candles on a paper cake and everyone sang to him.  The teacher said, "Will you smile while we sing?" so he pasted the funniest fake smile on his face and didn't shift the expression the entire time.  I had such a hard time not laughing.  Then he got to "blow out the candles" and be the calendar helper for the day.




Other things we've been doing a lot - swimming and ice skating.  He LOVES to swim and we go twice/week in addition to his swim lessons which he started in December.  He's getting better all the time and its just amazing how fast he makes progress in ability and confidence.  He hasn't figured out how to breath while swimming yet, so he swims, stops, breathes, swims again, etc.  But after only swimming for two months, I'm really impressed with him.  He's always the only kid in the pool without arm floaties.



I'd really hoped he'd like ice skating more because personally I love ice skating but hate swimming.  It's not really his favorite, though but sometimes I can get him to go skating with me after swim lessons.  He's not great at it but he's way better than I thought he'd be starting out.  I think roller skating so much already has really helped.  It's so much fun introducing him to all these new things.  Little kids are so much fun.

The weather has been so warm lately.  It's been amazing to go outside and play in warm sunshine in February.  Also, one of his favorite things has been going to library story time with his favorite librarian, Karen, and his besties from church - Marley, Annie, and Joan.  We four moms come every week and hang out while our kids enjoy story time.  It's perfect for all of us.







Monday, January 22, 2024

Indianapolis

 After Christmas and New Years, all the excitement had passed and yet nothing new had begun.  School didn't start for another week and even then not really because of snow days.  So, just like last year and the year before that, I determined to take a trip the first week of January and get kids away from screens and out doing something fun.  We tossed around a lot of ideas but since I was going to be the sole driver, I needed it to be fairly close.  Indianapolis won out.  It was a great trip.

We got an airbnb apartment in a building directly in the center of town for $50/night because it was off season and it was a wonderful place.  It had a huge common area with a pool table, ping pong, shuffle board, corn hole, bocce ball, and giant movie screen.  It was a great place to hang out in the evening after we were tired of exploring the city.  Indianapolis has more of a Detroit feel than a bigger city like Chicago or New York. It's definitely been through the same rough decades of urban flight that Detroit has but it seems to be recovering very well and it was very walkable and had plenty of fun things to do.

We visited the zoo, the highlight of which was the dolphins and the dolphin show.  Also, the seal enclosure was getting cleaned while we were there so there were scuba divers in the tank and other workers above ground who were interacting with the seals and that was fun to watch.







We visited the Children's Museum which is supposedly one of the best in the world.  It was over-hyped in our opinion and we honestly didn't like it as much as the one in Ann Arbor or the one in Toledo, but it was ok.  It was a fun way to spend a few hours and the space station exhibit and the Terra Cota warriors display and presentation were great.  Christian was the hero on this day because it really wasn't very geared to his age and yet he never complained and made the best of it for many hours.





You can't go to Indianapolis and not visit the Indy 500 Motor Speedway.  That was definitely a highlight.  They drive you out onto the track and drive the whole loop while the tour guide tells you all about it.  We all felt like we were breaking some rule as we drove out onto the track.  I felt like someone was going to come out any moment and yell at us!  Then they took our picture at the famous bricked finish line, with the timing and officials pagoda, and the score board.  The building in the background of the first picture is the museum which, sadly, was closed for renovations.  It says "Indianapolis Motor Speedway - Racing Capital of the World" on it.






We also went to an outdoor evening lightshow at a beautiful place called Newfields.  It has outdoor gardens, a modern art museum, a sculpture garden, etc.  We spent the day exploring the grounds and when the sun went down, went into the light show area.  We found some of the church's Light the World machines there!  That was cool. We'd only ever seen them on the church's website.  So we chatted with the members that were volunteering to help people and we bought chickens and produce for the needy. 


 


The show was spectacular with all sorts of amazing ways of displaying the lights.  Our favorite was a dried up river bed into which they'd placed dozens of lights on posts so they looked like they were floating down the river, all up to a gorgeous giant dome of lights that looked like the moon on the horizon.  The best part was when we came up to the "moon" and discovered that we could go inside.  The boys couldn't get enough of the experience.






Peter's highlight of the day was the escalator.  An up and down one side by side - perfect for endless looping.  He rode it for about 30 minutes non-stop.  Christian discovered the joy of going the wrong way on the escalator.  I was shocked that at 13 he'd never done that before!  My sweet rule-abiding kid.  Another day we found another set of escalators side by side like this in the mall and it was another 30 minutes of riding.  I think that will be the only thing Peter remembers of Indianapolis in the future!


Or maybe playing on the giant numbers in a sculpture in front of the museum.  Not sure that was allowed, but no one stopped us.


We explored a beautiful park area around the river one day and discovered they have the NCAA Hall of Fame there.  We hadn't intended to visit, but it was a lot of fun.  The highlight there was the interactive games where you get to play any sport you want against the computer and cameras which track your movements.  So you throw/kick a real football/baseball/soccerball/etc. at the screen and it acts as if you're playing against real players who catch/hit/block/etc the ball (or don't, if you throw really poorly)  It was a lot of fun.







We also spent time just exploring around - the Saints and Soldiers monument to all the military from Indiana, the state capitol building, the 9/11 monument (not pictured) and random funny little things we found like this man on a bench.  No idea who he is, but he seemed very friendly.   We got so lucky with the weather.  It was always sunny and in the 40s so we never froze.





Random extras:

We ate sushi several times, exploring what the city had to offer.  We also ate our weight in gyros and chicken shwarma because I discovered Christian had no idea what they were and I was sure he'd love them.  He did.


We got stymied by the winter season closures in one park which blocked off all the paths we'd intended to take back to the car.  Rather than go all the way back the way we came, Christian suggested going straight up along the freeway overpass and along the free way for 100 meters to get back to the car.  Stupid idea but definitely more fun and adventurous, so that's what we did. 


The apartment building we stayed in.  Other than parking costs, this place was fantastic.  In fairness, though, parking was half what we paid in Chicago.


I have no pictures of the skywalk.  It's a multi-mile glass enclosed walkway that lets you walk all around the downtown center over the streets without going outside and allowed us to go from our apartment building to the mall and a ton of other places without ever needing a jacket.  That was a lot of fun.

I'm so glad this tradition of January trips continues.  I'm sad that Bella and Benjamin couldn't be convinced to come and that Kelly had to work.  Otherwise, it was a great week.