Fire Station Tent Village

Todd was off of work on Monday and so he helped out with school.  I really thought we'd get done quicker with two parents helping, but it didn't happen.  We were a little distracted in the morning by the 3 giant (they looked giant to me) opossum in our backyard.  I only got a picture of the little one, but the three of them were just walking around the yard like they owned the place.  Todd told his boss about them and she said they were good for eating rodents and rotting fruit, so that may be the attraction to our yard - our fig and lime trees have mushy fruit on the ground.  If they eat mice and rats then we'd be happy to keep them as pets because those are always a problem in this area.  Welcome to Texas.  We have fire ants and rats.

For Josiah's spelling work that day, he had to write down three wishes, and use a few spelling words in the process.  Now, if I were making three wishes I know that a personal chef and a personal trainer would be pretty high up there, but Josiah, who is 8, had other priorities.  His three wishes:
#1 - To build all of the Lego kits in the whole world.  (makes total sense for him)
#2 - I wish to eat pizza.  (again, makes sense for this child)
#3 - To work at Pizza Hut.  (And this may be where we need to broaden his life goals.)

We didn't make it to CC this week because the morning of CC, Caroline woke up very early and threw up five times.  After a mid-day nap, she woke up and seemed to be much better.  The next day at karate, I kept her in our car just as a precautionary, but we went in the building at the end to get the boys.  In those five minutes inside the building, she told no less than three adults, "I threw up five times!" with a giant grin on her face.  Clearly she was feeling better.

Since we didn't go to CC, we did school at home that day.  We tried to make stalagmites and stalactites, but the experiment was a fail.  We'll try it again.

We did boil eggs with onion skins and got them to change color.  Henry and Caroline wanted to eat the boiled eggs.  They thought the eggs were good, but they didn't like the yellow part in the middle.  Todd says they're definitely my kids.

Henry had finally saved enough money to buy his Lego kit, and it came in the mail on Wednesday.  He was sooooo excited.

Josiah was upset that he never gets anything.  (For this, I'd like to refer you to the blog post from last week with the pictures of him holding his three new Lego kits....)

They didn't have time to work on the kit that afternoon, so Thursday morning, the boys both did school very well, they were efficient and they didn't complain.  They had a goal in mind - they wanted to finish school by noon so they could work on the Lego Fire Station.  They did it easily, which we hope is always a lesson to them of what they can accomplish if they put their mind to it.  Henry was very kind to Josiah and let him build half of the kit.

Since the fire station was built, they have been playing Legos for hours each day.  All weekend, they have played upstairs making Lego cities.  Yesterday evening, they had been playing Legos for a long time, and Henry kept popping downstairs with different books asking me if I remembered that we had a particular book.  Then when I went upstairs, I saw just what he was doing with all of those books.  They became tents for all of his Lego people.  It was one big tent village.

We did watch the Inauguration on Friday.  Whether our candidate wins or not we still should respect the office of the president and watching the inauguration ellicited a lot of good questions from the kids.  I got to tell them about the different branches of government and balance of power, who the particular people were that they kept showing (past presidents or members of Congress).  There were many lessons in it.  Josiah actually watched it all and asked many questions, most of which were good questions.  My favorite, though, was when he heard Rep Chuck Schumer speak and he asked, "Does he do Gonzo's voice [from the Muppets]?"
After President Trump took his oath and they shot the cannons, Henry was concerned that they kept shooting them because they were going to hit people and hurt them.
But Caroline topped it all.  During President Trump's speech, she must have been listening, because when Trump said that we'll get our dreams back, Caroline piped up, "Yay!  I get my dream back."  Now, I don't know how many dreams she's lost at 3, but I'm glad she's happy to be getting them back.

This cutie did make it back to karate on Friday.

We're hoping for a drier week next week.  We had huge rain storms all week and besides having a water logged yard, the kids would like to ride their bikes again!