You know Mary thinks about this every year...

It would have been soooo much easier...

(we have a very interactive Nativity set...all the characters interact with all the rest of our toys)

Honey's 87th birthday

We celebrated 87 years of Honey this past Sunday. Can you imagine? 1923. There's a lot of history between now and 1923. My 35 years seem incredibly insignificant when I think of the wars, Depression, civil rights improvements, etc that he, my grandmother(s) and their generation have seen and been involved in.
We had lunch at their new, swanky retirement digs. He even got a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday from a staff who seem to think he may be the funniest not-old person in the place!

Wii time

The rule around here is no TV or Wii on school nights. I'm finding that to be easier to enforce when it is warm and light outside in the evenings. As usual, with the onset of winter comes the onset of more gaming at our house. Now the kids are old enough to play some of the games. This is Makena doing an obstacle course and Reese...well...eating cake, I think.

Linville Caverns

Everybody had Veterans' Day off last week (a foreign concept to people living in towns not heavily populated with bankers). We took the day and drove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and toured Linville Caverns. I hadn't been into caverns in 30 years and my memory (as a 5-ish year old) of Longhorn Caverns near Austin had always been this massive and expansive space. These are downright claustrophobic..and slimy with all the water running down the walls. But so cool! We spied two bats ("about the size of a chicken nugget" was the description the guide gave us. gross.) and some blind fish. Poor fish.

We started the day with a good old fashioned, Southern, fattening breakfast at Cracker Barrel. Everybody needs to learn how to play that confounded game.

Then we did a little bouldering while we waited for our turn in the caverns.

Didn't really get many good shots in the cavern- I spent more time trying to ensure that my lens didn't get whacked into a 30 zillion year old stalactite.

After the caverns, we tooled down the parkway and found a good picnic spot. Reese's movie star diva came out in full force (that's string cheese in her mouth).

Halloween

Par for the course, I guess. Or, I could look at it as only being two weeks behind instead of two months. You choose.

At the end of the pumkin carving, a character named "Balance Girl" appeared. We'd never met her before. Apparently, her preferred attire includes nightgowns and headbands a la Roller Derby girls and she walks along the uncoiled water hose (her balance beam). She has made a few spontaneous appearances since...but you never know when to expect her.

The girls were both flappers this year. Strangely, Reese's flapper-headgear was very similar to Balance Girl's...

Hiatus

Ok, so 2 months and a few "OK...Kindergarten...we get it...move on" comments later, I'm finally finding time to blog. Sort of. Our lives feel really different now. Makena gets up at 6:30 and she and Brett leave by 7:10. She doesn't get home until 2. Reese and I have lots of time to ourselves in the morning....during which we still seem to get very little done. I've found myself volunteering at Makena's school at least once a week. Her teacher welcomes parent volunteers into the classroom while the kids are in there so it has been a fun experience for me to sit in there like a little fly on the wall just spying away on everybody.

Reese had a birthday last month. We've been soccer-ing. We've chosen pumpkins. Pictures...

Seriously- I've spent half an hour trying to upload three more pictures and Blogger is apparently on strike this morning. Grrrrr. This would be a large part of my laziness when it comes to posting- Blogger takes forever to upload photos! More later.

First Day of Kindergarten

Well...I guess this happens to all parents of 5 year olds...today is Makena's first day of Kindergarten! She's been excited about if for...oh...about a year now. We went through the ritual yesterday of deciding which outfit to wear. That only took an hour. This morning we got up as planned, got ready, had a last minute change of heart about which outfit to wear, then drove to school!

Calling it the "first" day of school is a bit of a misnomer, though. Our school staggers the rising kindgergarteners over four days (so each kindergartener only goes for one full day on either yesterday, today, tomorrow or Monday). They don't determine the classes until after those four days so on Tuesday, we go for an hour and a half to meet her actual teacher, THEN next Wednesday she goes for a full day to her real classroom. It's kind of like having three "first" days. A little anticlimactic, but it certainly works when you can't decide between three outfits for what to wear on your "first" day.

Of course, the next week she's off Monday for Labor Day then she's off again Thursday and Friday for teacher workdays. So sometime in November we'll be into a real 5-day-a-week schedule.

As an aside...in some odd twist of...something...on the first day of school I found myself putting on khaki shorts and a white shirt and I woke up with a big zit smack in the middle of my forehead. Clearly some things never change.

24 Hours of Booty

Say what?? 24 hours of who?? No worries...it's kosher. For the second year in a row, Brett participated in a charity bike ride here in Charlotte around what is locally known as the "Booty Loop". The race got its name from the see-and-be-seen 3 mile bike/run route around one of the hipper neighborhoods here. 10 years ago, someone decided to organize a 24-hour team ride to raise money for cancer research and awareness. 10 years later, it's a Charlotte institution, rasied over $1MM this year and has expanded to other cities. Not too shabby!

This year, the team (which is mainly comprised of people from our church) rode in honor of our friend Sydney, who is my age, the mother of three and has been living for a year and a half with a brain tumor; Amy, also my age, mother of an infant, recently diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer; and Jonathan, another church member recently diagnosed with cancer. Again, this year, Brett chose to be the middle-of-the night rider and he rode from the beginning of the ride at 7pm on Friday until 6:30am Saturday (he took breaks, but he was out there in the lonely wee hours).

Here are a few pictures from the party we had at the beginning of the ride.

The whole team:

Gratuitous action shot:

What have we been doing all summer?

Swimming. Some swimming. And a little more swimming. I neglected to give adequate recognition to this when it happened but, about a month ago, Makena got her green band from the Y and Reese got her yellow. They wear them anytime they're within half a mile of water.

We've also had a weekly playdate/dinner date with the families who were in Reese's preschool class last year. It was a small class and the kids absolutely loved each other. It's actually a little head-turning how well they all get along...and the parents got to be good friends, too. So we've gathered at rotating houses once a week all summer and let the kids (and siblings) play. The grown ups are able to sit and chat and have a leisurly dinner once we stick the kids in front of a movie. Spouses show up at dinner time and we hardly ever break up until 9. It makes for late nights, but they're fun!

One of the families has a backyard pool and that, of course, is the favorite gathering place. Makena spends most of her time racing off the diving board (cannonballs are a favorite). Reese alternates her time between very fanciful jumps off the board and diving to the bottom for treasure.

Hope you're as waterlogged as we are!

Lunch

My list of sins is long. And grievous. And long. Did I mention long? One of my daily missteps is being a little too prideful in being a decent cook and almost always trying to feed my family all natural, garden grown, low sugar, organic, etc etc etc. Well...sometimes I don't succeed, sometimes I don't try and sometimes I put my foot down and do a 180.
Let me introduce you to one of the delicacies of my youth. Triscuit pizzas. This was today's summer-lunch-on-the-deck. There's nothing on these babies that isn't processed to within an inch of its life. Triscuits (which we do actually eat often), jarred spaghetti sauce- been making my own for years, Target-brand sliced mozzarella ("Target-brand" dairy?? I'm sure it's Sargento's scrap rejects from their factory), and full-fat peperoni. Broil for a few minutes, then enjoy the hot, salty, cheesy grease running down your fingers.
Then feel like you have a 3 pound rock in your belly for the next 4 hours...


Yum.

Jen's 4th pictures

These are our children at their best. Jen (obviously) took these great shots- you can see how giddy they get with her (and Chris). I love that their personalities come out in full force- Makena is the more serious one and Reese is just...well...lively!

Did I mention that Jen & Chris were voted Best of the Best Children's & Family photographers by Charlotte Magazine?

4th weekend

We drew out our 4th of July celebrations for a good four days this year. We started at the lake, moved on to Pops in the Park, dinner with friends and fireworks across the street, then dinner with more friends and a waterslide in the back yard. I'm worn out!

Underwater exploration was the theme of the lake trip this time. The water was down enough to give us more shallows where they could see the bottom. Who knows what they'll find down there.

Look...lake bottom schmutz!

We shared Pops with friends and family

In case you weren't sure, our kids think Jen (and Chris) Hunt hung the moon. They were absolutely glued to Jen's stories.

Some sparklers in the back yard are always fun. And an ER trip just waiting to happen.