Happy Birthday, Ed!

Today is Ed's birthday. He isn't old.
Katie gave him candy. I gave him underwear and candy (and a subscription to the WSJ, but that wasn't wrapped). My parents gave him shirts, pants, dates, and baklava. He was very pleased.

Katie decorated the cake (except the writing. I did that. She could have done it, but she wanted to let me do something.)

Travis stood around looking cool. Katie and I just can't seem to get that right, so Travis has to be cool for all of us.

And then, because we love him (and because it was a gorgeous day) we left Ed to have a peaceful afternoon and went off to Stone Mountain with my parents.

 My dad showed us nature stuff, so it counted as school as well as phys. ed.
This is a trout lily.

This tree is eating a sign. Doesn't it look a bit like a goblin?

Maybe you had to be there.
And this is a rock.

We thought we'd go to the lower falls as well as the middle falls, but the stream was high and the stones (which apparently are supposed to serve as a bridge) were low, so we made do with just one falls.

 My dad saw a place where he thought trout might lurk.  And neither of the children fell in, which was nice.

And when we got home Ed was glad to see us and I made him a delicious early dinner, so as to allow him "room" for cake later tonight. Because we need his cake eaten before Katie's birthday on Sunday!

A Fine Day

Today was good. Really good. If they were all like this..... well, that sure would be nice, eh?

I spent my early morning entering assignments for the kids in HST, but I finished in time and the kids came down and ate their breakfasts without a fuss. And then we started school in our unusually neat (for us, you understand) school room.

That is my desk, and Travis's behind it, with hardly any clutter (relatively speaking).  Lately it has been buried under stacks of books and papers due to a lack of shelf space (or I suppose you might say, to a surplus of books, but I wouldn't), and yesterday I finally got a new shelf!  Isn't it spiffy? It is the one right by my chair, so that my most used stuff is easy to grab but Not stacked on my desk! Of course, the top of the shelf is covered in mouse traps, so as to discourage the cats, which does slightly diminish the elegance of the set-up, but you can't have everything.

In our newly orderly workspace, my kids did their assignments quickly and without complaint. It was miraculous! It is possible that my new bookshelf has magical powers, or aliens abducted my children and left well-behaved alien children in disguise, but whatever the reason, today was great!

Here are some of the some of the books we are reading this week...

Katie absolutely loves the Thomas Edison biography (not the suggested title, but the one I already owned) and also Around the World in 80 Days (abridged). Travis is especially happy with Otto Von Bismarck and also with Jim Murphy's The Great Fire. And I love Robert Browning, so we are all happy! (And I'm planning to read the Alexander Graham Bell biography myself, since I think it looks really interesting.). I meant to plug in a Louis Pasteur biography this week but I forgot.

I haven't actually checked either of the kids' Latin workbooks today, but I don't want to ruin my happy glow so am saving them for tomorrow morning. For tonight I am a happy, happy woman with perfect children!

Looked Like a Jelly Doughnut to Me

But it wasn't.

A jelly doughnut, that is. Our priest's wife taught Sunday school today. First she talked about Lent, which Ed and I mostly missed (the talk, not Lent) because we were in the kitchen setting up coffee stuff. By the time we got seated she had moved on to talking about Eugene Peterson's idea that images are important to help us grasp and focus on theological concepts. Okay. And I learned that The Message and The Living Bible are two different translations. Good to know. And then we got the the main thing, which was looking at a painting by Anneke Kaai from a book called In a Word, by Kaai and Eugene Peterson.

This is not the painting. This is another one from the book, and it is called Grace. The one we looked at is a big orange circle with a smaller orange circle in the middle and some yellow and black, and it is called Love.  Our class was supposed to look at the painting and talk about the feelings it gave us. I love our church*, and our priest's wife is a wonderful teacher and preacher (she happens to be a Methodist minister), but I am getting very tired of Sunday school classes in which all we do is talk about our feelings. The picture here, "Grace", is pretty, but I can't say I loved "Love."  Katie's class got out early so she sat with me and we snickered (quietly) over our art interpretation. I thought it looked like a peach, cut in half, and Katie thought it was a jelly doughnut, and we had some other ideas that seemed pretty hilarious to us, none of which made it onto the white board.

So we failed Sunday school, but we made an "A" on coffee hour!  My mom spent the past week baking and cooking up a storm, and her breakfast strata (eggs, Swiss cheese, mushrooms, bread, and I don't know what all else), bread pudding, cinnamon crisps, and blueberry crumble coffee cake were a great hit! We transported the food, set it out, cleaned up, and I washed the grapes. Very skillfully! And graciously accepted gushing compliments on my mother's cooking. So now we are off the hook for coffee hour for a few weeks and, I think, have pretty much compensated for our dismal lack of appreciation for modern art.

And we have flowers blooming in the yard (no thanks to me)! Yay!

*And I especially love our church since this year for Lent we are doing the Rite I form of the Eucharist. And today we sang the Trisagion and the Sanctus to the same music we used in Florida (otherwise known as The Right Music). The organist (who isn't really an Episcopalian) played with a bit more "vigor" than one have expected, but it was definitely an improvement!

In Which My Mom Joins the Chain Gang

Not really. Quite.
But...
This morning the kids and I were driving in to town to pick up my bifocals (which are absolutely Excellent, by the way!) and I slowed way down when we saw the signs and cones for road workers. Then I slowed down even more because the road workers were actually prisoners on trash duty (and there were lots of them and they were walking in the middle of the road. Not timid sorts of people.). There was a car pulled over on our side of the road, right across from the correctional facility van, and the kids both asked at the same time, "Isn't that Granny?"
And by golly it was Granny, chatting with the guard/van driver! I was a little concerned and pulled over just past her and called out asking if everything was okay. She said it was, got back in her car, and we both continued in to town. But the kids and I were very curious!

After I got home I called my parents' house, hoping to find out what Mom was up to. Only she wasn't home yet, so I told my dad about it, and then he was curious too!  A while later my mom stopped by (with sugar snap peas, because she is generous like that!) and so we got the story. Turns out that she's been distressed by the amount of trash by the roadsides, and when she saw this civic minded group (the van wasn't there when she first pulled over) she thought maybe she could join them! She asked if they were volunteers and they laughed! Of course, we had to tease her about what she would have to do to join this gang (I don't think my mom has ever had so much as a speeding ticket), but really I think that her eagerness to volunteer and make the world a better, cleaner place is wonderful. And I'll bet the guard is still chuckling!

And these pictures are from yesterday morning...

They don't begin to capture the lovely pinkness of the snow and the sparkle as the sun hit the icy branches, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  And the snow is pretty much all gone now, which is also just right!  Now we've had our snow and we can move right on to spring!

And this is one I took of the cats this afternoon.

I heard the clink of cups and turned around to see the cats playing with Katie's tea set!

Snow Day

We drove up to church this morning to find only the priest there. He told us church was cancelled (and the e-mail sent out around 8:20 am, after I checked) due to the weather. Since it was just drizzling down where we live and light flurries up the mountain, I was kind of annoyed, but we quickly resigned ourselves to a peaceful Sunday at home.
And by mid-afternoon it started doing this...

It was a nice day for reading, crafts,

and Latin quizzes!

(Don't let his frazzled expression fool you -- he actually spent most of his day messing around on the computer! But he has perfected his Tragic, Persecuted look and it would be a shame not to share.)

And eventually there was enough snow (barely!) for the kids to go out and play in it.

 Ed did not particularly want to go out, but Katie is very persuasive!

This is Travis's snow mage, with his faithful pig companion,

and Katie's Very Happy snow (and grass and mud) man. Doesn't he look sweet and trusting?

Saturday

Today was beautiful! Spring-like. After lunch we went with my parents over to Stone Mountain.
They met someone a few weeks ago who told them about a "stone house" off the trail, and they thought it was something we would enjoy seeing too. We did!

The rocks were enormous, and look as though they were cut and arranged.

After playing on the rocks, we went up to the summit and admired the view.

And then ice cream!

Now it is overcast and getting colder, but we had a grand day out!

World's Worst Mom

that's me.

My kids are not enthusiastic eaters of fruits and vegetables. That is putting it mildly. I've been trying to feed them properly since I got them (Their prenatal nutrition was excellent!), and they were okay with pureed bananas, but bananas were as far into the wonderful world of fruits and vegis as they would willingly venture.

Still, at dinner every night (okay, most nights) I require that they consume a serving of fruit or vegetable (both would be good, but I can only stand so much conflict. and I give them multi-vitamins.). Tonight Katie had a carrot. We were out of bananas, and Travis declined oranges, apples, and applesauce. Things were getting ugly. I told him to look in the pantry (thinking maybe he'd like canned peaches or pears). "I'll eat jam!" he said.
        "Jam isn't a fruit; it's a condiment."
        "It's grapes."
        "It's sugar!"
        "Grapes are the first ingredient -- look!"  He showed me the label. Grapes are the first ingredient -- right before the high fructose corn syrup.
        "Fine,"  I said. "Half a cup of jam and we'll call it a serving of fruit."

     He was surprised but since he was winning, cautiously pleased. I think he knew there was a catch of some sort.  So he measured out half a cup of jam.

(here he is noticing that jam is very sweet...)

 (but he is stubborn!)

He ate it. Every spoonful.

And he didn't throw up, which had been Ed's prediction.

He says he won't eat jam again (as a fruit), though, and later, when I told him I had thought he'd choose canned fruit, he said that of course he Would have if he'd seen any. So he did learn a lesson after all! (He learned that we keep the canned fruit on the lower right hand shelf of the pantry. And that jam Is a condiment, not a fruit.)