Random

A very rushed Halloween picture  - they were in no mood to pose long, trick or treating was waiting!

1. I have been too busy and it's not good for anyone. On the flip side, I've learned how much I can and cannot do so hopefully this won't happen again.

2. Halloween was awesome except this year, the kids are counting their candy. Every year up until now, we have kept their buckets on the counter and given them a few pieces each day and thrown a few away each night. About a week after Halloween we let them pick 2 or 3 last pieces and then toss the stash. This has worked well, as they haven't been eating that much candy but they also haven't been feeling deprived of it. This year though, they are keeping track so we need a new system. Dang it.

3. I'm in love with this blog , it takes me back to my feminist theorist days of college in a fun way, which I never thought was possible.

4. My kids have stopped eating food. Miss E went to school with yogurt and pirate booty in her lunch and that's it. I'm pretty sure Mr. T ate pretzels for dinner last night. Meanwhile, Peter and I had a delicious corn chowder which neither of them would touch.

5. Also, tears in the morning for the last few mornings. This morning I even pulled out the "some kids aren't lucky enough to have winter coats". Not my finest moment. Once I calmed down I explained that throwing a fit because our perfectly lovely and warm winter coat was "too puffy" was not in any way ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR.

6. Mr. T has been waking up screaming on and off for the last month because he thinks there's a monster in his closet. It's heartbreaking. Also a bit jarring to be woken up by screaming at 6:30 in the morning.

7. I can't wait for soccer to be over! This year has been a bit of a debacle for a variety of reasons and I am just so glad to be putting it behind us. Hopefully next year will be better.

8. Peter went to each kid's class yesterday with all his gear to do a fire safety talk for them. The kids were SO PROUD of him and Miss E told me that kids kept coming up to her all day asking her questions about him.

9. Speaking of Miss E, she's in a 1/2 blend class and is on the topish end of the 2nd grade curriculum. And she has another year in this class. Fortunately, once kids learn to read the stuff they can learn widens (umm.... the more stuff there is to learn? the depth of the academic field widens? you know what I mean) so we are going to be supplementing a lot.

10. Last night we finally showed the kids Star Wars and oh boy was there a lot to explain. Considering they have only seen animated no-fighting things so far, we spent most of the movie answering questions. About what war was and space travel and ships and who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and on and on... Miss E had a TON of questions about HOW the movie was made - are the actors really dead or just pretending? How did they film that scene? How did they do the space effects? Which kind of led me to believe that  a home-school type unit on movie production might be fun. We could write a movie, act it out and film it. Maybe in January.

11. I am continually amazed by how sweet, funny and awesome my kids are. I'm a really lucky mama.