Only Eight Months?

We were in the backyard with our neighbors the other day and she mentioned that they were working with their builder to address something from their original construction.  She mentioned that it had been eight months that they'd been in their house and how time has gone by quickly.  My reaction was somewhat of the opposite though; I thought, "eight months?  Can it possibly be that these friends of ours have only been our neighbors for eight months?"

These neighbors were the second house occupied on our street of eleven lots.  We have only one house left that's not finished, although we've known that family for a while as they're taking a deliberate and careful path with their construction.  So our street is full, complete and finished as far as neighbors go, which is a long step forward from the empty streets and sparsely occupied neighborhood we moved into at the start during the economic drop.

So back to the eight months...that means that the neighbors on the other side of us moved in even less than eight months ago.  And yet I feel a strong kinship with these nice friends we've made.  We have a fun time together as neighbors and honestly, I'm not looking forward to the cold months, because the spontaneous gatherings out on the street aren't going to happen very often until spring arrives again. 

Perhaps we'll get snow and all meet outside with sleds and mittens?

The Big Boy Update:  Ham-ma-ker.  He doesn't like hamburgers like his father, but he likes to talk about them.  Today he made a "hammaker"out of thin slices of apple.  Oh, and the head of school's name to him is "Dom-ma-keek," not Dominique.  He was fairly certain this afternoon that he was pronouncing her name correctly when I asked him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "I want more kale."  Yes, she said this and she said it more than once.  We try so hard to feed them well, but we fall prey to the easy and tasty meals that aren't as healthy.   So I was happy to hear that she liked my Kale Yeah dried kale treat.  She ate more of it today.  I'm going to have to look up how to season and dry it.  My cousin says it's pretty easy.

Fitness Update:  Ahhh...better.  Four miles today without a problem breathing.  I am utterly relieved it was the antibiotic and nothing more.

Hypotensive

Flash back to Friday and the run that was the worst run I've ever done in an unusual way...

We started the run in the afternoon, expecting to make twenty-four miles without a problem as we didn't have difficulty with the twenty-two the week before.  Shortly after I started out I was tired though, and tired in a way I didn't expect to be tired.  Sure, when you first start running your body isn't warmed up and your heart isn't pumping at a rate you'll get to when you reach a sustained cardiovascular workout, but I didn't expect to be tired like this.

I had to walk for a bit and this was before we had even hit two miles.  Strange.  I had to walk several more times and I was starting to get concerned.  Fortunately, I had a physician with me so we started talking about it and by the time we got to twelve miles (with interspersed walking) we had it figured out.

I was taking an antibiotic as a prophylactic measure for the root canal.  Since I'd been on the medication, I hadn't been running so I didn't realize it was affecting me.  It turns out the medication was reducing my blood pressure, which would be fine normally, but in this case, was causing me to be out of breath unexpectedly.

Fortunately, I was wearing my heart rate monitor and I'd been checking on my heart rate regularly so I knew my heart wasn't racing.  But I was out of breath.  Low blood pressure was causing my lungs to get less oxygenation accomplished and as a result, I couldn't keep running for long periods. 

The good news was, I wasn't in danger of stroke, heart attack or any other things I might have been concerned about without an on-the-spot diagnosis.  I texted my dentist (who you might remember is my next-door-neighbor) and he told me I was fine to stop the antibiotic. 

It was still a very long way home in both time and exertion.  My neighbor was having her own discomfort as well.  She was having tightness of her legs because they wanted to run and weren't used to this walking nonsense.  Imagine the two of us, she needed to run and I needed to walk.  We did the best we could and made it home doing a run/walk alternation and making twenty-one miles.

The Big Boy Update:  "We are the workers."  This morning the children wanted to eat breakfast on the porch.  After breakfast they decided they wanted to go and swing in the back yard.  Because there was fog and mist, I brought down cloths and spray bottles.  They were most pleased to be cleaning up the swing set and completely forgot about the swinging for a good while.  My son happily announced, "we are the workers" as he began to spray the underside of the picnic table.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The Doo Doo Duck.  We have a plush duck with a pouch in it's tummy for an ice pack.  When someone is hurt, they can ask for the "Boo Boo Duck" and hopefully it will make them feel better.  (For toddlers, an ice pack heals eighty-three percent of all ills.)  My daughter thinks it's the "Doo Doo Duck" however. 

Auction Kickoff

I'm still tired from yesterday, but it's been a busy day and I'm just getting to this blog post so I'm going to make it quick and go to bed.  We went to a corn maze, played in a bounce house, played in a sand box that wasn't sand but was dried corn kernels.  We rode on a hay ride without hay to a pumpkin patch and picked our own pumpkins.  We shot corn out of a cannon at collegiate signs and missed entirely and we got nearly lost in a corn maze.

And it was all fun.

Then, my parents came over and watched the children while my husband and I hosted an auction kick-off event for our school's annual fund.  We had a very productive meeting with a group of parents who are passionate about raising funds for the school.  We came up with many exciting ideas that I hope will ultimately turn into money raised.

The Big Boy Update:  He is non-agressive and a complete gentleman when he's been given an outlet for his "need to move" as his teacher called it.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She is very independent.  At the farm today she wasn't attached to us, her family.  She would happily go and explore the various play areas, including large slides that required help from people to get her down.  Also, she ate dirt.

The Most Tiring...

We had a very rough run today for an unexpected reason.  If I wasn't so tired I would explain more because it's an interesting situation.  For now, I'm going to try to go to bed as soon as the children are asleep to give my body time to recover from four-and-a-half hour run in which I lost six pounds of water weight.

The Big Boy Update:  He saw realtor balloons at our neighborhood entrance and told me it was someone's birthday.  When I asked him who's birthday it was, he told me it was our street's birthday.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We have some necklace beads from New Orleans that our neighbor's got as a gift on their recent trip.  My daughter is very fond of wearing one, two, or even six of them at the same time.

Fitness Update:  21.1 miles, which isn't our longest distance, but was definitely our most lengthy and tiring run.  Going to bed to recuperate.

Ellipse

Ellipse.   See, you can't tell, but I didn't even know how to spell that word correctly.  It got the little red squiggles underneath it, meaning I had added one too many L's or not enough I's.  And was it one P or two?  I think I had one of the vowels wrong as well.  At any rate, thanks to the technology of the spell checker, I look like I knew how to spell ellipse all along.

Yesterday I had a "lesson" from one of the students in the class I was substituting in.  She asked me if I wanted to see her do this particular "work" so I sat beside her while she showed me what she was doing.  Ultimately, she was doing some tracing and then filling in the area with colored pencils.  But the process and what she was learning from that was more important than just the act of tracing.

She went through a set of steps I, myself, would have had difficulty doing with accuracy, but she did the job both carefully and thoroughly.  I was looking at what she was doing and decided to ask her a question about the work.  "What shape is that?" I asked, expecting the answer of "an oval."  But no, she said, "it's an ellipse."  "Oh dear, these three-year-olds might be smarter than I am.  I could be in trouble", I started thinking.

Shortly after that there were two children who wanted to work with some blue shapes.  The teacher said to them, "if you know the name of the shape, you can take it out of the box."  So the two students talked to each other and worked together to remember the names of each shape.  They got them all.

Today, I had to look up online, "names of geometric solids" to remember what they were myself and the first link I got was to a picture of the items they were working with, color and all, from another classroom:

I'm definitely going to have to go back to school to keep up with my children it appears.

The Big Boy Update:  In the car this morning the Happy Birthday song was playing.  I asked my son how old he was and he immediately answered, "I'm twenty-five."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  She no longer is bothered by bows in her hair.  She's fairly active and they tend to work themselves out on their own, but at least she's not tearing them (as well as hair) out anymore.

Substitute Teaching

I took the substitute teacher training course offered at our school earlier this year.  I wasn't sure if I would be called on or not to serve, but I wanted to be available in case help was needed.  This morning I got a call from our head of school asking if I could substitute in one of the Children's House classrooms.  I quickly made a call and cancelled my morning plans and prepared to go in and be the best substitute teacher I could be with the two hours of training I had been given earlier this school year.

On the one hand, I was nervous because I was helping out the most senior teacher on the campus.  On the other hand, I was very pleased to be working with someone who could most likely handle twenty-five three to five-year-old children by herself if she had to.

I arrived on campus and went to her classroom and was given a quick five minutes overview of my responsibilities for the day.  She had two pages with the children's names and their pictures so that I could keep them straight.  I was relieved to note that I already knew about half the students from the prior year and other interactions at school-related functions.  And then, students began to file in quietly and the morning was starting.

Montessori children are very impressive.  They know what is expected of them and even the three-year-olds only needed small reminders to put something away or a suggestion of some new work if they weren't sure what they wanted to do.  But the best part was the older children.  The five-year-olds had been in the classroom for over two years now and they knew how all the "work" was supposed to be done, what should go where, if a child had not been given a "lesson" in that particular work and was therefore not ready to do that work yet. 

And they were my big helpers too.  If one child needed help with something I didn't know how to do, I asked that child if they had a friend that could show us how and every time, the older child was glad to help both me and the younger student out.  We had one child help a newer student on with his socks (a job that took fifteen minutes because neither was very skilled at putting on tight socks). 

When it was time to go out to the playground, I was told I'd go in when the bell rang to help the children with lunch.  What did I do?  I asked these older children and they told me everything that needed to happen.  I asked them what they did first and they told me they changed into their inside shoes, washed their hands and then prepared their lunches.  If it needed microwaving, they put their food on a plate and handed it to me to heat up.  They could have milk or water and they helped me with the picture and pouring the milk into the pitcher.  Then, they served each other milk. 

They waited for everyone at their table to be ready to eat and then began eating together.  They were using ceramic plates, real cutlery, cloth napkins and glasses and they were having the most civilized meal you can imagine, including polite conversation.

Then, my time as morning substitute was over.  I had an enlightening morning, met some new friends and got a lesson or two myself in how a well-run classroom with children who are given both freedom and responsibility can be a happy and calm place at the same time.

The Big Boy Update:  He can be bribed with gummy bears. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The "peepotty" thing she is getting much better at.  The "poopotty" thing she is resisting...mightily. 

Halloween in September?

Our neighbors brought out Halloween decorations more than two weeks ago.  I know what you're thinking, because we were thinking it too, "really?"  But it caught on.  Their neighbors put out some bigger decorations and then two more houses put out other things.  Soon, more than half of our street had out decorations and October hadn't even arrived.  What did we have planned, you ask?  We had no idea.

My husband said he wasn't going to directly compete with the large inflatables some of the houses had put out and it was far too early to get a real pumpkin, but that he was thinking about it and to give him some time. 

Shortly after that he had an idea, and a great one at that.  We ordered some theater light gels in different colors.  When they arrived, we cut them into shapes that matched the low-voltage up-lighting we had all over our yard and last night, just hours before the start of October, we enacted his plan.

We put an orange glow on lights that targeted the house and a green glow on lights that highlighted the plants.  I added a green downward glow on the path lights heading to the front door.  It looks very nice when it's dark and the best part it, it's invisible during the day.  

I'm sure we'll add a pumpkin or two and there's the cool psychedelic laser light display we got last month we'll add to a bush or the entryway, but for now, we're at least in the game. 

If Halloween is this much of a to-do on our street, I'm a little afraid to see what type of competition Christmas will bring...

The Big Boy Update:  He loves trains.  We've been given on loan a wooden train set that my neighbor's children grew up with.  He can play pretend with the Thomas the Train set for a very long time.  Today he was angry at me because I told him he had to go outside to play with our neighbor--whom he loves to play with--because it was interrupting his train games.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We were deciding if we should order guacamole at lunch the other day and my daughter heard us discussing it.  "I want mack-a-mole-ee" she said and that decided that.  She easily ate half of the order in-between our requests for her to pronounce guacamole again and again because it was so cute.

Fitness Update:  Six miles, easy run in the light as my neighbor is working night float at the hospital this week so we ran after I woke up but before she had a chance to go to bed.