Happy Birthday Becca!!

A day late. But we celebrated a couple days early, on Sunday with her requested dinner of steak with chimichurri, roasted potatoes and asparagus and an ice cream cake for dessert. She got an iPhone for her birthday, which she was totally surprised and ecstatic about since we had told her previously that she wouldn't get one till after 5th grade. But hey, she's 11 now and starting to do things like walk to friends' houses on the next street and go to play rehearsals. So, out of shouting distance more often. Also, I got a deal when I switched out cell phone plan to unlimited data if I added a fourth line. Happy birthday Becca!! Can't believe you are 11!

Hurricane Florence

September brought the wrath of hurricane Florence, which cleared out the bread and water from Charlotte, closed the county schools for three days (two of them entirely needlessly of course), and dumped a record amount of rainfall on the city. By the time the storm arrived it was much weaker wind-wise than anticipated, so Joel and the kids were disappointed that we didn't even get tropical storm force winds. We certainly got a lot of rain though. The disruption to the kids' new back to school routine was NOT APPRECIATED. Fortunately we are now back into the swing of things!

This is my accidental rain gauge, as Caroline happened to have left this bucket hanging on the porch railing before the storm!

Happy New Year

Wishing everyone a sweet 5779!

Guitar Lessons

Becca has been begging for guitar lessons so finally I gave in, here she is with her pink-stringed 3/4 size guitar! Adorable! 

First Day of School

My baby boy marched off to high school yesterday! Unbelievable how time flies. I remember when we first moved here it was a selling point of our neighborhood that the high school is in walking distance - a very far off selling point at the time! But here we are. Ben had a good first day and announced the only teacher he doesn't like is his math teacher because she is the only one that actually made them do classwork and assigned homework yesterday.

The girls also had good first days of 1st and 5th! Fingers crossed for a great year for everyone!

Almost Time to go Back to School!

The kids go back to school on Monday! Yesterday we had a marathon day which included Meet the Teacher for both girls and Freshman orientation for Ben. The girls put away their classroom supplies and said hello to their teachers - Becca has Ms. Flowers and Caroline has Ms. Jeanne. I know nothing about either one of them, but fingers crossed for a great year for both of them!

Later on Ben and I walked over to the high school (15 minutes door to door, we timed it - though most of those 15 minutes is walking out of the neighborhood and there's a shortcut through one of the neighbor's yards but so far he says he doesn't want to use it). We listened to some more or less clarifying instructions by the principal, and then walked around and found all his classrooms. Of course, he said he did NOT want to go inside ("I don't want to meet any teachers yet!") First semester he has honors Earth & environmental science , Math 1, Spanish 1, Sports & Entertainment Marketing, and Team Sports. Science, math and Team sports he has every day for 1 semester only; Spanish and the sports marketing class he has on alternating days for the whole year. Second semester he has honors English, world history, and gym in place of math, science and team sports. And, he has to be in class at 7:15 a.m. so that's going to be interesting.

Kumon Update

Caroline is about five months into her stint at Kumon, and she is just starting level "B", which they tell me is 2nd grade math though it doesn't correlate totally with grade level.

Anyway the teacher came to see me after Caroline finished up yesterday to tell me about the new level and to show me that she'd had Caroline start on one of her new work sheets to see how she would do. She said, "I didn't show her how to do it, all I told her was to make sure she lined up her numbers under the problem properly."

So I asked the obvious question, "Well then how did she know how to carry over the 1 to the other column?"

"Beats me," she said. And then, "If she can figure out how to do it herself, it doesn't really matter how she's doing it. It actually shows me that she has very good number sense. So if you don't need to show her how to do it by carrying over the 1, don't. Just let her do it her way."

From San Francisco, With Love

Okay I've been remiss in the blogging department. I'd suggest those (few) of you still reading the blog should resign yourselves to the fact that the kids are getting older and more aware of their presence on the interwebz, Facebook has long since taken over much of the day to day keeping in touch business,  and life is just plain hectic most of the time. However I'll try to continue to post the highlights.

Like this one! Such an awesome trip to San Francisco / Lake Tahoe to visit the Larkins, whose kids got along with ours like peas in a pod. It was a very fun trip with so much to see and do! Below are some of my favorite pictures from the trip.  Of course the week went by way to fast, and back here in Charlotte we have so much to do to catch up with work and get ready for school to start!

14 Year Old Checkup

I took Ben for his 14 year old well exam today. He measured at 6 foot 1 inch even, and 143 pounds. His height is back to floating above the growth curve right now - they wrote "100%" for the percentile. The doctor said since he usually sits right around the top line (>95th percentile) for height, that he will probably settle back down there instead of staying off the chart. So he predicted something like 6'3 and a half for a final height for him. All I know is his growth better slow down soon - he grew 4 inches this past year and 4 the year before that too I think. He already complains his bed is too short :) Otherwise the checkup was uneventful. Ben is home this week doing his reading for school and resting up after a fun week in Philly with Uncle Mike and Aunt Kathleen! He had a great time.

On Sunday we head to San Francisco for a week! We are splitting the time between SF and Lake Tahoe. Hopefully it will be awesome! And a lot cooler weather than Charlotte. The girls are finishing up their last week of camp this week. Hard to believe the summer will be over in a month!

Ben and Annie

Ben and his cousin Annie at dinner last night. I think they look kind of alike don't you?

Cake Baking

Ben and Uncle Mike set out to make this cake for Aunt Kathleen's birthday:

And somehow took a left turn and ended up with this:

Apparently the cake didn't rise and the mousse filling didn't set , so they decided to improvise. It looks great! (Apparently it didn't taste so great though). I told Ben next time he needs to pick something less complicated!

Philly Bound

Ben headed to Philly yesterday — after a bit of a delay due to severe weather — on a plane named Wilbur. Have a great visit Ben!

Performing Arts, session 1

Becca finished up her first session of performing arts camp last weekend and performed as a Neverland native in a total of five performances of Peter Pan over two days. Phew! She did a great job! Now on to session 2, 101 Dalmatians, in which she is playing Boxer #2 ;)

Camp cutie

Becca's Famous Again

This banner is hanging in the Temple Beth El parking lot. Becca is pictured with her friend Leah.

#Flowing

Puppy Dog Eyes

New Phone

Ben killed his phone in MA last weekend by jumping into a pool with his phone in his pocket when it already had a cracked screen. The cell phone repair shop spent two days trying to resuscitate it to no avail. So i ended up buying out the rest of what I owed on my phone which was $93 and switching that phone to Ben and getting myself a new phone. Somehow Ben made out pretty well since the phone he killed was a 32 GB iPhone 7 and the one he got from me was a 128 GB iPhone 7. I got an iPhone 8. I wanted a X but instead I got an iPhone SE for Becca for her upcoming 11th birthday (Sshhhh it’s a surprise!) I also upgraded us to unlimited data since we are always going over our allowance and managed to apply a military discount thanks to Joel’s dad which means I got 4 lines of unlimited data for less than the price of 3 , otherwise. Yay!

4th of July

Up to the usual 4th of July shenanigans this year!

More from MA

Looks like a field trip to Clark and some fun in the sun!

With Sprinkles

Caroline and I, left home in Charlotte while the rest of the crew galavants around Boston, baked a cake this evening.