Nine

Matilda turned 9 today! Rather than a party this year she decided on a visit to the Medieval era. She brought two friends along and we all thoroughly enjoyed our mediocre food and raucous cheering. Our knight won!!

Since play acting violence and greasy poultry is not quite enough, we continued the birthday celebration with a sleep over. These lovely girls were actually arguing over whose turn it was to look up the next word in her new birthday dictionary. This girl of mine is awesome, with some mighty fine friends. It is midnight now and I still hear them whispering in bed.

Nine years of parenting. Wow.

Morro Bay Fun

Do You Need a Valentine?

Matilda decorated this bag to bring home her Valentine haul from class today.

She loves everyone! (Now I need to listen to some Lyle Lovett.) 

Today's Fun: Ice Skating on a Hot Day

Today's Fun: Valentine's Sweat Shop

Today's Fun: A Lazy Sunday

Science fun with color experiments, acid and base mixing, and Oobleck. Porter exclaimed, "Oobleck IS science!"

Board games with a neighbor friend.

This two day old game is still running! Porter is a ruthless real estate mogul.

Zoo building with grandpa's blocks.

A very sunshiney afternoon spin around the neighborhood.

Beautiful City

Amazing views of the city this morning on my hike.

Jet lagged

Candy House Bonanza

Porter and Matilda each invited a few friends home after school today to decorate houses. I can't say gingerbread house since I just did my usual cheater graham cracker house assembly. However, with all that candy flying no one seemed to complain!

 It's important to sample the supplies. 

 Success, another candy house in the books.  

Before

If you don't hear from me, it might be because I've been entombed in icing.

Certifiable

It's Chime Season!!

Hands down, my favorite Christmas decoration.

Naturalist

I love this shot that Tim captured of Matilda on our hike in Joshua Tree last weekend. She likes to carry a notepad on any nature walk to document her observations, thoughts and quick sketches of any animals we encounter, especially the cute fuzzy ones! It is amazing to me the quantity of little notepads that she manages to fill. Thorough documentations is important in good research I suppose.  

Weather!!

We are thrilled to be getting some much needed rain. Although water falling from the sky seems to be such a rare occurrence that it's making people act a bit crazy. Walking back to the car at pick up from school, we heard the principal come over the loudspeaker system asking a parent who had left their car double parked in traffic to please return to their car immediately. Don't lose your head everyone, it's just some precipitation.

Sous Chef

Porter is all about food these days. He must be approaching a growth spurt because he's eating SO much! Constantly hungry and eating crazy quantities. He is also super helpful in the kitchen. For dinner tonight he made our salad and was very happy to have the freedom to choose all the ingredients and wash/chop/peel/slice to assemble it himself. 

Keeping with the food theme, the week before Thanksgiving break I went into his class to present a lesson related to food. They were doing a food unit and the teacher (knowing my loved for all things food) asked me to prepare something. I found a really great lesson plan online about "Eating a Rainbow!"which discussed the nutrients in fruits and vegetables and why it's good to eat a bright variety of produce. It's so fun to see their minds cranking and turning! After the discussion they all got to make rainbow kebabs for a snacks.

I forgot to get a good photo of all the trays, but they looked really beautiful.

I also made kale chips and sweet potato fries to sample and it was exciting to see how many kids were willing to try them. Beside enriching all of his 25 other classmates, all the prep work was worth it just to see Porter so proud and happy to have me in class.

Cheese Turkeys

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm thankful for so much, including these goofy, big kids.

Hope you all had a lovely holiday, however you spent it.

Project Boy

Porter will tell you his favorite thing about kindergarten is the projects. He is really enjoying all the little crafty challenges they have for him, flexing those glue stick muscles. Today he turned in his second biggish homework project, a family book. For both projects, it has been really interesting to see how focused he is, with a very clear picture of how he wants things to look and be done.

We had a pretty big struggle trying to convince Porter to practice his presentation of this book at home. 

For each letter of the alphabet he chose a photo to illustrate something starting with that letter, which relates to his family or things we like to do together. In class he will be expected to go through it and explain all 26 pages! I think he will probably do fine in class, when he turns on his game face, but at home he was just giving us all attitude and mumbly mumbles. For a sneak peak, here's the letter G:

Heat Wave

This heat wave of ours has been going on for quite a while. After Porter's first soccer game this weekend (three goals by P!), we spent the remainder of the weekend soaking ourselves in various bodies of water. 

First up for Saturday: The Pacific

Next up on Sunday: Neighbor's pool 

The kids took turns riding a Big Wheel in the pool! Bike ride in snorkel gear = wild, good times.

This grocery store display feels really wrong when it's triple digits in the parking lot!

Dental Adventure

Matilda had her two top cuspids removed today. The baby teeth were overdue to come out and were jamming up the path for all her grown up teeth. Hopefully this will help everything fall in a little nicer for less braces-type intervention later. She was understandably nervous but the dentist did a great job moving things along quickly so she didn't have time to get too worked up.

Her teacher encouraged her to write about her worries today, instead of the regular writing assignment, which I think helped a bunch also. She illustrated her essay with this picture. I can't chose my favorite part of this: her worried expression, the dentist pinching her wrist, the dentist's kooky eyes, or maybe my prominent teeth that are not being threatened. So much awesome.

Away He Goes, Jet Pack Powered

Tim has been plugging away at making a jet pack for Porter for a while now and finished it just in time to gift as a first day of Kindergarten present. All the hard work and time spent buiding it was justified by Porter's enthusiastic reaction! 

 Apparently it's a very serious responsibility wearing this jet pack! 

 One of Porter's immediate concerns with the jet pack was whether it would be safe from wild animals if we left it out on our back patio area. (He is very wary about the skunks, possums and raccoons that frequent our yard.) We joked with Porter that the raccoons were not plotting to fly away in his new jet pack. Funnily enough, as we got ready for bedtime that evening the local raccoon family started making a major racket walking around on the aluminum roof of that same back patio area. Porter was in a panic trying to simultaneously close the back door and go out to get the jet pack from them. We watched them for a long time climbing our tree and growling, squeaking and grumbling to each other. Porter's worry for his new precious toy seemed to subside a bit and so far the jet pack has not gone on any wildlife joy rides that we know of. Well done RD Papa, this imaginative toy is going to get some miles on it. (Yes, totally, pun intended.)