Can You Roll Your Tongue?

This picture is just terribly fuzzy, but it was the best I could do in about 10 attempts. Kenneth has the rare ability to triple roll his tongue! Most people can roll their tongue into a double roll (like a taco shell), but he can do one of those clover-like indentations where two sections indent creating 3 bumps. I am impressed. He is too. It is a trick that has apparently won much favor in the 3rd grade.

c/o 1993

Last Friday night a few of us from the class of 1993 met for a Happy Hour at El Gringo in Austin. Heather recommended it and it was a great spot. I do think we all pretty much look the same. Perhaps it is the blinded lens of my mind despite the undeniable fact that most of us in the picture are twice as old as a high school junior. Anyhow, it was fun, and Amy will try to round us up again in the summer. Go Tors!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

So I was singing loudly along with Arethra Franklin when the song R-E-S-P-E-C-T came on the radio. I looked back at Kenneth and Evelyn, and Kenneth had a look on his face that clearly indicated that he did not appreciate me singing with such abandon. Evelyn was smiling and trying to sing with me. The age of embarrassment starts somewhere in the 8-9 yr range, I guess!

100 Sunflower Seeds

I don't mean to harp on the quick turn-around assignments, but today, Evelyn came home with a note that said Thursday is the 100th day of school, so each Kindergarten student must create a posterboard that has 100 items glued to it. No, I am not kidding. The idea is that you can do something educational with it as well, such as grouping 100 M&Ms by color, or spelling their name with 100 paperclips, etc. We will glue 100 sunflower seeds in patterns that create circles, squares, and other shapes. Sunflower seeds were the item of choice because I found some in my cabinet in large supply.

They've known for 98 days that Thursday will be the 100th day, and they waited till now to inform us of the project.

The Alphabet Parade

Maybe it's just me, but is it a little odd that teachers would continue with their weekly activity plan when there is only one night (because of ice storm days off) to inform parents that their child needed to create a letter "J" posterboard and accompanying starts-with-the-letter-J-items for the Friday morning Kindergarten Alphabet Parade? I would have postponed the parade to the following week. Oh well--Evelyn will bring a jack-in-the-box and wear her poster and we'll all call it successful.

5-Day Vacation?

We are on our 3rd day of being stuck in the house because of the Central Texas ice and snow storm that has hovered around us. No school tomorrow either. The kids are having a good time because we've played a lot of board games: Sorry, Boggle, Labyrinth, Go Fish. Their Nana has been with us this whole time, which has been tremendously helpful for Rod and I as we've navigated conference calls, etc. mixed in with the daily duties of being home.

This afternoon the ice changed to snow and the kids played outside a lot. I included an old picture of Evelyn and I in College Station from January 2002. My cuties.

Just a Figure of Speech

Evelyn has been surprising us more and more lately, as she is developing more grown-up ways of expressing herself. This is true for facial expressions, hand gestures, and verbal expressions. I see myself in her in so many ways. Tonight, Rod and I were talking and he said, in reference to one of my co-workers, "She knows you, but she doesn't know you." About two minutes later, Evelyn pipes in "Anyhow, Mom, it's just a figure of speech. She does know you, but she doesn't know you well."

Maybe it's just me, but that is pretty smart for a 5 year old to (1) know generically what a figure of speech means, then refer to it, and (2) explain what that particular figure of speech means.

Visit from the Ontiveros Family

This weekend flew by. We had a quick visit from Aixa and Tracy on Friday night (they brought something up from Houston for Rod). Then, on Saturday, April, Cesar and Noah visited for about a day and a half. Noah liked being around Kenneth and Evelyn and April says that ours was the first non-home bathtub in which he hadn't freaked out. He must like us! Noah spent an inordinate amount of his play time "slicing" wooden vegetables that were velcroed together. The other major toy adventure was cracking up at the jack-in-the-box and trying to slice the jack's head off with the wooden vegetable knife. LOL. We ended our visit at Hula Hut, where Rod felt discriminated against because of his beard growth. He promptly shaved it later that day.

The rest of Sunday was spent pulling together Kenneth's Science Fair project, which was a take on "will it float?". The hypothesis was that there were age and gender differences in being able to predict whether 3 different things would float. The objects were a bag of frozen peas, a pushpin, and a rubber ball. He did the majority of the thought processes himself, including percentage calculations in his head (e.g. 1 of 4 = 25%, 2 of 6=33%, etc.). We used Excel for the more diffcult ones, like 7 of 9. Anyhow, his project looks great and he'll be turning it in tomorrow. 'm pretty impressed with him.

Serious Face Grown Up

The kids got their own photo albums for Christmas and we've been going through our enormous collection of digital photos so that they can pick some to begin their books. In this process, I ran across a couple of Kenneth that made me smile. When he was 2, we used to ask him to do his "serious face." It always made us laugh and we got a picture of it at that time. Sometime this past summer, we caught another photo of him with a serious face, so I thought I'd post them together.

Happy New Year!

We've had a fun couple of days visting with Rod's Dad and Linda. They have travelled to TX to visit us and Gwen, who is in Dallas visiting Jeff's parents. Then they will go to Kerrville and check on their land--they are building a house out there and are finalizing architectural drawings. They were able to watch the kids last night so Rod and I could go out downtown for New Year's Eve. We first stopped at a place called Cru, where you can get a 'flight' of wine (2 oz. samples in trios) and just people-watched and chatted. We had a fun time. The picture was taken by Rod--I think he did a pretty good job considering he was holding it out in front of us.