Random Updates

It's Monday and the kids are finally back at school after being off for spring break for a week and a half (two weeks for Ben, if you count his Washington DC trip with the 8th grade). I'm happy to have the house back to myself for the majority of my work day, but a bit grumpy at the 6:15 alarm I have to set again. Two more months of school left, so we're into the home stretch!

Our front yard got dug up last week and our plumber put in a new water line from the house to the edge of the driveway. The leak they said, was in the yard somewhere. The next day it was apparent that the leak was NOT in the yard, as the leak was not even a little bit better. The city came out (I think the plumber called them because I didn't) and replaced the rest of the pipe between the yard and the meter. And behold, no more water leak. So as far as I believe the leak was never in the yard to begin with, so when the plumber sends me the bill for that I may have a thing or two to say to them about it. But at the moment no one has asked for any money, and considering that it took 2 and a half months to fix the leak, I'm not inclined to pay anyone in a hurry.

We enrolled Caroline at our local Kumon center for math enrichment, and she started last week. She goes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for about 45 minutes, and has around 20-30 minutes of math worksheets on the other 5 days of the week. So we are just about done our first week. The first few days were a little rough, as they intentionally start kids below their level so that the work is easy at first. Of course, easy math is not what makes Caroline happy so she was very grumpy at first. It gradually gets harder of course, but there's a lot of repetition especially with basic math facts as part of their teaching method. So we'll see how it goes. They recommend sticking with the program for two years. Wish us luck with that ;)

Carowinds

The girls and I went on our annual-ish pilgrimage to Carowinds yesterday. The boys opted to stay home. We had a great time and despite the picture below made it out alive :)

Passover 2018

State of the Sidewalk

This is super annoying. We've had a water leak since mid January, and the water department came out like a thousand times and dug a big hole and finally announced it was our problem. So we called a plumber who came out, dug up the hole, filled it back up and left, and that was over a week ago. They are supposed to come back with equipment to pinpoint the leak and then (presumably) dig up the rest of our driveway to fix it. At this point, I am almost looking forward to that, because at least it would be something different to look at instead of just this. every. single. day. Sigh.

Basketball Game

The boys went to see the Hornets and Sixers play last night with Eric and Jared. Look at those seats! Practically on the court. The Sixers won and they had a fun time!

Piano Recital

Not to be outdone by her sister this weekend, Caroline had her first piano recital as well. She was visibly nervous leading up to her performance, but she did a fabulous job. She was the youngest student performing-- the next oldest was 8 and there was only one 8 year old. The other kids were all in the 9-12 age range, with one adult student as well. Caroline was not intimidated :) Below is a link to the video, hopefully it works...

https://www.facebook.com/mandine728/videos/10215651092610307/?t=5

JCC Kids Musical Revue

Congrats to these kiddos who worked so hard over the last couple of months to put on a fabulous show this weekend! The kids not only performed, but they wrote most of the show themselves as well. They did a fabulous job. Becca is pumped to continue her acting and singing career with a seven week stint of performing arts camp this summer :)