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."