Saturday: coming home

After a week in Missouri we came back.  (More posts to follow.)

First we had to pack up and get out of the house by 10am.  While it was a bit early, we were ready in time.  We ate leftovers with whatever we could find. 

The boys played a few last games of the driving arcade game.

We said our sad goodbyes and left.  We decided to go to the Discovery Center that was about an hour up the road, but pretty close to our planned route.  We stayed there quite a while and had a really fun time.  (We also went to an Indian restaurant down the road and the kids didn't like it at all.  Not even the mango lassi-s.)

There was a bed of nails.  It felt quite silly, actually.

Shadow wall

Ferro liquids

I drank from a toilet!  I was Mrs. Stinky for a while with all the kids, so it seemed so appropriate.

Joshua immediatly went to the big Lego blocks and patched up the house framework.

They were both surprised by the whisper dish.  They thought it was magic for a while until I showed them the dishes.

The water part was one of their favorite parts.  I had to "drag" them away because other people needed a chance to play too.

But then we found some air tubes with pom poms that blew out and hit you.  I haven't seen that much excited jumping from the kids in a while.

Joshua was really hamming it up on the drive home.  "Mom, do you know the word Mississippi?"  "Mom, do you have the toilet seat?"  (That one stumped me for a while until I realized it was his portable one.)

We pushed through the whole drive in the end.  The boys slept quite a bit and so that is always helpful.

Thursday: VBS

Today's VBS went a bit better than yesterday.  People listened during the lesson.  There was a skillet and phone book incident though.  (Two of the kids got the relics of a strongman show...but then didn't want to let us carry them for the rest of the morning.  Seriously...we couldn't let a kid carry around a skillet with so many kids around.)

Here's Joshua with his class.  He's the one in sunglasses.

Wednesday: today

Well...VBS day 3.  We had two new students today that were a handful.

Isaac and Joshua are spending the night at Cheryl's, so it was a relaxing afternoon.  I did do some work, but I could do it while not talking to anyone. 

Tuesday: VBS day 2, evening

VBS was good today.  Our class got to go on stage to dance with a sloth.

I sat almost next to Joshua while Isaac was on stage, but I don't think that he ever noticed me.

It was a cleaning day, and Tornado snuck into the pantry one of the times I opened it for cleaning supplies.  Then I opened it again a few minutes later and saw this...

This evening didn't work very well for Joshua.  I'm not sure exactly what the problem was, but the problem he was crying about was the bath foam.  He didn't like it.  But when we ran out of foam he wanted to make sure I got more.  But he wanted to play with it.  But he didn't.  Ben and I both talked to him and I finally told him if he couldn't calm down and play he was going to bed early.  He didn't calm down.  On his way out of the tub he hit me again.  (Again, not hard; but it still isn't ok.)  I called in the reinforcements, since he seems to listen to Ben better than to me.  After a double talking to by Ben (about slightly different things) he finally went to get his pajamas on and calmed down.  He still went to bed early.

Monday: VBS day 1

Today was the first day of VBS.  It nicely didn't rain during VBS (but of course rained before and after).

This year I'm teaching 2nd grade, because Isaac wanted me to be his teacher.  It turns out that (so far), I really like 2nd grade.  They can read.  They are mostly independent.  But they aren't too old to be excited about everything. 

We also had a small group.  I felt a little bad, only having seven kids instead of the 15 that some groups around me had, but not too bad.  I usually end up with the super small groups which is weird, but fine.

The scheduled activities also ran quite behind schedule today.  I feel like this is somewhat normal for a Monday, but it felt worse than normal.  So we only had fifteen instead of thirty minutes for the official Bible lesson as a class, but it was fine.  I cut out some of the extra stuff and then we went to outside time.  I could tell they were ready for it.

Leaving was a pain though.  One of the exits from church is unavailable due to construction.  Normally by the time we're ready to leave the parking lot is busy but almost empty.  Today the parking lot was still backed up...so we went to the playground for a few minutes.  Not all that long, but it was better than waiting in a car.

Last Saturday: Brickworld

Last Saturday we went to Chicago to see Brickworld.  It's held at a large convention center and you see what other people have made out of Lego.  It's rather amazing.

Joshua loved the mechs the best, especially the two below.  We took a lot of pictures of mechs.  Joshua was a bit to short to fully enjoy the show, so I carried him quite a bit.  He could see things, but a lot of stuff involved looking down and he really could only look across.

We kept going around.  In the end, we probably only saw about half the show.  What we saw was all really cool though. 

We also took a break for the kids to play at the green block table.  There were about four sizes of bricks, all in green.

Joshua made this puppy and I was so impressed with it.  I could tell it was a puppy right away!

Then he made another one.  "They're both puppies, but they like each other."

Isaac was working on some wheels, copying something else on the table.

After lunch, we saw the Great Ball Contraption.  It is kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine, where many individual pieces work together to move a bunch of little balls around a circle.  The favorite module was the Ballcano.

This is the leader of the group.  Ben 'fan-boyed' over him just a little bit.

Then we saw some selected exhibits.  I loved the flowers.  There was a potion shop that was rather amazing too.

Some photo places:

And on our second (or third?) try we finally made it out.

Saturday: friends

We had some friends over this afternoon.  The kids played.  It was nice and relaxing.  The weather was beautiful.