Adventures at Grandma's

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Elsa volunteered to help me write this blog post. This is what she said: "We were going to the beach house, and Victoria was there, and we went on the beach and we found so many pretty shells. That's all I remember."

Just to be clear, we did not go to the beach house last week. :P I'm not sure if she's making up a story, telling me what she remembers from the last year, or what.

She did get to play with Victoria this week, though; Grandma Julie and Grandpa Craig were in town this weekend and invited all the cousins for a sleepover. Alison and Mike and Becky and Chauncey had Arby's for dinner and played Here to Slay at Becky's house while the kids were all at Grandma's. It was very fun! And when we went to pick up the kids, we sat and created characters for a The One Ring roleplaying game that Chauncey's going to GM for us.

Earlier this week, Rea got to go to Grandma's house an extra time for an adventure. She was signed up to take her official school RISE test online at 9am Monday, so Sunday night we spent an hour setting up a testing room for her according to the directions we'd been given (private room, nothing educational on the walls, nothing with writing on it, no screens beyond the one logged in to the private testing browser, etc). Monday at 8am Mike woke me up with the news that the internet was down. After a little confused flailing, we decided to send Mike and Rea to Grandma Julie's house to take her test there while Alison did school with the rest of the kids. Alison sent a text to Grandma and Grandpa after Mike and Rea had actually left (luckily they were OK with it), and Mike managed to get her stuff set up so that she was on time for the test. After all that, she did a great job on the test and said the writing part was actually kind of fun - she's really enjoyed her writing class this year and was excited to show it off.

Other than that, we had some lovely weather this week and spent lots of time outside. Alison also changed up our schedule yet again - she doesn't like to let any schedule go for more than 6-8 weeks without changes, but the last change didn't work very well at all, so she's mixing it up again early. We're going to start driving back over to our neighborhood or inviting people over here after school every day, so the kids have "play with friends" time every evening 3:30-6:00. That moves Team Clean and screen time to after dinner. Screen time right before bed does make it a little harder to get to sleep, but overall it seems to be working.

One afternoon we went to the Tyler library and picked up some seed from the "seed library" - plant the seeds, and when they flower and go to seed in the fall, bring some back for the library! It's a fun idea, and the kids were very excited to plant their flowers, aliums, and squash. They and the Waters are sharing our garden; hopefully they're more adept at keeping plants alive than our family has been in the past. :)

That's about it! The picture below is Gideon holding up a single centimeter cube and posing beside a ten-thousand-centimeter-cube construction we made for math time. He was very proud.


 

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