Thing 1 turns 8... in a couple days

We have been planning for a couple weeks to have Thing 1's birthday party on the 12th of September. I mentioned it to my mother on Saturday, and she told me she was pretty sure that my brother and his family - whose daughters are some of my girls best friends, and whose presence is VITAL to any party at our house - will be out of town. OH NOOOO!!!
Looking at the calendar, since Hubby is traveling so much the next month (and we're going with him on one of those!) there are no good times in September, it would be halfway into October before we'd be able to get everyone together. So I frantically called everyone and we bumped the party to the next day - Sunday. Amazingly everyone was able to come.
Luckily Thing 1 wanted Pizza, which is the easiest birthday party to have, so the only hard part was making her the cake. Usually we order a cake from a lady we know, but 24 hour notice isn't enough time to do that. So Hubby decided to do it. He was going to make a Pikachu pokemon, it's kind of a little round ball with ears and a tail, it ought to be pretty easy to represent in cake and frosting. I think he was going to try and surprise her. But luckily, or unluckily, she saw what he was up to and it turns out she doesn't really LIKE Pikachus. She likes elaborate, involved looking pokemon. After quite a bit of back and forth, they came on one that she liked that he had a prayer of doing. I think he did a pretty good job. Though you kind of need the picture to see what it was supposed to be. Everyone thought it was a really angry elephant with it's trunk up in the air, until they see the picture.



So we celebrated Thing 1's family party last night, and her friend party will be this week.



Another weird thing - we solved a mystery. Thing 1 had homework on one of the first days of school. I know she had it, I remember pulling it out of her folder. But then it dissapeared. I couldn't find it anywhere. My house isn't completely tidy, but there aren't too many places it could have been. I looked in all of those places, but we couldn't find it. I had to send her to school with no homework, with a note from me saying it was my fault, we looked high and low but somehow lost it. Which is a real thorn in my side as I pride myself with them doing their homework quite regularly. Her teacher made her do it at recess.

Well, I found it.
Scooba ate it. We have one of those floor mopping robots, my husband knows that while I love having a clean house, I don't like cleaning it and since I'm a stay at home mom I can't justify hiring anyone, so he has given me my cleaning buddies, I have a Roomba upstairs, and a Scooba downstairs. Apparently I had the swamp cooler on (translate - GALE FORCE WINDS) while Scooba was running. Scooba requires some monitoring, as it wedges itself under my cabinets in a couple of places, but it calls me with a frantic beeping when it's stuck, so as long as I'm in ear shot, it merrily works away. And to clean it, you open it up and push buttons to release brushes, pull out filters, and clean them off. I don't remember the last time I turned it over.

Well, getting ready for this birthday party I turned on Scooba to clean the kitchen floor. It was almost immediately obvious it wasn't running right. Completely weird, it was leaving these strange little rolls of lint everywhere, and kept stopping. I pulled out several filters, tried several different things to clean it, but nothing worked. I was on hold with their customer service department when I finally just turned it over to find a wet wadded up ball of homework stuck in the outer brush. I was able to unwrap the paper wad enough to see yup, it's Thing 1's homework.



I'm not even going to try to explain that to the teacher.

Back To School Shopping

Grandma came down for the afternoon and we took the girls back to school shopping. It's much easier with Grandma, she helps entertain the kids, or takes one to look while I take the other. And she is inclined to buy stuff for them too. What's not to love? I've been waiting to do this because I was hoping the sales would get more intense now that school has started. I don't know if they did, but I felt we got some good bargains.
The girls were not happy about all this shopping. You'd have thought we were taking them to listen to Emergency Test Signal Broadcasts all afternoon. They DID NOT want to go. Thing 2 asked what her reward for putting up with this back to school shopping expedition was. "Some wonderful new clothes that I'm buying for you, so you don't have to wear your pajamas, or super tight, short clothes from last year to school!!!"

She was unimpressed.

Beware the "NEXT BLOG" Button

I believe I got a couple of nasty Trojan Horses and a few other toxic viruses by hitting the Next Blog button. I was just whiling away some free time, thought I'd see what other people were up to. Next I know, BAM!! My computer is SCREAMING at me that it's infected.

I have a guy I called, who thought he'd fixed it after working on it for an hour, then whoops, up comes a really bad infection that had just been lurking. He had to take my computer and wipe it.

Beware the NEXT BLOG button!

First day of school!

This morning excitement was running high, once I got them up. They were both tired after staying up so late the past couple of nights, and I let them sleep in 15 minutes longer than I originally intended. But they were going great after I did wake them up, and we buzzed around quickly and walked out the door ten minutes early. We found their classes, and I eventually had to kiss each one good bye.

I came home and exercised... and felt lonely.

It's a little after 11:30 am. Last year I had a half day kindergartener, and at this time we'd be walking home soon from school, deciding what to have for lunch and what to do with our afternoon until we walked back over to pick up her big sister from 1st grade. I go to pick up Thing 2 in about an hour, she has half days for the first two weeks, a testing period for the teachers and an adjustment period for the students.

I am more worried about Thing 2, going from 1/2 day to full day school, and having a teacher we don't know. This teacher is described as "the teacher everyone hopes for" and is "strict but fair." I just worry that the strict part will be hard for my little muffin for a while, who has a tendency to speak out in groups. I like her willingness to say the funny thing she's thinking, but I realize that in school that sort of behaviour is sometimes distruptive, and often is somewhat curtailed. I just hope curtailing it doesn't hurt her feelings. We had hoped that having this teacher would be good for her because last year she expressed real problems with other kids around her being disruptive when they were supposed to be sitting at their table doing work. She is kind of a Noise Nazi. I realize the irony of my daughter being upset by other people making noise, while I'm trying to protect her willingness to speak out, but I like to believe she is just already exhibiting an awareness for the appropriateness of speaking your mind during a group learning session on the rug, and keeping quiet when everyone is supposed to be quietly working at their desks. Her kindergarten teacher was quite good at keeping order, but even so there were moments at Thing 2's table when she was so busy shushing everyone she wasn't getting much done. Can't wait to pick them both up.

--- Later
School went very well for both girls, no problems in either case. I think we're going to have a good year. Here's Thing 1 with her teacher.

Back to school eve

We've spent a couple days at Grandma and Grandpa's house to finish out the summer. This is MY vacation. I stay up late talking to my folks, I sleep in late while my folks watch the girls, my mom cooks, and takes me shopping... it's a little slice of heaven.

The girls and I made snickerdoodles one day.



We went to see my sister and her family and dogs. The horses were out in the pasture, and we were kind of in a rush to get back to town, so the girls couldn't ride. We'll have to go up again and do

We got home late tonight, which was a mistake because tomorrow is the first day of school and my 1st grader is so excited I think her head is going to pop right off. She was in morning kindergarten, so this is going to be a big change. We packed their lunches, and laid out clothes for tomorrow, and they were making plans about what to do if which one woke up first... I told them please go back to sleep if it's before about 6:30, I'm not sure I could handle that much excitement before 7:00.
Tomorrow is a big day.

Chidren's museum

In desparation to not let our summer fade away without a fight, I took the kids to the Children's museum yesterday. Thing 1's favorite thing to do is the stop motion animation. I took a video of one of her movies.


I have spent this whole day uploading entry by entry my journal about my girls. They have been fabulous, playing with each other the whole morning and have hardly had the TV on at all. But I kind of feel like I wasted the day.

Girls on bikes

Momentous day yesterday - Monday... BOTH girls finally let go and took off on the bicycle, no help from me (except in the starting and stopping, that's still a little shaky.) I've been trotting alongside helping with corrections for a while, but this is the day when they sort of grasped that they didn't need me, and took off on their own. I got phone video, videocamera video, and stills of Thing 2. Since she was crowing on the phone with Daddy when Thing 1 really took off, and since the phone is my easiest way to send video to the computer, and it's like two in the morning (I've been up hulu-dot-com-ing) and I'm too lazy to upload the real video right now. Maybe later. But they both did it! Huzzah!

Hubby felt bad that he missed it,(not that I blame him), he's in North Carolina I think. We've been working on this off and on for a couple of weeks. I felt since nearly the beginning of this endeavor that they almost had their balance, they just need a little practice. I think he felt they weren't nearly as far along as I did, so he was surprised today when he got the video that I'd let go completely. I wasn't surprised at all. But then I've been running along side a lot more than he has.
Thing 2 really mastered it first, and was very proud of herself. Thing 1 had a lot more fears about it, but reported that she said a strengthening prayer, after which she got brave and took off without all the whimpering and shaking she exhibited earlier. Whatever it takes, sweetheart.