I went back to high school

...last night. It was curriculum night at Grant's high school. I had to follow his schedule to meet all the teachers. This high school is huge - about 3000 students. I went to a private, Catholic high school that had about 150 students TOTAL. So this reminded me more of college (yes, my college was bigger than 3000! GO K-State Wildcats!), than high school.

I was nervous. I didn't know my way around campus and was so anxious to find a map. Did Grant have a map the first day? Of course not! And he wasn't even nervous or anything, and he wasn't going to be embarrassed by being seen with a map!

As I walked up to the school there were student helpers handing out maps - YAY! I take one and I'm looking at it, going...huh? when I hear student helper #1 say to student helper #2 "wouldn't it be funny if someone asked us to, like, highlight the classrooms they need to go to?" I stopped in my tracks...and did a 180. "Yes, I would like you to highlight my classes!" Student helper #1 got all giggly and reached into her purse for a highlighter. OK! One less thing to figure out. It was hilarious seeing all these hundreds of parents walking around with their eyes glued to the map. And no one was the least bit embarrassed!

I got to my first class 1/2 hour early. (What a nerd!) As I was waiting for class, I decided to jot down my thoughts (yes, I brought a notebook (nerd!)). My first thought...I'm SO happy to be out of school! OK, so I've been out for something-ty years, but I was still glad it wasn't me having to really go to class. I could almost feel the jitters of the first day of school...clueless about your classes: where they were, were your friends in there, was the teacher going to be nice. So much to worry about. Once again...glad it's not me! :)

So, it lasted about 2 hours and this is what I learned:

1. Grant does a lot of walking up and down the stairs to get to his classes and has no time to go to the bathroom. (I really shouldn't have had all that water before I went.)


2. His drama teacher (his only "fluff" class) has 5 children and looks like Jack Black.


3. Grant has 3 classes where he is one of 2 or 3 freshmen and the rest are sophomores and juniors.
   
4. His spanish teacher talks like a Valley Girl. I mean, like, really, she does.


5. When you put a lit candle in a bowl of water and then put a beaker over it, it goes out, the water rises, and condensation forms on the inside of the beaker. (Yes, the biology teacher really did do an experiment for us.)


6. His algebra teacher was a cute little guy who stopped talking to say "Bless you" every time someone sneezed (3 times).


7. AND...I really, REALLY love my life, just as it is. Done with school, done with my first career, and now just being a mom and watching my boys go through some of the most wonderful times of their lives. (Was that too mushy? I'm usually not too mushy. ;) )

1st Day of School

Today started at 5am for me. Somehow, my alarm clock got set an hour ahead and I didn't realize it until I had already showered and woken up Grant, thinking it was 6:30, but instead it was 5:30. I rushed back upstairs and told Grant to go back to sleep. Oops!

The boys all got to school, with only a couple of glitches. Wyatt forgot his lunch (but I caught him at the bus stop, where he got thoroughly embarrassed, even though I tried to be discreet) and Grant text-messaged me, while I was at school with Kent and Kurt, wanting to know his locker combination. Oy. I am seriously all thumbs when it comes to text-messaging so by the time I had sent him "in folders" meaning it's in his folder inside his backpack, he had gotten it open.

So I went to the Freedom Lunch figuring we had pulled off the morning fairly successfully, and was drinking a margarita by 11am. It was only in conversation with the other 6th grade moms that I suddenly realized that I sent Wyatt to school without his schedule! Ack! Serious, serious mom-guilt overtook me (and was enhanced by the margarita) and I could not think of anything else after that. I knew he knew where his first 2 classes were and I just prayed that they got another schedule in first period. I worried about it all day and felt so bad for being so diligent with getting Grant's affairs in order that I skipped something important for Wyatt. That poor middle child! So I was practically pacing the floor waiting for him to get home from school, just waiting for him to say it was all my fault that he was humiliated today, that he had been wandering aimlessly, that he'd never forgive me...

A few minutes later, he walked through the door, all confident and acting mature. I said "Wyatt, I forgot to give you your schedule this morning!!!!!! What did you do? Did they give you another one? Did you find your classes? Did you get lost?????" And he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "No, I had my schedule memorized, so I didn't need it."

Oh.

So they all had great days, and are back in the swing of things already.

Unfortunately my photo of all 4 of them was blurry, so I don't have one to post. Think I could get them to dress in all the same clothes another day so I can re-create it?

and....

...whooooooooooooooooooooosh!...summer is over. Well, at least the part of summer where the boys are out of school. The summer heat will drag on here for at least another couple of months.

And I sit here tonight trying to figure out if I got everything done. Back to school is complicated this year. The boys are in 3 different schools. (That happened one other year, but one of the schools was pre-school, so that doesn't count. Heh.) So much to worry about!

Getting Grant ready for high school had a lot of facets. Academics was just one of them...testing into the gifted program, then choosing honors and gifted classes...could he succeed with such a tough schedule? He's already completed his first homework assignment for Honors English - had to read an assigned book over the summer and do hundreds of study questions. And that is just the beginning.

The logistics was another...getting books, being assigned a locker, the new clothes, backpack, supplies...who would he walk to school with? Can he find his way around this huge school (2nd or 3rd largest high school in Arizona, I'm told) and get to his classes tomorrow? I worry - will they give him a darn map? And more importantly...will he be brave enough to use it?

And then there is football...so much going on with that and it hasn't even really started. Football camp, sports physical, the right cleats (see below)...one memo says practice starts Monday, another says it starts Wednesday...take the white form and the blue card in to get a blue card and a yellow card back...because you cannot play without that yellow card! Ai, yi, yi. And I spent hours today scouring the football club website, trying to get acquainted with everything so that we, as parents, won't be such the neophytes either. (Because seriously, being naive is when you get stuck with the awful volunteer jobs.)

And then there is Wyatt...off to middle school tomorrow. He is in a "pod" with many of his friends. But even if he weren't, he would be fine. He's my social one and doesn't shy away from getting new friends. Wyatt's very excited about having a vast menu from which to choose for lunch. He has never eaten at school even once in his life! And he has to take the bus for the first time ever. No big deal, except, whoever he sits with the first day, he has to sit with the entire year. Choose wisely, son.

Kent and Kurt are the easy ones this year. The biggest crisis with them was trying to fit Kurt's pencils with the pencil top erasers on into his supply box. (Kent just opted to take his off and leave them in the box loose. After all, he says, the pencils are new and have perfectly good erasers on them.)

So, the clothes are chosen for tomorrow, the lunches are decided upon, and the schedule is mapped out. Hopefully we will have a successful morning and I'll be back with a post tomorrow with first-day-of-school photos.

Thank goodness it's not yet time to get rid of the flip-flops!

The-week-before-school-starts ramblings...

Yep, school starts NEXT week! August 7th. This summer has been so very busy, it's flown by!

I'm always excited when school starts. Not so much that the boys will be gone all day (OK, so I'll admit, it is *I* who plans the annual first day of school lunch with my group of friends and calls it the "Freedom Lunch"), but that it means we only have about 2 more months of hot weather! WooHoo. Well, if we are LUCKY it might start to cool down by October. At least at night. Maybe.

Anyway, the weekend was taken up by shoe shopping. A pair each for Kent and Kurt, 2 pairs for Wyatt (one to keep in his locker for PE). And then there are "the shoes" that we ordered for Grant. They came on Friday. OK, they really aren't shoes, they are cleats for football. These are cleats that are only available at one store on the Internet because Grant had to have them in orange and white. And he loves them so much he didn't even roll his eyes when I said I wanted to photograph them before he got them dirty. I guess they are kind of cool.

Today was all about doctor appointments. Four of them. The big boys each got 2 shots, but the little boys escaped unscathed. Shots are no big deal for Wyatt normally since he gets allergy shots twice a week. But the tetanus shot is kind of painful and they are both complaining of sore arms tonight.

Tetanus shots always remind me of the time that my sister stepped on a nail and we had to all go to the doctor to get one. I think I was probably about 4 years old and for many years thought stepping on a nail was contagious, when in reality it was just an excuse to get us all vaccinated. Anyway, I am the youngest of 5 children and I was the only one who had to get the shot in the cheeky rear area (if you KWIM). My siblings all got them in the arms. That night my leg was so sore from the shot in my behind that I could barely walk. Yet even though it was just my siblings' arms that were sore, they made me wait on them like a slave all night! I remember all 4 of them sitting on the fireplace hearth, saying "Mary, get me a glass of water, I can't lift my arm." and "Go get me that book, my arm hurts too much." And I would hobble around and do their bidding. How mean is that? And where were my parents while this was going on anyway??? ;)

The rest of the week will entail getting schedules and finding out which teachers everyone got. Like every year, I'm crossing my fingers, and praying they all get good ones. We've been very lucky through the years and have had some great teachers, so hoping our luck holds out.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Back from the beach...

Had a great time in San Diego.

Bad news...turns out both of my lenses didn't work for my new Rebel, so I got very few good photos. Thank goodness I took my point-n-shoot camera along!

Some highlights...

We all enjoyed boogie-boarding. We toured the WWII Midway Aircraft Carrier at Seaport Village. The USS Reagan had just returned from Iraq and was across the bay from us. So cool to see that! We also went to SeaWorld, which Kent and Kurt definitely loved.










Glad to be home; glad to have carpet under our feet; glad to have air conditioning; glad to have a comfy sofa to sprawl on; and DH is definitely glad to have a nice TV to watch. Miss the bike rides; miss the cool weather; miss the ocean; and wish I had gone boogie-boarding more than one day.

A beach, a bike and a bell

Soon we will leave for a trip to the beach. Can you believe we have never been as a family before? You see, most of our vacations are spent visiting family in other states or going to Disneyland for a couple of days. But this year we decided to rent a house on the beach for a week. We are very excited!

In our living room we've been gathering stuff to take: boogie boards, beach chairs, sand toys, fans, and other beach paraphernalia. We are also taking our bikes. Now, my bike is the perfect beach bike: a cruiser with pedal brakes. I've had it longer than I've been married (which BTW, will be 16 years tomorrow) as DH and I bought used bikes for each other one Christmas when we were dating. However, my bike doesn't have a bell or a basket and my friends, who are beach aficionados, say both of those are a must for riding on the boardwalk and making a trip to the market. When I told DH I must have a bell, he started laughing profusely. "You are not getting a bell for your bike! That's embarrassing!" But, of course, since it made perfectly practical sense to me to have a bell on my bike (so you could signal to people on the boardwalk that you were coming up behind them and they needed to get out of the way), his ridiculing made me all the more determined to get one.

As luck (I thought) would have it we have a bike shop just down the street, so I went over there the next day. At the front of the store, they had the most beautiful pink cruiser bike with a basket and bell - I fell in love! Until, I saw the price...$320?? Uh, I think I love my $50 used 20 year old bike more. So I scour the shop for a bell. No bell. I even ask "Do you have bells like on that bike over there?" as I pointed to the lovely pink cruiser. "Oh, no, no bells, except in the kid's section." Erg...so I hustle over to Target and into the bike aisle. Bells, bells...how hard is it to find a bell for a bike? Finally, I find one. A Hello Kitty one. Complete with handle tassels. Oh wait, there's also a Disney Princess and a Power Ranger one. No others. So I pick up the Power Ranger one (force of habit to buy the boy one) and headed out. But then, I stop. Wait, this is for MY bike, so I stride right back and get...Hello Kitty. When I get home, DH thinks I'm completely insane! "You are not putting that on your bike!" Oh yeah...watch me. :P

You see, I am too old and have given birth too many times to be embarrassed about much of anything. A Hello Kitty bell? " "Pshaw!" I say bravely.

But wait...then my friend tells me that she is sure she saw bells at the bike shop down the street. The same bike shop with the pink cruiser bike. Small black non-kitty bells. So we head back over there the next day and she walks right up to them. (Very informed employees they have there, huh?) So I stare down at this black bell. It's small, it's chic, it will be barely noticeable on my bike, and just gives one "ping!" when struck. Definitely sophisticated...for a bike bell. So I sigh...and buy it. I tried to be brave, I really did...but instead, I said Goodbye Kitty.

Home Movies

I was really trying to keep this thing updated, but then I went and got visitors...my sister and my niece (who is moving to Los Angeles...YAY! someone close!) and we are just having a wonderful time.

Anyway, tonight my sister and I watched old home movies of our family. I've had them here, in my fire-proof safe, for quite a while because I am planning on getting them put on DVD. But they are so out of order and mismarked, we needed to go through them. It's not unusual for the boxes to have more than one date or notation on them, so it gets very confusing. (Side-note: I've never minded the mismarked boxes. There was a certain charm and excitement to not knowing what you would actually see until you turned on the projector.) I don't think I've watched these movies for 20 years or so and my sister and I decided we must have watched the same ones over and over because we saw several we had never seen before.

This time, however, I was able to watch through a scrapbooker's eyes, or, if you will, an historian's eyes. While many of the movies were from "events" like Christmas and birthdays, I was also watching for the "details"...like when I caught my dad in the background nuzzling my cheek when I was a baby (I was such a daddy's girl), or the old slide in the yard, that my mom still has 50 years later, or even what the ceiling looked like on the old porch before we remodeled the house. There were many exclamations from us..."There's that sofa that is now in the basement." or "Why did Mother always have to fix my hair that way?" or "Gosh, Mom looked great even when running after 5 kids!"

We laughed at the interaction of all of us siblings and ooh and awed over ourselves as babies...me hollering to my boys, in the other room, to come watch me at my first birthday, or hunting Easter eggs, or playing with a kitten before I could walk. The vacations are there...my dad holding the hands of my brothers and sisters as he walked them into the waves of the ocean for the first time in their lives, and the time we visited relatives in Kansas...I didn't even know we had a movie of the aunt who raised my dad after he was orphaned. She died before I was 1 year old, so what a treasure to see her holding me.

Not all of these things are present in my current memory and not all of these things are immortalized in photographs. But they exist in these movies...thank goodness. And thank goodness for the technology to get this additional documentation of our history into a safe and lasting (for now) format. I can't wait to finish watching the rest of them tomorrow night!

Father's Day

As everyone knows, Father's Day is Sunday. This will be a very different Father's Day for me. It's the first one without my dad. I'm not even sure how I will feel on Sunday. Right now I'm just remembering last Father's Day. You see, my dad was already in a nursing home and not doing very well. My mom had brought him home for a few hours so he could spend the day with family celebrating him. Only, I didn't know that and no one called me. When I called my mom that night and found out that he had been home, but no one let me know, I was heartbroken. I didn't get to tell him Happy Father's Day. Not that he would have understood what I was saying, but I still wanted to say it.

I know my dad is in a better place now, but I'm still dreading Sunday. I will try to make it all about my husband, who is a terrific dad and deserves a day all about him. But my heart will be heavy. My sister is coming to visit tomorrow...I suppose we can remember Dad together.

Just wanted to post a tribute to my dad...a layout I did last year, right after Father's Day...my favorite photo of the 2 of us, when I was about 3 or 4.

End of School Update

OK, so school has been out for 2 weeks...and summer school is already in session, but I'm going to update anyway... ;)

Last week of school brought the 1st grade picnic with Kent and Kurt. We lucked out because instead of it being insanely hot, it was wildy windy. Then came the 5th grade party, held at a local amusement-type park. It was nice to be able to stay for the whole day with Wyatt.

That week was also Wyatt's baseball tournament. I was lucky and for once had the camera in the right place at the right time. Wyatt was playing 2nd base and a line drive was hit to him. He caught it about 4 inches off the ground for an out. I caught that moment in a photo - the ball is in his glove. Can't wait to scrap this one! Grant then graduated from 8th grade. Middle school was awesome for him - straight A's and he is going into high school with credits for 3 classes. We are so proud!

We ended the school year with a neighborhood pool party which has been our tradition for the past 6 years.
Now, summer school is in session. Grant is taking high school PE so he doesn't have to take it during the school year. Five hours of PE 4 days a week for 4 weeks! Wyatt is taking 4 fun classes like archery, law & criminal order, aviation, and computer web design. That leaves Kent and Kurt at home with me in the mornings. Reminds me of before they went to school and I'm enjoying the alone time with them immensely. The rest of our days are taken up by friends galore. So far, a fun, but very busy summer!

Another Scraproom Photo

Finally, I finished organizing my scraproom.  Well, at least for now...it's always a work-in-progress for me.  But I did get everything up off the floor and cleaned up and put somewhere.  I put just a few more photos in my photo album.  Maybe now I can actually be creative!