Tuesday: old

 Isaac looked rather old this afternoon while he was doing a search on something. 

Parent-teacher conferences were tonight.  Both boys are doing very well.  The biggest difference is that Joshua likes writing and Isaac doesn't.  Joshua needs to add spaces to his writing, but other than that the teacher is happy on how he is progressing.  Isaac's spelling is getting better.  (I've noticed it and his teacher noticed it.)  It's still not great, but he's about in the right spot for where he needs to be in third grade.  There are still some dumb mistakes that he makes, but it's getting there.  He also needs to do more reading aloud.  This one surprised me a little bit.  I've thought his out-loud reading has been fine.  Sometimes the cadence is off a bit, but it's not too bad.  (Some of that is probably because he can't read ahead while talking.  I've noticed I do that quite a bit to help with voices and different emphases, but it's probably an advanced skill.)  Anyway, we'll get it into the rotation homework.  He can read to Joshua, who probably needs a bit more reading to anyway.

Saturday: karate testing

Isaac and I had karate testing for our next belt rank today.  I can't remember if I've mentioned this or not, but our dojang recently left their franchise and is now working independently.  While not a lot is changing functionally, there are a lot of little changes.  So testing this time had a lot of motions that we've been doing for a while and a new (and easy) form.

But, as always, they managed to put in some things during testing that we had either never done or hadn't worked on in a while.  One of the things I still haven't started to love and I get out of breath so quickly.  It's actually rather embarrassing, but it is what it is.  

Of course, I still rank up because testing isn't necessarily a test.  You can't go to testing until you've passed a pretest, so it isn't too big of a deal.

Friday: busy day

 Today was a busy day.  After doing school in the morning (along with proctoring a test and holding a help session), Isaac had piano lessons.  They had been rescheduled last minute.  It fit into our schedule, but right after they were done we went to the dojang to play with the obstacle course.  Er, I tried to catch up on some of my work.  I'm not sure if I was successful, but I tried.  There was another family there for some reason with a little boy and my boys played very well with him.  (It was especially nice because they needed the course pieces for something else so we didn't have to wipe them down and put them away!)

Then a quick stop at the grocery store and the library.  I continued my trend of not really finishing anything by getting the groceries in the house (and the cold stuff put away) and then leaving it.  This continues the trend of getting the laundry in the washer but not started, the continuing problem of the kitchen always having dirty dishes, and overall starting one thing and then realizing there is something more important that I should be doing.  

We also had our games tonight and we played some different on-line games.  I really enjoyed the games themselves, but the background music was a bit much and made it harder to talk.

Wednesday: cats

The boys do love the cats. 

I also found Tornado relaxing last night on the steps.  It was a poor choice, since he's grey and was laying in a grey shadow.  (Photo taken on night mode to actually see him.)

Monday: Unexpected

Ben: What were you dreaming about this morning?  You were all twitchy.

Amanda: Someone was going to superglue me to a piano.  [I didn't mention it, but it wasn't just my fingers.  It was all of me.  It was a bad person.  I was trying to escape while at the same time wondering if they'd be dumb enough to superglue my clothes to the piano instead of my skin.]

Ben: ... 

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Immediately after Joshua finished his morning meeting he said, "I want to talk to Grandpa Paul."

"Ok, " I said.

"Do you want to know what it's about?"

"Sure."

"Leprechauns."

Well, that wasn't what I was expecting him to say as I thought that maybe I could have answered any questions he had about leprechauns.  I thought maybe there was an inside joke though, so I set up the meeting.

Joshua's two questions were: 1) Are leprechauns real? and 2) Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Dad did a great job answering them, but I still haven't figured out why it was Grandpa Paul that had to answer them.

Sunday

 During church both boys wanted to snuggle with Ben.  I got to snuggle with Joshua's foot...for a few minutes.

I finally sorted all the to-be-sorted Legos.  The little pieces fall to the bottom and they take forever.  Of course, I've refilled it this afternoon, but at least I had it empty for a little bit.

Friday: normal day

 It was an uneventful day.  The kids had school, we did our errands, had rest time/screen time, I got some work done, I completely forgot about the laundry, dinner, boys went to bed, we played some Dominion with friends (on-line).

Joshua had to read a book for school and since he doesn't read the instructions I said that he had to read it to me.  It was an early reader with one sentence per page, but some of the words were hard like "jungle" and "anything" and he got almost all of them!  He's at just the right stage where is reading ability is taking off and it's so fun to watch.