Molly and I got to perform a song together for the first time in October. We first performed this on the Fall Youth Retreat, then did it a second time at Children's Worship at church a week later (which is what you see here in the video). Make sure to watch the whole thing so you don't miss Molly's solo.
Traditionally in the Methodist church, 3rd graders are presented with Bibles. Leah was excited to get hers from Pastor Mandy.
In that same service, Leah also sang with her choir. It was a busy morning for her.
We were determined to get to Auburn this year, and homecoming ended up being the weekend we could make work. We flew in to Atlanta late Friday, spent the night in a hotel, rented a car, and drove to Auburn Saturday. We met up with Jen’s family and had a great time around town.
The Wesley Foundation hosted a homecoming brunch, so we got to hang out and see old friends. The kids especially enjoyed the ping pong tables. Then we got lunch, did a little shopping, and wandered around reminiscing.
Of course, part of homecoming weekend is the football game. Sadly, just before half time they suspended play due to lightning in the area. We left the stands and hung out nearby during the ensuing downpour for a while, but eventually decided to leave when it lightened up a bit. We ended up seeing the conclusion on TV as the kids got ready for bed.
We stayed the night (thanks Julia, Earl, and Daniel), then got up early to drive back to the Atlanta airport to fly home. Hurray for getting to Auburn!
We celebrated Leah's 9th birthday with a Double Dare party. Jen and Leah were in agreement that a non-messy version was the way to go! Jen did the planning of all the fun "Minute to Win It" type games, and I created a display for the game show. It’s a QLab workspace for showing the scoreboard, displaying the graphics just like the TV show, countdown timers, and sound effects.
After watching an episode of Double Dare so everyone knew how to play, Round 1 Opening Challenge was a Hula Hoop Relay between all three teams.
The teams then rotated answering trivia questions. Because there were three teams, we threw in an extra "triple dare." The kids loved playing all of the physical challenges. Below are a few that we played.
Into the Hanger: Players attempted to fly 2 paper airplanes into the hanger. (Jen made use of the strawberry we made for a bean bag toss for one of Leah's previous parties.)
Elephant Head: Players stretched panty hose with a tennis ball placed in the toe end over their heads. They then tried to swing the balls around on their heads until they knocked down a dozen coke cans in 45 seconds.
Snowball Shake Down: With a dab of Vaseline on their nose, and without using their hands, players must transfer 10 cotton balls from one end of the table to the other.
Cool Shot: Players used the squirt guns to try to knock all of the balls off of the tees.
Final team challenge: Hanky Panky. The first team to empty their box got an extra 200 points!
The game was tight, but the Caticorns managed to barely defeat The Savage Kittens in the end, and headed to the final Obstacle Course!
The final Obstacle Course consisted of stations in which a small orange flag needed to be found and passed along to their teammate. First up, Duck Hunt.
While the two remaining teams caused a pillow fight, a flag had to be carried down the stairs to a teammate.
Someone then had to pop the balloons to find a flag.
Opening all the Easter eggs to find the small flag was little challenging because Jen put so many eggs in the basket. Oops!
After the winning team ran the course, we reset the stations to allow the remaining teams a chance to run it. They were all so excited to run through the house!
Finally, it was time for cake and ice cream. Jen and Leah designed an ice cream slime cake. This was the only slime allowed at the party, and it was delicious!
We sang to the birthday girl.
When the house was again calm and quiet, Leah opened her gifts. Leah has wanted a giant cat (a Beanie Boo) since Molly got hers. So, Molly got her one for her birthday.
Leah's best friend introduced her to Lost Kitties.
Panda + Unicorn = Pandacorn slippers!
The toy that has made the largest impact has to be Winston, a Squishmallow. He seems to constantly be with Leah. So soft, so squishy…
Happy birthday Leah!
Molly has joined the Youth Orchestra at church. Here she is in her first performance with them from back in September.
I find myself needing to apologize for failing to post things here for so long. Other than 1 post about Halloween costumes (which were so awesome it had to be posted), I’ve failed to post things for this entire school year. So, I’m sorry about that.
It’s been a rough year so far (with lots of awesome stuff mixed in as well). In September, we found out Grams has ovarian cancer. I won’t go into details about it (though you can find them over at CaringBridge), but it’s been a lot to handle. G’Mom has also been battling ovarian cancer (details about that are at her CaringBridge). She’s been on a break from that battle, but the battle is now back on. So, we’re pretty fed up with ovarian cancer around here.
Don’t think that has slowed us down from all the other activities happening in our household. Things are busier than ever here - so busy, that between those activities and cancer-related activities, I haven’t had time to post anything. But now it is time to catch up. So, sit back and pretend it’s September, and I’ll walk you through some of the stuff that’s happened in our household since then. It may take a couple weeks, but it’ll be fun to relive the school year so far.
The girls decided to be Athena and Artemis for Halloween. Thanks to Rick Riordan/Percy Jackson for inspiring them to learn about Greek mythology.
Jen made the toga dresses, belts, bracers, bracelets, and quiver. She originally thought she might get away with a simple T-shirt toga, but then found this awesome post (thanks Make It & Love It). So, the costumes ended up much more extravagant than originally thought.
I was excited to make a bow for the first time for Molly. At first, I tried to make one using scrap pine from studs, ignoring the advice of the Internet that pine was not strong enough. And after a lot of work, it snapped. So this is actually the second bow I made, and it is made of oak. Some stain, a few coats of lacquer, and it looks quite nice.
The arrows are made from dowels spray painted gold with feathers glued on for fins. The tips are actually foam earplugs (thanks Jen for the idea).
I made Leah a spear (modeled after this statue of Athena) from a thick dowel and some scrap wood. This was much easier than Molly’s bow. It just took some work on the band saw, some sanding, some lacquer, and gold spray paint for the spear head.
It’s the day after Labor Day, which means it’s the first day of school! It’s a big day for our house, as Molly is now in middle school!!! We can no longer pretend that this isn’t happening. I guess we really had to stop pretending last week at 6th grade orientation.
Middle school means our mornings are now earlier, as middle school starts an hour earlier than elementary, and also requires a bus ride instead of walking around the block. So, there is no picture of her with her sister, as Leah is still asleep.
There were of course pictures with kids on the block.
And then waiting at the bus stop. We have so many kids around us that her bus stop is ridiculous. I counted 35 kids at the stop. It’s the first stop, and fills more than half the bus.
Then it was time to wake up Leah. She’s very excited about this start of 3rd grade.
One of the main reasons she is excited is that Madison is finally in her class.
We got a picture with some of the elementary kids on the block.
And of course with the wildcat.
And then she was off to class. Not only is Madison in her class, but lots of her other friends are too. And not only that, her teacher is Mr. Chen who Molly had and Leah has wanted ever since.
When Leah got home, she said it was the “best first day ever”!
After a day of touring around New York, we were ready for a day of tennis. I actually waited to buy tickets until the night before in our hotel room. This meant we could see who was playing when selecting our tickets, and that we could get a great last minute deal (our tickets were just $47 each for some good seats in Armstrong). We woke up, ate breakfast, checked on Leah’s teacher assignment, checked out of our hotel and drove over to Flushing Meadows. We got in the gates just before 11:00 when the action began.
We wanted to see some different things while at the US Open. Instead of starting with big names, we started with women’s doubles with some future stars. Whitney Osuigwe here recently won the Girls 18s Nationals (she’s 16), but we got to see her playing with the adults.
Caty McNally was the older member of her doubles team at 16 and a half.
Back in March, Leah moved up to a bigger racquet (a 25” Babolat Pure Drive), but I guess she’s ready to move up to something bigger. That racquet may be taller than she is. Molly said the giant ball was the same size as a basketball.
We got tickets to the brand new Armstrong Stadium. We made sure to get to our seats early so we didn’t miss any of Venus Williams’s match. It was very hot (95 degrees plus serious humidity), but I made sure our seats were in the shade at least. The seats on the other side in the sun were mostly empty as no one was willing to bake in them.
We got to see Venus Williams take on Camila Giorgi in a very tough second round match. Despite being almost as old as me, she survived the heat and humidity to win the match.
The new Armstrong stadium is really nice. I think I may keep trying to get tickets there. It still has big names like Ashe (maybe slightly smaller), but you get to be so much closer to the action without spending the big bucks. Just make sure to get seats in the shade. As you can see, the sunny seats are mostly empty because it was so hot.
When we walked in, we passed a kiosk called Melt selling fancy ice cream sandwiches. After the match, we headed straight for it to get a cool treat. Both the girls went for the “Lovelet” (red velvet with cream cheese ice cream). Jen and I split a Brambleberry (honeycomb cookies with blackberry and lavender ice cream). They were delicious and refreshing in that heat.
After the Venus Williams match, we watched a bit more women’s doubles. Here’s Taylor Townsend (who we’d see play for the Philadelphia Freedoms just a few weeks earlier).
The great part about the outer courts is you can get so close to the action. Leah and Molly were especially close as they tried to find some shade to hide in. They could have easily reached over the fence to hand a ball to the players (they didn’t, that’s frowned upon).
We headed back to our seats in Armstrong stadium to catch the last set of the Juan Martin del Potro match. American Denis Kudla tried his best, but del Potro was just too much for him.
Then we headed to the Food Village for some dinner (we’d had lunch there too) before hitting the road to drive home. We got home around 11:15, which was a vast improvement over 1:22am from two years ago.
When our school year shifted to starting after Labor Day, a new opportunity became available to us. This meant that the first week of the US Open now happened during summer vacation. Two years ago we went to the Open for one day during the very busy Labor Day weekend, but this change meant we could go during the less busy opening week. So, this year we decided to make the trip.
The girls really wanted to see a bit of New York as well, so we decided to make it a two day trip. We’d drive up, see a bit of New York on day one, then see some tennis and drive home on the second day. So, Tuesday we got up and drove straight to our hotel (the Belvedere, one block away from Times Square) to check in.
After we checked into our hotel, we first took the subway down to the World Trade Center. We wanted to go up high to see the city, and chose the new One World Observatory to do it. The building is pretty impressive from the outside.
They had tablets to rent that would tell you about what you were looking at. I wasn’t interested, but the girls really wanted to get them. I’m glad we did. I imagine the girls would have gotten bored quickly without them. With the tablets, they enjoyed learning all about New York and the landmarks we were looking at from above.
Here’s the view of Manhattan from the One World Observatory.
The girls wanted a picture of themselves with the Statue of Liberty in the background.
The place the girls were most excited to go was American Girl Place, the large American Girl store by Rockefeller Plaza. Molly has been saving gift cards for more than a year. We’d offered to take her to the Washington store, but she wanted to wait to go to the fancy New York store. The girls of course brought their dolls.
Molly used her gift cards to buy the Girl of the Year - Luciana. Leah also got an outfit and a pet (not pictured).
Our dinner plan was to go to Ellen’s Stardust Diner (where the wait staff are aspiring Broadway folks who sing while serving you). We got there and got in line (there’s often a line) for 10 minutes or so, when the staff came out and said they were not taking any more customers that day (no idea why). So, we found a pizza joint for some New York pizza. However, it had no seating, so we opted to take our pizza back to the hotel to eat.
After dinner we headed back out to M&M’s World. It’s a fun store with everything M&M you could imagine.
The coolest thing at M&M’s World is customizing your own M&M’s. You get to create 4 custom designs to put on your M&M’s. Ours were “Leah is cool”, “Molly is awesome”, a picture of a unicorn, and a picture of a microphone.
The next step was to fill a cup with M&M’s of the colors of your choosing. Ours were yellow, pink, teal, and purple.
You then pour those M&M’s into the printing machine.
And the printed M&M’s come out at the bottom. The M&M’s still have an M on one side. The machine prints your designs on the other side.
And here’s our finished product. It was fun to make, if a bit overprices for M&M’s (that cup cost $20).
Then we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep before a fun day of tennis. More on that to come.
