Grade 5, Week 1

Last week Mikey started the 5th Grade. This year he's going to the school in our neighborhood, Walt Disney Elementary. (I've never been in a school before where black & white pictures of Disneyland from to 50s were a key part of the décor!) Cathy has been really anxious about his first time in public school (Mikey's been in Christian school and home school up until now), but Mikey said his first week at Disney was AWESOME! His teacher, Mrs. Sears, is big on reading, so she actually gave him a Roald Dahl book on registration/meet-the-teacher day so he could get started reading it right away. He loved the book! He tore through it as soon as he got home. He even got a 100% on his first homework assignment in "reading and listening!" He's pretty excited about starting computer class next week, too!

And... Mikey's going to be learning to play trumpet this year! We've already rented him his horn, and I showed him what I could remember about how to hold it, how to play it, that sort of thing. He got some books about trumpet from the library, and I printed him a fingering chart of notes and of a C scale so he could play around with that. I showed him a squinchy tone and then a nicer tone (I never really played trumpet on a regular basis, so my tone was still a LITTLE squinchy, but the point was to show the contrast). Unfortunately, at the moment he still generally sounds a little bit like the baby duck in the classic Tom & Jerry cartoons, but that will change quickly when band class starts. On the way home from renting the instrument, I was like, "Mikey, you'll need to go in your room and close the door to practice." Cathy was like, "I don't mind if he practices in the living room!" When we got home, Mikey took out the trumpet in the living room, and within 30 seconds he had traumatized the dog, terrified his sister, and changed Cathy's mind about where he would practice. :)

So so far, Mikey seems to really be enjoying his new school. He's looking forward to his second week. It's going to be a great year!

Jellystone Park

"I forgot the camera."

Those are the words I said to Cathy yesterday as we left the city limits of Tulsa, and that's why you won't see pictures of us with John & Sheri at Jellystone Park Camp in Eufaula, Oklahoma. But I'm not sure we would have gotten that many pictures anyway... we spent most of the day in the water, and our little snapshot camera is most definitely not waterproof!

We didn't go to camp... you can pick up a day pass for ten bucks apiece and use the facilities for the whole day without spending a night. John & Sheri had discovered the place somehow, and we had a GREAT time with them. Mikey and Hannah loved the pool (Hannah was wearing a floating suit, so she even got to go in the "deep end"... a whopping five feet!), and after we had splashed around there for a while (and got to dance the Macarena and the chicken dance and eat free ice cream... POOL PARTY!!!), we went on down to the lake swimming area, where the water gets a little deeper and where they have paddle boats, kayaks, a huge inflatable water slide and a smaller plastic slide, and a trampoline right out there in the lake. Awesome! Mikey and Sheri snagged a paddle boat while John and I swam out to the water slide, and they promptly ran over a life jacket which was floating in the water (presumably whoever had been in the jacket was on the shore somewhere and it blew out into the lake... I hope!) and so it was almost impossible to paddle the thing. Crazy! Hannah wasn't liking the muddy water, so she and Cathy went back to the pool. John and I went down the water slide, forgetting that unless you want muddy water up your sinuses, you should hold your nose when you go down a monster slide into the lake!

So anyway, we joined Mikey and Sheri on the paddle boat and managed to get back to shore. Sheri joined Cathy at the pool while Mikey snagged a kayak. Mikey and John and I went out to the trampoline; we discovered that a trampoline on water is a weird thing. The water absorbs some of the bounce, so it's a lot harder to jump. So we didn't jump for very long!

We joined the girls back at the pool and splashed a little longer, then we dried off and took a break to go across the street to Watts' Barbecue, a restaurant which is apparently somewhat legendary and which is owned by the family of former U.S. Representative J. C. Watts. It was good stuff! Afterward we went back to the campground and tried out the mini-golf course, but it was really hot and except for Mikey, who finished the whole course without us, our hears weren't particularly in it... the grown-ups and Hannah quit halfway through. :)

They have tent sites and cabins out there, and it would be a GREAT place to camp out! We may yet do that sometime, but the day pass was a great, inexpensive day with family and friends. Despite using waterproof sunscreen, each of us wound up with varying levels of sunburn... but we all had a great time!

Jasmine Moran Children's Museum

Last Saturday we took a day trip to Seminole, Oklahoma to visit the Jasmine Moran Children's Museum. We had a great time, as you can see from these pictures:

     
     
     

Usually I try to give a synopsis of what all went on in these blog posts, but in this case, the pictures are so central to the story that I sort of blogged in the individual photo descriptions. The real blog entry lives almost entirely on Flickr! You really should go there and take a look at each picture individually... it's easy on Flickr to enter a photo set and click "Next" on each page and go all the way through it. This is one case where the official Web site doesn't do the real place justice.

Click this picture of the museum's welcome sign to see all of the pictures and read the photo captions to see all the things we did:

Happy Birthday, Kevin!

Today Kevin turns 37! In honor of this momentous occasion, here are a couple of shots of him from our fishing trip with a couple of the kids a few months ago. You can check out all of the pictures of that event, as always, on Flickr, at this link.

Here's the MONSTER fish that our birthday boy pulled in that day! Think of the fish he can catch now that he's a BIG boy!!!



(p.s. Sorry, kevin... I'll try and hold the camera EVEN CLOSER to the fish next time!)