Class Holiday Party

Caroline Not Blowing Out Her Birthday Candle

A reluctant Caroline, as promised :)

Tasty Toes

Kiawah Weekend

Our weekend in Kiawah for Joel's half marathon was a lot of fun! We got stuck in some rush hour traffic for the last 45 minutes of the trip on Friday evening, but despite that the kids traveled well over all. Since we got in later than expected we went straight to dinner where we were meeting friends Javier & Crisi and their kids who were also in town for the race. We were all tired after the drive and somehow Joel didn't protest when Ben ordered the most expensive thing on the menu (a $36 steak dinner). Caroline got some gluten free pasta with butter and cheese, and dug in with both hands and ate almost all of it. 

After dinner we found the 3 bedroom villa we had rented for the weekend, and Ben walked in the door and said, "wow this is kind of tight." But he was right, it WAS kind of tight, and wasn't helped by the fact that there was way too much furniture / things for me to worry about my kids breaking in the place. Fortunately no one broke anything and I managed to get Caroline to bed in her pack n play in a strange place with NO CRYING! She was really tired, and I sat with her until she fell asleep.

Saturday morning Joel got up early and headed to the race , which was about a half mile away from our villa. After the kids got dressed/ate breakfast we headed over there as well, arriving just in time to see the first half-marathon finishers, who were doing something like a 5 minute mile. Joel was doing something like a 10 minute mile, and apparently was so busy chatting with other runners that he didn't bother listening to music until mile 11. He did a great job -- way to go Joel!!! 

After the race we went out to lunch and then Caroline and Joel took a nap while I walked with Ben and Becca to the beach. It was getting windy and starting to rain when we set out.  By the time we got to the beach and the kids ran around and chased sea gulls and dared each other to run into the water and decided to head back, it had started POURING. And the beach was a 15 minute walk from the villa. And I got a little lost and my cell phone battery died. But the kids had a lot of fun despite (or probably because of) this adventure.

Saturday night we had dinner and birthday cake with friends Kim and Hal and their kids (also in town for the race). Caroline's birthday cake, despite being 48 hours old and having been dropped in the parking lot once, held up remarkably well. It was certainly edible, if not "delicious", but the kids all seemed to enjoy it.

And Sunday we packed up early and headed to Charleston where we took the kids to the aquarium and then out to lunch where we found a deli that happily had gluten free bread so Caroline could enjoy a sandwich just like the rest of us! Then we headed home, and ended a long/tiring weekend with unpacking, grocery shopping, starting laundry, etc. Ben and Rebecca were a little off-the-walls when we got home probably because of having been cooped in the car, and Caroline held up decently for a while despite having not napped in the car on the way home like we assumed she would. We were all certainly ready for bedtime! I think I was asleep by 9:30 last night.

Below are a few pictures! I will try to post a video of Caroline not blowing out her birthday candle later ;)

Too Many Things to Do...

--to be blogging!! I have work to finish up, packing to do, and then need to pick the kids up from school shortly after noon so we can head to Kiawah for Joel's half marathon! The almost-a-birthday-girl is all packed up and ready to celebrate the big "2" on the road this weekend! It took me forever to make her cake last night (was up until 11:30 which is way too late for me!) but no time to blog about that ordeal now!! Here she is, at school this morning getting ready for her "Shabbat birthday" , and below that, the troublesome cake is ready to travel :)

Bagels & Blocks

This morning was bagels & blocks at Caroline's preschool. Of course, I had to supply Caroline's (gluten free) bagel for her, which, after 30 minutes baking in the oven came out crusty and delicious looking, and seemed to have held up better than I expected it to on the ride to school / wait for the festivities to begin. Of course after all the trouble I went to, Caroline took about 3 bites of her bagel and opted to gorge herself on fruit instead! The bagels are ones that my cousin recommended, but they are uncooked so need to be baked. So they are kind of a pain in the ass. This, my second attempt at making one, came out much better than the first time I tried, which was marred by a malfunctioning toaster oven / impatient child ("I want bagel! I want bagel!") and didn't seem to rise all the way. Bagel number two (skipped the toaster oven and went straight to the regular oven) looked much better but Caroline didn't seem overly impressed with it ;) Oh well. At least I have the ability to supply a bagel for her when necessary!

6 Year Old Checkup & EOG Scores

So I finally took Rebecca for a (belated) 6 year old well checkup, after somehow completely forgetting to do so when she actually turned 6 at the end of September. She is 45.5 inches tall and 46.2 pounds, which puts her at the 50th percentile for both height and weight. Her height seems to be dropping off.

The checkup went fine until I asked the doctor if we could do a celiac screen on both Rebecca and Ben (who was along for the ride) because Caroline's GI doctor had recommended having the other kids tested and I had not done that because, well, my kids hate needles and also the thought of having ANOTHER kid with celiac disease, especially one who's old enough to remember what, say, an Oreo tastes like, was just too difficult for me to contemplate six months ago. But Abby gave me a bit of a lecture the other day about how I needed to do it, so out came the needles and my kids FREAKED! It took myself + two nurses to hold Becca down, and Ben was not much better. In fact Ben was traumatized not only by the blood test, but afterwards spent an hour freaking out about the possibility that he could have celiac disease, though I tried to reassure him that it was just to make sure that he didn't, and that I really didn't think he did. I don't know when the test results will be back, because in the chaos of the ordeal I forgot to ask. But I'll be sure to update here when they come in!

In other news Ben got his results from last year's End of Grade exams. North Carolina switched last year to what's known as the "common core" standardized test curriculum , which has been adopted now or is in the process of being adopted by 45 states, basically so that test scores across states and against other countries can be compared accurately because everyone's taking basically the same test. Unfortunately for NC , and as other states have found as well, the common core tests are a lot harder than the tests that they replaced. In NC only 42% of 3rd through 8th graders were deemed proficient in math , and 44% in reading on last year's test. This compared to 83% and 71% the previous year on the old test.

Of course at Ben's school it was more like almost 90% of students were rated proficient in both reading and math last year (still a drop from previous years which were >95% usually). Ben himself got a "3" (proficient) in math and a "4" (superior) in reading. So, yay Ben! As a reward for the "4" in reading, we got him the Lego Marvel Superheroes video game.