mathmom's blog

I was in the car today, driving Ella to pick up Amanda from school, and I realized that it was awfully quiet. Luke is almost always talking. I looked back and didn't see Luke in the car. "Luke! Luke! are you here!" I yelled. Ella looked up from her book, and said in a worried voice, "No, he's not in the car!" As you can imagine, my thoughts immediately went back to the house where I must have left him---I had a million things to remember today (we went from string lessons to social group to dinner to Taekwondo ), and I have always worried that I would end up forgetting a person. I did once forget Amanda in a waiting room for 3 minutes when I went in to Ella's gym class, although she was 3 months old at the time... "Poor Luke! He must be so worried! He was probably bawling and terrified! He'll never trust me again!" I worried silently. I needed to get off the highway right then, call Michael to pick up Amanda, call the string teac...

It is very interesting to see what the kids get up to when weare not around. Gramma and Grampa came to visit, and supervised what ended up being the Acorn Project . Grampa blogged about it, fortunately, or I would never have known even half of what happened.

Amanda brought a bag full of small pieces of paper which she had colored on. "Could you laminate these, please?" It turned out they are invitations for mermaids. She wants to laminate them and then drop them in the ocean. One side has a picture of a mermaid on it, complete with a tail instead of legs and surrounded by blue water. The other side has a few symbols: A, ♥, M. It turns out that she wanted to write on the back, "Dear mermaids, could you please come to the state pond of North Carolina? Love, Amanda." As she said, "If you can't write that whole sentence, you just have to write A heart M." It seems like a good plan, although she did ask me tonight if the place where mermaids live is connected to the pond of North Carolina. I first asked if she thought mermaids were real. "No, mermaids are pretend," she said. "Well, in that case," I said, "the mermaids can certainly come to North Carolina." She seemed rel...

I took the girls to their first martial arts lesson yesterday. I'd been looking around for some sort of physical activity for them---they both are taking string lessons, but I think there needs to be something more active. A friend of ours mentioned that the local studio is run and taught by women, and Ella thought that was pretty neat and wanted to try it. They got there and tried on their uniforms: both ended up being a little big, although Amanda's (the smallest size) really needs some taking up =) They got to sit on a spot on the floor, learn a few rules (don't be a bully was the most important one---don't abuse your Tae k won do). They learned a few rituals: bow to the flags (Ella correctly identified the Korean flag), tell the teacher "Thank you ma'am," jump up in the air and shout "Taekwondo!" Then they got to do a few punches and kicks into a small round foam circle. I think the main purpose of the exercises was to learn how to move ...

As Kim just blogged, we went to the mountains for Apple Festival -- for the fourth year running. Amanda was disappointed last year that she couldn't do the ropes course, and this year, as a great big five-year-old, nothing was going to keep her away. This involved a lot of waiting. First, waiting for over an hour and a half before starting climbing. Then she climbed a free rope ladder with rungs about half as far apart as she is tall, to a platform about dozen feet off the ground. Once she got there, we discovered that the "lobster claws" she was wearing were not long enough to read the safety wire, so she had to wait while they changed her over to a different set. Walking a pair of beams never seemed hard to Ella or to me, so it didn't surprise me that Amanda did fine. The bigger surprise was that she never fell off the high wire, and in fact didn't seem to have to use her hands very much -- good balance. She wanted a helping hand before she jumped across a...

Last weekend we went up to a camp in the mountains for a family "retreat". My good friend Julie had been a counselor up there in the (now distant =) past, so she knew the trails. While Ella and Amanda and Michael went on the intermediate ropes course (Ella's favorite part of the trip), I wanted to go on a hike. There were two options: a short (15 minute for a grownup) hike over mostly flat ground, or a longer (1 mile) hike up to the top of the mountain. I had gotten enough sleep that night, or was feeling ambitious, and Julie told me that it would be alright, so we opted for the latter. As with so many things in life (getting married, having children, getting your PhD, etc.) if I had known before I started what was entailed, I wouldn't have done it. Having done it, I'm glad we went. The first part of the hike was over a leaf covered trail, through the forest. As we got higher up, there were more and more rocks to climb over. I pulled Luke up the first part ...