Friday Roundup

I am listening to the Friday News Roundup on NPR so I figured I would do one of my own.

1. I met with the dean of 6th grade students this morning for a quick conference that was optional to sign up for. He said that kids usually take 30-60 days to adjust to middle school, but that Ben adjusted right away and is doing great. He has all As on his first report card -- no easy feat considering he has 7 classes!-- and his teacher comments were things like "great transition to middle school, great job completing work, learning new concepts and helping others", and "Does a great job, participates in class and completes all work on time" and "a solid and intelligent young man who works hard in class". So YAY BEN!!

2. I had someone out to take a look at our fireplace yesterday, because every time it is turned on it smells and the smoke detector goes off. It turns out that the smoke detector is also a carbon monoxide detector and that's why it was going off :( Hooray for working CO detectors! Not so hooray for my fireplace, which is a vent-free gas system that is no longer being made, in fact the company that made it is out of business. And it is totally messed up and the guy spent 2 hours working on it but could not get it working without the dangerous CO levels. So he is putting together an estimate for some various options for replacing it with a new system. Which is rather pricey but I think Joel will be OK with it because when I told him about the carbon monoxide he asked if they couldn't  have just taken the old fireplace with them when they left? LOL.

3. Besides the Halloween party tomorrow night and trick or treating -- which the kids are insanely excited for especially Caroline who doesn't really remember trick or treating because we were in Disney last year -- we are having our laundry room and two upstairs bathrooms tiled on Sunday. We went to Lowes last weekend and picked out the tile and all the supplies and paid for it, and the contractor is supposed to pick it up this weekend and start (hopefully finish?) the job on Sunday. Which means that I think I had better get all the laundry done tomorrow :)

Crazy Morning

We got off to a bit of a rough start this morning, with the elementary school bus not showing up. So Abby got Ben out the door and watched Caroline while I drove Becca, Charlie and Amelia to school. Of course just as I pulled the car off our street I saw the school bus pulling away (no one had waited for it so it really didn't bother to stop for more than a second else I would have tried to get the kids on it). The school parking lot was a total cluster (I don't understand why anyone drives their kids to school) so even after dropping the kids off --they ran into school but probably were late since they arrived just at 7:45 when the bell rings-- it took me another 10 minutes to get out of the parking lot. After I got home and finished getting Caroline ready we headed to school and I was marveling that I really hadn't gotten her there any later than usual, considering the messed up morning, when I realized I'd forgotten her lunchbox at home :( So I had to drop her off, drive home, get the lunch, drive back, and then drive home again. And by then I was seriously behind schedule. Sigh.

Kitchen Update

We are kind of in a holding pattern for a few days. The wood to replace the damaged floors arrived today, but needs to sit in the house to adjust to the environment for a few days before being installed. Installation will be early next week sometime. The lower cabinets can't go back till the floors are down. The back splash can't go back till those cabinets are in. In the meantime I picked a new stain color (bottom picture) for all our floors, since they have to sand and refinish everything anyway. It's called Espresso. So pretty :)

Halloween Preview

My baby dragon. A little coercion was involved here. She wanted to be a mermaid princess. I wanted to be Danaerys Targaryen and for her to be one of my baby dragons. I won. Technically I need three dragons but my other two children flatly refused to humor me and are going as Sandy from Grease and a zombie chimpanzee, respectively. 

Sunday Night Football

The Eagles are in Panther country tonight! Ben and Joel headed to the game early to tailgate with Mike and Charlie before heading into the stadium. At halftime, the game looks to be a rough one for the Eagles though they are trying to hang in there! Go Eagles!!

Junior Firefighter

Caroline attended her friend Henry's birthday party this afternoon at the Waxhaw fire department. Before taking a swing at the piñata pictured below, she paused and asked Henry's dad, "Is the candy in there gluten free?" 

Vampire Cat

Becca won the honor of designing our pumpkin this year -- it's a vampire cat ;)

(I, as usual, won the honor of carving it). 

Starting to Look a Lot Like Halloween

This is an Improvement

This is how the kitchen looks now. Fans are gone and the stove is plugged in. Some guys spent the better part of the day today patching the large holes in the walls :) They are coming back first thing Monday morning to continue working. A tile guy stopped by yesterday to check out the back splash tile -- I told him if he couldn't find it I wouldn't be heartbroken and I already did pick out an alternative in case he can't find the same one (I didn't like it much anyway). A cabinet guy whose name is Mike Vick (not the football player I presume?) is coming by later today to look at the cabinets he needs to rebuild. We rented a house in Hilton Head for the week of Thanksgiving -- when the floors are being done and we have to be out of the house -- and got it approved by the insurance company. I ordered a new microwave and mentioned to the guys this morning that if they could NOT punch a hole in the sewer pipe while installing it, that would be appreciated :)

Lice-Capades

The Lice-Capades over at the cousins' house have spilled over into our house thanks I am sure to the newfound interest Becca and Amelia seem to have in combing each others' hair (using the same hair brush of course) which I told Becca NEVER TO DO AGAIN! But, too late. I did pull one dead louse off of her last week but despite what I thought was a thorough nit-picking she did turn up with a couple more yesterday which Abby nicely removed while babysitting for me ;) Rebecca's bedtime routine for the next week is going to include a thorough olive-oil comb-through and shampoo-out the next morning, which is a pain in the ass but is better than having bugs in your hair :( Caroline and Ben thankfully seem to have been spared.

Parent Teacher Conference (Becca)

Joel and I went to Becca's parent-teacher conference yesterday. She has the same teacher as last year, which is good for us and her to have that continuity. Her teacher says her attention/focus issues are much better except for first thing in the morning; she has trouble doing anything self-directed ie when they come into the classroom in the morning they are supposed to read the smart board and follow the directions given there,  but she never does unless prompted to. So we are going to work on that. Her rocking continues but not as violently as last year -- she does not rock her chair across the floor or distract other students now. She pays attention and always responds when spoken to, which wasn't the case last year. She does take a very long time to finish assignments and tests and is one of the slowest in the class in that respect. But the finished work is of good quality and she doesn't seem to zone out or be distracted while she is working... just slow. So not sure what to make of that.

She did score in the 92% percentile on the verbal portion of the CogAT, which is given to all second graders as part of testing for the TD program. The 92nd percentile score means she will be taking a second test later this month, and if she scores over the 95th percentile then she'll be in TD for literacy (but probably not math). Ben, by the way, bombed all three sections of the CogAT and eventually found his way into TD in 5th grade for both math and literacy so I am pretty confident those tests are bullshit.

Academically, she is doing fine in everything except spelling / phonics, which she has always had trouble with. She is just now starting to be able to sound out words-- her method of learning to read seems to be memorizing whole words and not sounding things out because she is very bad at sounding things out and remembering spelling patterns. I have recently noticed a little improvement with this, so hopefully the spelling will also improve this year. Overall an encouraging report!

Fall Pictures

Pretty cute but I can't decide between these three:

Slight Progress

As far as I'm concerned, anyway. Becca is now leaving little notes/drawings around the house that say things like "I hate this!" And "I want to move!"  We are down to one fan / dehumidifier blowing on a small area where the fridge used to be. It will likely be finished drying tomorrow. Our stove was moved back into place and plugged in this afternoon so at least we can go back to cooking like normal more or less. Just minus a few cabinets, the microwave, and with a big hole in the wall and a bit of flooring missing :)

Final Cross Country Meet

Last meet of the season, the Middle School Championship meet at Cuthbertson, which was a 30 minute drive and we had to be there at 7:15 this morning. Mommy and Ben were up early! Joel and the girls slept in. It was also FREEZING this morning, in the low 40s which is pretty darn cold for being in running shorts. Ben did awesome despite the cold and early start, with a new personal best of 14:09. Yay Ben!!

State of the Kitchen

I don't think I have documented on this blog what the kitchen actually looks like right now! There it is in all its glory.

The Power of Braids

School picture day and Caroline requested two braids. When I was done she said, "Now I am not Caroline anymore, I am Anna!" (From Frozen). And then she made me call her Anna till we got to school. 

Kitchen Update

There is no kitchen update. Everything is exactly as it was on Monday -- draped off and with giant fans whirring at a deafening volume :( The contractor came to check on it today and said he "highly doubted" it will have finished drying by tomorrow, "maybe Saturday". Rebecca is being seriously driven bonkers by the noise and inconvenience, always my most impatient and easily disgruntled child. But the rest of us are slowly wearing thin as well! It's not that fun to have to go out to dinner every night especially with a three year old who is invariably pretty tired and cranky by that time of day. And trying to concentrate on work / homework not to mention having to sleep through the din... Sigh.

Becca's School Picture

Cross Country Meet #2

Ben had his second XC meet, at Weddington middle school this afternoon. I don't have his official chip time yet but he says he finished in 14:23 which if true is over a minute faster than his first meet. The course looked hard,too -- running up hill through the woods at one point. Afterwards I took him and the girls out to dinner where he refueled with a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a strawberry shortcake milkshake :)

Someone was Happy Today

Yeah, this girl. My little ray of sunshine in an otherwise shitty day :)

Worst Monday Ever!

That would be having to de-louse three children while your kitchen floor is demolished and giant fans are set up that ARE SO LOUD YOU CANT THINK AND HAVE TO STAY ON 24 HOURS A DAY. 

The de-lousing was more a precautionary measure after both of Abby's kids turned up with lice today. I had the school nurse check and double check Rebecca and she said she didn't have any, but I did end up finding a single dead louse in her hair. So I spent, oh, three hours tonight in the bathroom with the lice shampoo and the nit comb going through the kids' hair with a fine-tooth comb. (Yeah I guess that's where that saying comes from). After all that I did only find the one, but that was all I needed ;) I made Abby come over and we shampooed ourselves and combed through each others' hair (didn't find anything). I did the girls' sheets, vacuumed, and bagged their stuffed animals. 

As for the kitchen, it is now mostly enclosed in plastic with the aforementioned giant fans running. The awesome story there is the water damage that we thought was caused by the broken water line to the fridge was actually caused by a leaking sewer pipe. There was mold, guys in hazmat suits, the whole nine yards. They ended up cutting out a bunch of the flooring including the subfloor under where the stove used to be, took the microwave down, cut out some of the back splash and we lost 2 cabinets to mold. Tomorrow someone is coming to discuss the repair work and give an estimate for that. And the actual leaking pipe still is not fixed yet either -- plumber is coming tomorrow as well. And, Ben has a cross country meet. Another awesome day ;) Maybe tomorrow I will actually manage to work though -- I ended up taking today off. 

Finally Friday

1. Ben's school bus made the news last night --http://m.wsoctv.com/news/news/local/photos-show-kids-sitting-overcrowded-school-bus-ai/nnyDK/

For being so crowded that kids had to stand in the aisles while the bus was moving because there was no room to sit. I have been aware of issues with Ben's bus -- last week on two occasions it was so late getting to school that Ben didn't get there till after first period had started. Which was annoying enough. To find out that it is routinely so crowded that students have to stand is ridiculous. Ben of course didn't seem to think this was important enough to tell me. I sent an email to the principal (I imagine I wasn't the only one). 

2. Finally got around to having the insurance company come look at the water damage that happened when the refrigerator's water line leaked. Apparently the kitchen floor needs to be ripped up and the sub floor dried out and then we need to go on a forced vacation for a week (paid for by the insurance company) so they can sand and refinish all the continuous flooring which is most of the downstairs. So.... Fun. The water mitigation guy is coming tomorrow to officially assess the damage. On the bright side... The floors were in desperate need of refinishing anyway. And who can say no to a free vacation?

The Cheerios Story

You may recall that Caroline had an epic bout of vomiting a few weeks back. The day before she got sick I had bought a box of the new gluten free honey nut Cheerios that had just come out. General Mills recently began to market all of their Cheerios as gluten free, after spending the last couple of years developing some fancy mechanical system to sift out contaminating grains from the oats they use. Anyway, for the record Joel told me not to give her any because he didn't trust that they could really be gluten free. Of course I didn't listen and gave her a single bowl of them that Friday morning.

All seemed well for a while. Then Saturday night rolled around and she was so sick I had to sleep on the living room couch with her so I could hold a bowl in front of her every 20-30 minutes. She didn't have a fever or any other symptoms and of course with her history I was suspicious that the episode could be related to her celiac disease, and the timing of it the day after she had tried a new food.

During the next couple of weeks I began to hear about people getting sick from eating the supposedly gluten free Cheerios, and eventually a recall was announced of 13 days worth of honey nut cheerios produced at a California facility in July due to wheat contamination. Unfortunately I didn't save the box of Cheerios so I can't check the code to confirm that the box was part of the recall. But I would bet that it was. No more Cheerios for my sweet girl :(

Social Studies Project

Second grade is notorious for assigning projects that seem to grade the parents rather than the children. Projects that no second grader could possibly successfully complete by themselves ;) The notorious project when Ben was in second grade was to construct a working musical instrument that had to be able to play multiple notes and couldn't be glasses filled with different levels of water and hit with a mallet ;) The assignment was given when Caroline was around a month or so old, and I was entirely otherwise occupied and sleep deprived. After looking on Youtube for a bit I told Ben to bring home a straw from the school cafeteria and we would cut holes in it to make a flute. When Ben presented his project -- which he couldn't get to produce a note when asked to demonstrate -- the teacher asked him, "How long did it take you to do this project?" And my poor Ben, not realizing this wasn't a speed contest, proudly replied, "About five minutes!" He -- or should I say I -- got a D. Yes, they give letter grade assignments on these projects.

In subsequent years the musical instrument project was scrapped in favor of making a model of a community building as part of a social studies unit on the different types of communities (urban, suburban, rural). Rebecca was assigned a police station. I would like to say that this time I spent considerably more than five minutes on the project, AND I BETTER GET AN A. I mean, Rebecca better get an A. 

Here is my sleep-deprived child, ready to head to school this morning with her project.

A Handful

Yeah, this one. If you look up the definition of "having your hands full" her picture probably comes up. 

Another Week Begins

Caroline's preschool is closed today and tomorrow  for Simchat Torah, Joel heads to Dallas for the COG meeting tomorrow night, Ben & Rebecca have an early release day Wednesday, the dishwasher is still out of commission, and we have several looming school project deadlines. Welcome to my week!

Here is Caroline who is spending her morning thus far painting wide swaths of purple and yelling at the judges on a recording of last week's Dancing with the Stars ("Nine! Nine! No, nine!")

Birthday Party

Pizza, donuts, pottery painting, bingo, glow in the dark tattoos, popcorn, hot cocoa, and a movie. I am pooped -- I hope these girls go to bed soon!