Sweet Sixteen

Happy Anniversary to us!
Ben surprised me by coming home with a huge bouquet of flowers.  "Thank you!" I say. "What are these for?"
How's that for bending gender stereotypes?  :-)

04/23/2013

1.  My car died yesterday.  It's been having trouble starting for weeks, but I have not had time to take it in, and yesterday afternoon after visiting teaching, it finally would not stop, for reals.  After Ben came home, he managed to get it going with a jump and we left it at the car repair place.  There is never a convenient time to have your car in the shop!  I need it every single day!  Anyway, Joseph had flute lessons this afternoon and was going to ride his bike.  It's not far, but he would have to cross under the freeway.  I didn't know how nervous he was until after he broke down in tears during his practicing.  A quick text to his teacher, and now he has a makeup lesson scheduled for Friday.  I remember loving my bike and riding all over town on it.  But I guess there never was a big freeway to cross under.

2.  The boys have a very sparse school week.  Maybe the curriculum writers sense that these kids are getting tired?  I'm not sure, but I have a lot of anxiety when my kids are not "anxiously engaged" in school work during school hours.  It's hard for me to relax about it.  I have a whole shelf full of books they can read when they are done with schoolwork, and a whole list of other extra credit activities they can do, and they've been pretty good about that.  But I still have anxiety.  I've been thinking Sonlight isn't quite rigorous enough for us. I've been supplementing their reading with some additional books of our own, but I haven't been thrilled with the writing program.  This has been my biggest complaint for all our years of homeschooling-- I haven't found a writing program I really like, and I'm not that comfortable coming up with my own.  So I'm not sure what we'll do next year.  I think we'll probably stick with Sonlight and continue supplementing, but maybe we'll do an entirely different writing program.  Homeschooling is hard because it's all up to you, and there's no one to tell you if you are doing it "right."  When you send your kids away to school, it's easy to have a certain amount of confidence with the teachers and school-- after all, they're "experts," right?  But when it's all up to you, it's easy to be full of self-doubt.  I think my kids are doing just fine, but still I worry.  I guess it's good because I'll never be complacent about their schooling.

3.  I spent about 4.5 hours last night doing chores after dinner.  The floors were in desperate need of sweeping and we were finally out of laundry baskets (we have a lot of them) since they were all filled up with clean clothes that needed to be folded.  I really need another one of me.

recent pictures

Pictures off my camera and phone from the last couple of weeks:

 Brigham's very favorite math position.  I cannot get him to put his books on the table and do math like a civilized person!  :-)  The bookshelves in the back remind me of the bookshelves in this picture I re-posted on Facebook a few days ago.  :-)

As usual, I have way too many pictures of the cats.  I need another baby.  :-)

 Pretty Luna

 She hears something outside

 She sees... something!  I turned around, but couldn't figure what she was so mesmerized by.  :-)

 Sola trying to get Mosey to play with her instead of doing his practicing.

 Oh, so cute!

 My cousin Paul rode in the BPMS150 this last weekend (a 170+ mile bike race from Houston to Austin to fundraise for MS research).  He went to Rice as well and now works in Houston.  We drove downtown after church and met him along with some of the other 12,000 (!!) riders that were streaming in all afternoon. He had to catch a bus home that evening, but he did have time to come home with us for a quick shower and a little food before heading back home.  He is a great kid.  Not a kid anymore!  Ben lived with Paul's family in Portland while doing a summer externship way back a million years ago-- 2000, I think.  Anyway, Paul was a little kid at the time and got to be buds with Ben while he was there.

 Some more of Sola's favorite past time-- staring longingly out the window.  She tries to escape out the door whenever possible.  It's so interesting to see the very different personalities of our two cats.  Luna could not care less about going outside-- she is obsessed with food.  Whenever I'm in the kitchen, she'll run up and jump on my lap hoping to get a snack.  She'll eat almost anything-- she LOVES pancakes, for example, and ate about 6 canned green beans at a sitting once.

Sola also really loved the squirrels we caught.  Oh, she so wanted to get her paws on one of them!

And the two of them at the window.  I'll see them often on Brigham's windowsill (although this is my window), staring out at the birds and squirrels in the trees outside.  It's fun to see their two tails twitching in unison, their heads moving identically back and forth as they track whatever critter happens to be passing by.

camping

Brigham and Joseph had two scout campouts the last two weekends.  I'm not sure why they scheduled them like that, but it was fun for Brigham and Joseph.  Ben went with them and I think had a good time too.  So Mosey and I had some mother-son bonding time, and it was fun!
 The first weekend Mosey had a cello recital, so he and I got dressed up and went to the Milwood Baptist church where he performed Minuet by Boccherini.  He did great!  It's so fun to see how he has progressed from a year ago.
Afterward I gave him the choice of doing anything he wanted-- we could go out to eat, go see a movie, anything at all.  Well, Mosey is a homebody at heart-- like his mom, and so I got him a cream slush and tater tots at Sonic and then we went home and watched Hunger Games on Netflix.
The next day we got all the trees on our property trimmed.  It looks great now, and I'm glad we did it, but it made a MESS, and I had forgotten to pull the van out of the driveway before they started.  And I was supposed to play my violin at a baptism that morning!  Oops.  So I called around frantically and luckily found a ride and even got to the baptism on time.  Mosey was my helper and carried my violin and music into the church, and helped me get set up when it was time to play.  Thanks Mosey!
This last weekend Mosey and I had no plans at all.  I discovered that my tire was flat right before Ben and the twins had to leave, so Mosey and I were without a car again, but it was OK (since we're both the homebody type anyway).  He and I went on a bike ride!  Really, we did!  Ben bought a hand-cycle off ebay a couple weeks ago, and got it all put together a few days ago.  It's fun, but hard!  Right now it's only one speed since the part that allows it to have three speeds broke while Ben was putting it together.  Oops.  So on our bike ride Mosey did have to get off his bike and push me up a couple of really steep hills, but that was OK-- it was so fun to be out in the beautiful weather with my boy!  We watched a couple of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my favorite show from 15 years ago) after it got dark, and then turned in.  The next morning Mosey helped me clean up the house and then very nearly beat me in a game of chess.  It was only by pure luck that I won, honestly.
I think that is the last of the camping trips for a while.  I'd love to have a one-on-one mother-son weekend with my other two boys sometime!

skunks

There are a lot of skunks in our part of the world.  Sandy has now managed to get herself sprayed FOUR times.  Wonderful.  That's got to be some kind of record.  If anyone needs any tips for getting skunk out of dog fur, let me know.  :-)

Anyway, our last two interactions with skunks came courtesy of Joseph's squirrel trap.  The first was a week and a half ago.  Joseph left the trap open all night long, and sure enough, a curious skunk wandered in and got himself trapped.  I was ready to call animal control, but we did some internet research and figured we could get rid of it ourselves.  Ben sneaked up on the cage, holding a big canvas tarp in front of him, and carefully covered the trap with the tarp.  Then Joseph, covered in a big jacket of Ben's and an airsoft mask, carefully propped open the door to the cage.  After only a few minutes, out trundled our skunk!  Apparently it can take several hours for the skunk to get the nerve to leave the covered trap, but this guy apparently wanted to go home.

Here is Joseph opening the trap:

And here is the skunk heading for the hills:

Sadly, that was not the last of the skunk/trap encounters.  Last Tuesday night Joseph accidentally left the trap open again, trapped probably the exact same skunk, and the next morning Sandy got out and made a beeline for the trap where she naturally got sprayed right in the face.  Ugh.  I didn't video that one.  :-)

The skunk smell has dissipated from the yard, but Sandy will have a faint odor of skunk for probably several more weeks.  Fun stuff.

More squirrels! And a piano trick by Joseph.

The boys caught THREE more squirrels today!  Ben told the boys he would pay them for every squirrel they caught-- $15 each to divide between the three of them.  Ummm, I don't think that's going to work!  They will bankrupt us.  :-)  Ben is way more generous than I am when it comes to paying the boys for stuff-- I never got paid for any chores or other work when I was growing up.  I want them to value hard work, and value money.  Easy money like that isn't good for anyone, especially kids.  Plus, I'm pretty sure the boys would have been thrilled to catch squirrels without being paid...  So we're going to have to work that one out.
Anyway, here's some video with our cats checking out the squirrel before we took it to the greenbelt to let it go.


And here's another video of Joseph at the piano.  He tries to keep his practicing interesting and so today he practiced one of his pieces with his hands crossed over each other.  Fun trick!

Squirrel!

Ben wants to get rid of all the squirrels in our yard. I think it's a fool's task because there are millions of squirrels in Austin-- at any given moment you can probably spy at least 3, just in your line of sight. But he's told the boys he will pay them to trap and remove squirrels, and they are thrilled to give it a try. Yesterday Joseph and Mosey set out a plate of peanut butter and sunflower seeds and observed as some of the local squirrels came to inspect. Once they knew the squirrels were attracted, Joseph set up his trap. This morning around 8:00 Joseph was looking out the window and watched as his very first squirrel crept into the trap, sprung the catch and was caught! It didn't take long for Sandy to realize what had happened and she went absolutely crazy inside the house, barking and scratching at the doors and windows. Ben let her outside, thinking she'd take a look at the squirrel, get it out of her system, and then lose interest. Ah, not so. I've never seen Sandy that agitated. Poor squirrel!!!! Ben eventually put the cage in the garage and later in the afternoon we took it down to the golf course lake and let it go.

Here's the incredible footage of Sandy and the squirrel.  :-)



And, the release:

Courtesy of Mosey

It's always entertaining around here.  :-)

I love this kid.

conference weekend

Aahh... Conference weekend.  Love it.  Nothing to do, nowhere to go, just hangin' with my family.

I think my top three talks were from, in no particular order since I can't decide: Elder Uchtdorf, Elder Perry, and Elder Holland.

The boys enjoyed conference weekend, too.  It meant a break from the usual Saturday routine of chores and yardwork, for one thing.  :-)  My boys are actually very good listeners and were fairly engaged in nearly every talk, as far as I could tell.  Between sessions, they kept themselves busy.  Brigham started a pyromaniac craze among the boys yesterday and today.  He had all sorts of things going.  He's burning a skewer here-- earlier he was burning yarn fuses which make a very satisfying sparking as the flame moves along the yarn.

Joseph used his burned skewer sticks to write messages.
All the boys also worked on their ships.  On Friday afternoon, Brigham started making a ship to float in the pool, and his brothers quickly followed suit.  They used up all my extra foamboard, a bag of skewers, and almost a whole roll of aluminum foil.  I think all of them made at least two different models, some more successful than others.  This is Brigham's first model, which looked like Noah's ark, but which unfortunately tipped over in the pool.

 And here's Joseph's.  His floated pretty well, but he didn't wrap it in foil and it quickly became waterlogged.

Ben did a lot of gardening, making a big lattice wall for behind our garden-- he's going to grow kiwi vines.  Ben's been doing an incredible amount of work on our yard recently, planting around 20 fruit trees around the perimeter of our yard and working on the garden.
I folded a lot of clothes while watching conference.  Thrilling, I know.
This afternoon between sessions we went on a walk out through the old golf course.  Our neighborhood is built around what used to be a really big golf course-- 18 holes?  Whatever the biggest one usually is.  I guess there haven't been enough golfers recently to sustain a course that big, and so last year half of it was closed down.  Now it is just this incredibly beautiful green belt with wide meadows and a winding path that goes up and down hollows, in and out of stands of trees, and round lakes and streams.  It made me ache to be able to go running again...  Next time I'm going to bring my camera and force my kids to pose for some pictures.  :-)
The rest of our week was really pretty good.  I had seminary this week which meant I didn't sleep enough, but I also think I am figuring out how to streamline lesson prep, or maybe the content was just easier this week.  Unfortunately, our attendance was really awful this week.  The school has STAR testing this week, so I think some of the kids used that as an excuse not to come.  Also, three of my students are apparently now going to the seminary their church classmates are going to, so that cut down on the attendance.  I'm trying not to take it personally.  It makes sense that they would want to be with their church friends, but I'm insecure enough that I can't help but take it a little personally...
Thursday night was so exciting as my sister Eva opened her mission call--- she is going to Russia!  The Rostov-on-Don mission, to be precise, which is in the southern part of the country basically on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea.  Brigham was especially excited since he was the ONLY ONE out of our whole entire family who guessed Russia.  :-)  She leaves July 31 and I'm so excited for her, although sad because I will miss her so much.  She will be my very last sibling to go on a mission-- when you add up all the years of missions my siblings have been on, it is 14 years of missing a sibling!  (Well, more or less-- Brigham and Naomi overlapped.)
The boys had good school weeks, for the most part.  I can't believe how close we're getting to the end of the school year.  Where did the last few months go??
And a couple more pictures.
I think this is from Friday-- Mosey laying on the hammock doing Rosetta Stone German.

 Oh, and we got our Sonlight catalog for next year, and I was pretty excited to see this:

I had submitted the picture and little blurb last Fall sometime, and had forgotten about it.  Brigham and Mosey were really excited to see their names in print.  I think Joseph was a little embarrassed, and glanced at the picture for about half a second and grunting a little when I showed it to him.  :-)

Here it is on the full page:

Otherwise, we really enjoyed the weather the past few days.  This time of year is truly paradise in central Texas.  Everything is incredibly green and the temperature is perfect.  I could be outside all the time.  The boys went hiking down in the boulder park twice this week and said it's the prettiest they've ever seen it, which doesn't surprise me after the rain we had this week.  They've come back with soaking wet shoes and pants from wading in the river.  And Brigham brought back a bouquet of wildflowers for me on Friday which are sitting in a vase on the kitchen counter right now.