Fun with Mannequins

Glen Rose Trip

We took a day trip out to Glen Rose a couple of weeks ago. Glen Rose, TX has a state park with dinosaur tracks that showed up during some excavations. More than that, it has hiking trails and campgrounds. At some point down the road, we might do an overnight camping trip out there. Evelyn was quite adventurous: climbing everything and wading in the streams. Kenneth spent a lot of time trying to perfect his stone skipping. Of course, (like everything else that requires natural physical talent), Kenneth was able to get his stones to skip 3 or 4 times on a regular basis, while I have zero luck with that sort of thing. It is good to see that genetically we don't always pass along our less fortunate capabilities.

Destination Imagination

Evelyn recently participated in an activity called Destination Imagination. It is basically a group improvisational team. Her team practiced after school once or twice a week for about 3 months and finally had their competition a couple of weekends ago. While it is all improvised, they could practice based on a set number of topic; for example, they knew that they were going to get 1 of about 10 topics such as "endangered thing" and they knew that they'd have to incorporate a "super-power" that would be thrown at them about half way through the improv. They had to create props using only themselves and their body language and acting. Additionally, there were certain character types that had to be represented, such as "the absent-minded person" or "the contrarian." During the actual competition, they got "landline telephone" as the endangered thing and "spinning spiderwebs" as their superpower.

They worked very hard and had a great time doing it. It was neat to see them perform for the judges and use their quick-thinking skills. The ability to speak in front of an audience is such a valuable skill.

No, I Wouldn't Do That

[In response to seeing me take my wet hair out of a towel turban, before getting a chance to brush it.]

Evelyn: "Mom, I don't care what you look like in the morning, even if you look like you look right now. I wouldn't even care if you took me to school like this. I would just tell people your hair wasn't brushed yet. I would only care if you brought me to school if you were naked. But you wouldn't do that, right? No, you wouldn't do that."

Snow Day

We had a freak snow day on Tuesday. Sunday it almost hit 80 degrees. Tuesday it snowed. Wednesday it was in the mid-50s and sunny. Gotta love TX weather. The dog, Lola, did not know quite what to do and has not emotionally recovered from the confusing white stuff.

Evelyn's 9th Birthday

Evelyn celebrated her 9th birthday in style a couple of weekends ago. She invited a few friends to come over to hang out and get creative with some ribbon, foam stickers, construction paper and other fun stuff. They decorated little boxes and had a blast. Nana came over for the day (Pops is still too sick to come over) and Grandpa Merle and Grandma Linda came up from Kerrville. Evelyn asked her friends to bring donations to Ronald McDonald House instead of gifts. We delivered the donations the following weekend and she got a huge thank you from the staff.

100 days

Every year, Rod uses his photo skills and does a favor for the Elementary School: for all the kids who missed Picture Day (or enrolled after Picture Day), he takes their picture so that they can be in the yearbook. Of course, he has the lighting, the backdrops, etc. so they all turn out great. This year, he happened to be doing the retakes on the 100th Day of School so he took a special photo of all the kindergartners. Our friend Lisa sent it to the school district website folks, and they used Rod's photo on the site. Check out the link:

http://www.pflugervilleisd.net/news/index.cfm#hpes100days

My Babies When They Were Babies

Time flies.

Visit to Kerrville

Our last visit to Kerrville was just after Christmas. Grandpa Merle and Grandma Linda always make us feel so welcome. Evelyn convinced Grandpa to play multiple rounds of Battleship. Linda's cat, Emily, passed away a few days after we left. She was very frail and had been with Linda and her daughter, Lisa, for about 20 years. Luckily for us, Rod had taken a great picture of Emily when we were there. Since we were there over New Year's, Grandpa did fireworks with the kids. Linda and I pretty much stayed inside and watched from the enormous window that faces the back porch where they were setting them off. Rod took about a gazillion photos of the explosions.

Science Fair...Again

Science Fair is going to kill me one of these years. Evelyn wrapped up her project and is ready to turn the board in on Tuesday when they go back to school. This year her topic was determining whether people could accurately predict whether an M&M was green or orange.

We are going to enjoy the 3rd day of our 3-day weekend tomorrow. The kids have wrapped up all of their homework and projects so it should be a relaxing day. I plan to stay up late tonight and finish 3 episodes of "24 (Season 6)" that we have on Netflix.

Fun with Cameras

Over Christmas break, I tested out my camera on my handsome husband, Rod. He was the perfect subject...or so it seemed. I discovered, later that day, that he had gotten a hold of the camera (and a clothespin?) and taken a few pics of his own. I also found a series of about 30 photos of one of the Christmas decorations in varying lighting conditions, distance ranges, and angles.

365 Project

OK. I have a camera again. That is my excuse for not keeping up with the blog in the 2nd half of last year. If I have any readers left, you can look forward to my new goal: I am going to participate in a 365 challenge. This means that I have to take at least 1 photo per day.

Today I get a free pass and I will post an old photo of me, my sister, and my Mom.

Ken's B'day..from a couple of months ago

Here are a few photos from Kenneth's 11th birthday from a couple of months ago. We took a few kids out to the putt-putt, go-cart, batting-cage, laser-tag place. :) His present was a cell phone (calling and texting only to a select group of people!!), which is actually a present to us as well because we can get in touch with him when needed after school, etc.

Finally...

OK I have a lot of catching up to do. I can blame my broken camera on a lot of it--I have had to get all of the recent photos from Rod, which is more difficult than you might think. This picture is from Kenneth's 5th Grade Awards Assembly in June.

I also included a photo of Ken with 2 of the puppies from back in April. They were all (all 9 of them) given away soon after that photo was taken and after a clear indication that the mother dog was in heat, Rod finally took her to get spayed. No more puppy batches.

Patent Awards

I had the honor of participating in the annual Patent Awards Dinner for intellectual property contributions over the last fiscal year. It was exciting to be included as part of the "Milestone" group, which comprised those who had 5 or more patent disclosures authorized for the US Patent Office process.

Can't Keep Up!

All right, I know it's been a while since a blog post and I do have excuses but I will try to do better. There is a whole set of photos that Rod has on his camera that I need to get--Kenneth's end-of-school 5th grade graduation and his birthday party at Putt N Fun. In the meantime, I have a few photos from Evelyn's 2nd grade awards assembly and one of their summer camps (Camp Invention). They are veterans to the Camp Invention program now because they did it last year as well. The idea behind it is so that kids get exposure to problem solving an inventing using everyday materials and their own logic (plus team work).

She's a Trooper

Evelyn had her umbilical hernia repair surgery yesterday and did great. It was just a 45 min outpatient surgery, and it is fairly routine so we did not expect any complications. She was curled up yesterday watching a movie, so the belly button area must not have been bothering her too much. She's mainly been resting, reading, and eating chicken noodle soup. What a trooper. My sweet pea.

Math Pentathlon

Kenneth completed his Math Pentathlon tournament on Saturday (Evelyn had hers about a month ago). About 450 students from a regional area of TX participated. Some came from areas up to 3.5 hrs away. The idea is that each student pairs up with a student they do not know from a different school and competes in 5 different games, lasting 45 minutes each. (Somehow, even though there were 5 games at 45 minutes each, the day went from 7:30 AM -- 4 PM.) I was a judge again for one of the games, which is always interesting because with some of the kids, you can see the nuances of their personalities come through. Most have good sportsmanship, but others will probably be misogynistic pains in the rears when they grow up. I had the pleasure of getting one of those in the last game I judged and unfortunately, the person he was playing against was a rule-follower to the extreme (and there are many rules).

Here's a conversation thread (based on memory of course):

Student 1: [On turn #1] "Pass the flag card."

Student 2: "You always have to have the flag, card don't you?"

Student 1: [On turn #2] "Pass the flag card."

Student 2: [dirty look]

Student 1: [On turn #3] "Pass the flag card."

Student 2: "You constantly have to ask for the flag card. Somebody is just in love with the flag card."

[Various iterations of this continue for 45 minutes.]

Student 1: [After raising the Opinion Card] "I challenge your move. You cannot move the queen backwards to avoid the trap that you foresee I'm setting for you."

Student 2: "I disagree. I will do what I want because that's not how my coach taught us."

Erin: "Student 1 made a correct challenge. Move your queen back to where it was. You lose this turn."

Student 2: [Out of nowhere] "Girls are crybabies."

Erin: "You'd better watch your comments. One more comment out of you and you're disqualified." [Authoritative stare]

On a positive note, Student 2 lost that game. Justice was served.

I Need A Vacation

Kenneth is in his elementary school's Honor Choir and they had their end-of-year show this evening. It was truly enjoyable. Kenneth had a solo part and he was the perfect ham. The premise of the show was a series of songs about kids needing a vacation from school. Kenneth's song was about a bunch of camps that his parents keep sending him to and all he wants to do is come home. Check out the video...

GT Project Night

The other night, Evelyn did my hair for me and we took silly pictures.

Kenneth and Evelyn both participated in the GT program at school and have been working hard on their individual projects. Both kids prepared a Power Point presentation and created a video to embed within the presentation. They did a great job! Their GT teacher, Ms. DeBord, is a favorite of theirs. She is so enthusiastic and, lucky for us, she will be leading one of their Summer invention camps too.