Wednesday: pictures

 I don't know what Isaac and Joshua were doing, but Ben and I found this hilarious.

The professional pictures from senderpics.com came through from the competition.

Tuesday: not much

Not much of note has happened in the last few days.  The kids didn't have school yesterday.  Today they were back to school and I was back to work.  

Oh!  There was something I wanted to mention.

I realized that pop cans can go in the 12 pack box the "normal" way or perpendicular to the normal way.  It's much easier to repack them for recycling if they're perpendicular.  I can't believe it took me so long to realize that this was an option.

Saturday: rock climbing comp

Isaac had a rock climbing competition today!  It was near South Bend and he was in the afternoon session.  It meant that we could have an easy morning and we were home by dinner.

The format of the competition was four minutes on every route, but Isaac got to see someone climbing the routes last night and he could look at all the routes in the gym ahead of time.  He started watching them last night and laughed.  The first one he watched had a start parallel to the floor - they were difficult!  He was a bit worried going into them.

He ended up doing a great job.  He got points on three of the four routes - and he could tell he was making progress within the four minutes so he was very happy at the end of the competition.

The videos are the best try that he had.

Ben and Joshua spent a lot of time working on their spaceship.

We also had our yearly mummy dogs.

Friday: field trip

I went on a field trip with Joshua today!  I'll be honest, I didn't really want to.  We went to Outdoor Discovery Center and I have been there a lot.  It is always cold.  The end of October is just not a great time to have a field trip that is 60% outside.

I also thought I was off the hook - I was just the back-up driver.  Well, it turns out that most of the other confirmed drivers only had seats for three and another driver was needed at the last minute.  So I stepped in.

It was cold.  It was cold right away and my toes never warmed up.  We did get to go inside for a few of the parts, so there was at least a reprieve from the wind but I wouldn't call the insides warm.

However, the content was new.  (I think the 3rd and 4th grade trips are almost the same and having done at least three of them and had no desire to do another.)  It was about indigenous cultures and the leaders were good.  I learned some things which is always fun.  I also got to throw a dart with an atlatl.  My second throw almost hit the turkey that we were aiming for, although I'll admit that I was really just trying to get it to go as far as possible.  I think I was the closest person to the turkey, so I was happy with the goal change.

I got home and took a short nap before picking the kids up from school.  It was enough time to go home for the nap, but not enough time for a good nap.  So after I got the kids home I continued my nap.  Field trips wear me out.

I made pizzas for dinner, brought Joshua to a trunk-or-treat, finished up dealing with some food...although I didn't actually finish dealing with it I now realize...and finally got to be done with the day.  It was a good day, though not my favorite type of good day.

Thursday: new things

I did a bunch of new things today.

1. I played Captain's Ball.  It's a mix between basketball and ultimate frisbee.  It would have been nice if a few more people showed up, but it was still a nice time to meet new people, see Natalie, and get some exercise.

2. I had a door malfunction during my second class.  One person came through the door and it never shut all the way.  When the door doesn't shut all the way the alarm goes off after 30 seconds.  The TA and I took a look at the door and we didn't see any obvious reasons for it to not close.  We did learn that if we swiped our ID card at the card reader it would stop for 30 seconds.  So for the next 30 minutes my poor TA's job was to swipe her card at the card reader every 20 seconds so that the alarm wouldn't go off.  I did call the secretary right away and told her what was going on.  She realized the problem immediately and, while she didn't know exactly what to do, she knew where to start.  People came after 20 minutes, but didn't have the right parts to make it stop.  Then they were going to unplug the door at the control box, but whoever wired it up didn't label any of the cables like they were supposed to.  They did finally get the door to stop beeping; I'm not really sure what they did but I was relived.  I was able to easily survive the first thirty minutes without the TA, but there were a lot of questions as the students were working and it was helpful to have her walking around too.

3. I passed my lead belay class.  Today was practicing more of what we started last week, practicing falls, and trying a different belay device.  Falls were more fun than I was expecting...I get pulled way up into the air too.  I also really liked the other belay device for lead climbing as I didn't get the rope stuck so much.  I was surprised about that too as I was determined to like the device that I started with.

 

Wednesday: Trunk or Treat

We signed up to host a trunk at church this year.  Amazon has some great trunk decorating kits so we chose a cheap one.  We, and by we I mean Joshua, added a few embellishments and we ended up with a bunch of compliments.  The kids also made some swords from Lego.

It ended up being a lot more fun than I was expecting - the kids were cute.

I had gotten four bags of 75pc candy, two boxes of 75pc granola bars, and about a dozen mac and cheese packets.  SNAP is set to expire soon and my guess is that some of the kids that went by us are food insecure.  The mac and cheese packs went slowly, but they disappeared in the first 45 minutes.  The granola bars were taken pretty consistently: we went through a box and a half.  We also finished all the candy I had brought in the first hour and needed to restock a few times from the traveling candy bucket.  (I knew it would be available, so I wasn't worried about not having enough candy.)  That does mean that we had over 400 trick-or-treaters and probably closer to 500!  The post-event email said they had record candy donations and thought they were well stocked but still needed to make a grocery run for more candy part way through - they estimate there were over 1000 people that came on the campus over the night.  (They also ran out of hot dogs.)  Since the goal was just to get people on campus in a welcoming way, I would say it worked.

Last Sunday: Grandma's party