Month: October 2010

For a family that bikes as much as we do, we have very low-tech bikes. All of our bikes are salvaged from Goodwill or passed down through siblings or procured from neighborhood yard sales. Our bikes probably leave the garage on outings more often than our cars leave the garage. We don’t do long haul biking – most of our trips are less than 4 miles – to the Metro, to church, to school, to the library, to the grocery store and to the pizza/ice cream joint. But not today! The boys took their bikes and rode 20 miles on the C & O canal. Jeremy and Vince are planning (with the scouts) to ride the whole length of the canal over the next 3 years (184 miles!). I actually contemplated going with them and taking Edda her trailer, but 20 miles is a long way to be bouncing in a trailer; they were gone from the house from 9 am – 6 pm which really was going to be too much for Edda.

Another beautiful October weekend! I love autumn!

Edda went to Butler’s Orchard today with her school. Neither Jeremy nor I were able to chaperone today – but we got some lovely photos from the teacher.

I am always amazed at how quickly kids can learn stuff. It only seemed like yesterday Vince was learning to count – today, he’s learning about graphing data. I wish I could learn at the rate he is learning; I’m just trying not to lose the stuff I already know.

Jeremy’s been out of town most of the past week and as usual, our diet suffered considerably while he was gone. No one starved, but I’m often reduced to having Honey Nut Cheerios for at least two of my meals each day and the kids are down to mac/cheese, ravioli, oatmeal and glasses of milk. Oh, throw a banana or two in there and maybe a bag of microwave popcorn and that’s what we’ve been eating for 3-4 days. I also have this terrible habit of leaving Edda in her stretchy pants (which were used as PJ) and leaving them on all day. I actually went to the park with the kids with Edda still in them. Not the best look ever.

I know I should make Edda the most fashionable one us all – but somehow on Saturday, I ran out of inspiration. I think I may have been in some stretchy pants myself. Oh well.

Vince’s hair is so long now, it’s hard to get a photo where you can see his eyes.

… having a friend to do armpit farts with.

Monday was Columbus Day, which is one of those federal holidays which kind of sneaks up on you. Both Jeremy and I had the day off, the kids had to go to school. Hooray for us! We spent the day running errands, of course. And the schools scheduled open houses for all the parents.

Today, the kids were out of school and we were both at work. I have no idea why the kids were out of school. Vince is on his last hour of being grounded. We are all going to be happy to play with pals again soon. Grounding is hard on Vince, but also hard on us with wails of “I’m so bored” and then the extra rummaging through my office supplies – lots of use of staples and tape for impromptu art projects.

I like buying stuff like this at yard sales.

Jeremy refused to participate in growing the magic rocks. He said that since I was an actual bench chemist (in a past life), this was my territory. 😛

I went to the Renaissance fair on Saturday. I have never been to one of these things before, it was fun and it would have been more fun if I didn’t spend 2 extra hours than I was planning to in the car (1 hour to park, 1 hour to leave the parking lot). These were my cohorts:

There were a lot of boobs on display. There was a lot of yummy carnival food:

And a demonstration of jousting, the official Maryland sport.

Vince is grounded this week. While the reason for his grounding is not blogging material, I can tell you what he won’t be doing this week. He won’t have any screen time (no youtube, no angry birds (which is great fun by the way), no netflix downloads, no wii). (God, do we really have that many ways to entertain ourselves?!? Crazy.) He won’t have any playdates – I’ve already had to cancel a cub scout outing, a sleepover and movie night at the school. He has an extra chore every day this week, today was sorting toys to give away to charity. We do not ground him very often, so we don’t have a set rules for what his punishment should be, but this seemed to fit his offense.

Actually, as we noticed today – without all the extra screen time, Vince has been drawing pictures, reading to Edda and being extra nice and helpful; maybe we should limit his computer time more frequently. He did complain that Edda got to watch TV and I said that Edda wasn’t grounded and he groused that Edda would probably never be grounded in her life. And I had to acknowledge that Edda would indeed probably never be grounded in her life, but that Vince probably had the better deal in general, with him, you know, being an able-bodied person.

Anyways, that’s what’s going on over here. Jeremy’s been filming himself for the past few weeks. Part of his job involves “media” and “outreach” which is not what he has a lot of training in. Ask him about statistical mechanics or excel spreadsheets and he’s all over it, ask him about how to be a talking head, and it’s a little bit harder. I’m hoping to link to a video soon, someday.

The 5th Annual Fairfax stroll-a-thon. This one was thrown together very quickly, we were all a little overwhelmed this year – but out of the 4 strolls that I’ve been to, this one was the most fun and the most relaxing. Our team in our trademark tie-died t-shirts.

Cupcakes:

Silent Auction:

The limbo:

Vince just loves the DJ they hire, he danced for 2 hours straight. Look at that hair!