Things I don't want to forget

• I've talked a lot with Harper about how I don't want her to grow up.  I want her to stay this age forever.  Most times she just laughs and says she has to grow up.  One morning in the car she randomly says the following: "Mommy.  If you don't let me grow up then you won't have any more babies, but if you let me grow up then I can have a baby and then you would have more babies around."  Melt. My. Heart.  Then I of course threw in the obligatory "Yes, when you're grown up and married you can have babies."

• She has begun to logically reason with me and she's very good at it.  Two examples:

1.  She was riding her scooter around but it was really hot so she had taken off her helmet.  Then she decided to go careening down hill on the driveway.  Here was our conversation:
     Me: If you want to go down the driveway again, you have to put your helmet back on.
     Harper: You go get it for me.
     Me:  You're the one who wants to go down the driveway, so you go get it.
     Harper:  You're the one who wants me to wear my helmet, so you go get it.
Good one kid, good one.


2.  At night before bed, we always sing two songs.  One of her current favorites is "Down by the Bay."  She always likes to sing the "Have you ever seen a..." part, but she makes up crazy stuff.  One time she said "Have you ever seen a horse, wearing a voice."  I said, you can't wear a horse.  She said, "What about Ariel?  The sea witch wore her voice as a necklace."  Well played kid.

Fastest Texter in the West

Trying to blog more about teaching....

In an effort to get kids interested in learning math from the beginning of the year, we created a new problem where the kids had to deterring who the Fastest Texter in the West is.  (I teach at a school named West...thus this is very clever).

First we had the kids take out their phones and see how many characters they could text in one minute.  You should have seen the looks on their face when we asked them to text in class.  We had them hooked at that.  Then they had to plot their output on a graph and continue the graph with the assumption that they could maintain the same texting rate for up to ten minutes or whatever would fill the graph.  Then there some follow up questions where they had to make a table, and equation and answer some other things.

The second day, we had any student who thought they might be the fastest submit their completed work.  We copied all the tables, graphs and equations and cut them apart.  Then groups were given a set and they had to match the representations.  Then they had to order them from slowest to fastest textures and vote on who they thought was the fastest.

The conversations they had were great.  They were able to match things pretty well.  It helped that all the situations had zero for a starting point.  I liked how well they worked together, especially this early in the year.  It was a great way to start the discussion about constant rate and comparing rates using tables, graphs and equations.

One change I would make is next year I wouldn't have the input of 1 in the table.  It made it too easy for them to match the equation to the table.  I want them to have to think more in depth about rate.

And I just realized that I created the activity at work, and I'm blogging at home...I will have to link it later.

What activities have you used that are high interest and hook kids?

Two weekends ago Harper and I made the trip to Kansas City to visit my BFF Emily and her family.  We have always flown before but airline tickets were ri-donk-ulous.  Like $900 for the two of us.  So we loaded up the Subaru and set out for a good old American road trip.  Harper did awesome on the car drive.  I had a bunch of activities for her to do, and some movies of course.  I was surprised by how much time she spent just looking out the window.  The best tip I learned: get picture books on CD.  We had some and checked out a few more from the library.  She is able to follow along with the story and it was really easy for me to just pop in the cd's.

While there, we got to check off item number 5 on our bucket list: Go to a farm.

Feeding the baby cows

Tractor ride.  Too bad she's TERRIBLE at pedaling.

Wagon Ride

"Help!  Let me out of here!"

One day we took a trip downtown, where they have lots of amazing things to do.  While walking through Crown Center we happened upon someone dressed as Elsa.  There was like no line, and you just walked up and took your own pictures.  Considering the Frozen obsession around here, that was definitely the highlight of her day!

Snuggled up watching cartoons.

 On the way home, Harper asked if we could go up in the St. Louis Arch.  I had never been before, and what good is a road trip without a stop to see one of America's greats?

It was a great trip visiting with friends and cruising the countryside.  I am having such an amazing summer with this little girl.  I will be really sad going back to work this year.  Sadder than any year previous I think.  I'll just make sure to soak up as much time as I can.

Bucket List numbers 8 and 10

Harper is very timid and shy in new situations.  She's not the type to go up to kids at the playground and start chatting and playing with them, and she gets nervous trying new things.  So when we went to the Ohio State Fair last year and she jumped on all the rides without one bit of apprehension I was surprised.  She loves riding rides of all kinds.  This summer she decided she wanted to move up to something a little bigger so we took her down to King's Island for the day.

The kiddie part of the park is called Camp Snoopy.  It has tons of rides of all sizes and thrill levels.  We rode every single one, some more than once.  She had a blast.  We walked in right when the park opened and didn't leave until after the fireworks that night.  I can see many trips in our future when she's big enough to ride all the rides.

Item Number 10: Make fresh lemonade
This one was easy and a perfect thing to do with a friend during an afternoon playdate.

We're all set

This is hard work 

Yum!

We're Pregnant

With Watermelon babies....duh!

 So apparently the fertilization treatments I administered were successful and we have three watermelons on their way.  I'm super excited.

As you can see I've also made the move to vertical gardening.  My cucumbers and watermelons were just taking up too much room.  So I had Joe build be a couple of quick frames with some fencing stapled on and with some stakes I was able to train my vining fruits upward giving me a lot more room.

The only downfall is I worry about the watermelons falling off when they get too big.  Of course a solution exists, found using my #1 gardening friend, Google.  Watermelon hammocks!

What a great use for all those old nude hose I never wear.

I can't wait to sink my teeth into my juicy babies.

Watermelon Sex

You read that right...today I will be posting about watermelon sex.

The other night while watering the garden we discovered this little surprise.

I was excited.  Not only was it the cutest little watermelon ever, I was really looking forward to the big, juicy, yummy fruit I would be eating in a few weeks.

The next night I went out and discovered a black, rotten globe of disgustingness.

A quick visit to my friend Google pointed out the likely culprit of improper pollination.  Apparently the bees in my yard are not doing their job.

Solution: hand pollination.  That's right, this morning I picked a few of the male blossoms and rubbed their pollen-y middles over a few of my female blossoms so that they would be properly pollinated.  That's right, I preformed watermelon sex.

These things better be delicious with the extra care I had to give them.

Bucket List Number 1 and 11

Number 1: Go to the pool

This one was easy to check off.  We went and visited some friends who have a pool in their neighborhood and got some swim time in.  I really should make more of an effort to take her to the pool to help her get over her fear of water.  She just isn't that brave when it comes to getting in the water, especially when she can't touch the bottom.

Either way, we had fun.

Number 11: Bake something new

It is way too bad I didn't get pictures of this one.  We were at my mom's house for card club and we made a dessert pizza.  It was so delicious.  We rolled out one roll of sugar cookie dough into a round crust shape and baked it.  Once that was cool we spread the top with Nutella, strawberries, mini M&M's, butterscotch chips and almond slivers.  It was delicious and I can definitely see us making something similar again.

Bucket List Numbers 7 and 16

We took our first official family vacation to the beach a couple weeks ago.  We rented a house on the beach on Folly Beach which is near Charleston, SC.  My sister and her husband, and my aunt and uncle joined us for the week and we all had a blast.  Harper really lived it up on the beach collecting shells, building sand castles and "frolicking" in the waves.

Item Number 16: Go the the beach!

Item Number 7: Ride a boat - 

While in Charleston we decided to explore a little using the public transportation.  They have a free trolley that goes throughout the city and a water taxi that can be ridden across the Harbor.  We hopped on the water taxi and were treated to views of dolphins popping their fins out of the water, sea turtles and awesome closeups of the military vessels dry docked there.

We had a great time on the trip and we will definitely be taking another beach vacation soon.

Summer Bucket List

At the beginning of the month Harper came home from school talking about making a summer bucket list.  Of course I indulged.  Having things to do each day helps make me less of a crazy mom. Here are the items we came up with.

1. Go to the pool.
2. Go to the splash pad.
3. Play outside.
4. Go to a new park.
5. Go to a farm.
6. Have a picnic.
7. Ride a boat.
8. Go to King's Island.
9. Go to the fair.
10. Make fresh lemonade.
11. Bake something new.
12. Watch fireworks.
13. Go bowling.
14. Read 40 different books.
15. Fly a kite.
16. Go to the beach.
17. Go to a concert.
18. Paint a picture.
19. Go to a baseball game.

Most of these are designed to be fairly easy for us to complete, but there are a few I'm going to have to work for.  Going to a farm is going to take a little research.  I'm not sure what kind of concert I'm going to take her to.  I suppose the Picnic with the Pops counts, but we've done that a few times already so I want to try something new being a bucket list and all.  These should make for a fun summer.

The art of the selfie

Joe decided that teaching Harper what a selfie was would be a good way to spend a Sunday morning. Here are the results.

She needs a little work making sure to get her face in the photo more, and I think the next thing we need to work on his her duck face, but all in all she's well on her way to being a self-sufficient member of this social media world.

How does your garden grow?

Now that Spring has finally decided to show up we hit our backyard hard over the weekend.  We bought our house from a guy who lived there for two years and did nothing with the landscaping for the whole time he was there.  Needless to day it was completely overgrown.

We have three fantastic raised beds that needed cleaned out.  There were way overgrown raspberry plants that we dug up.  And theres a perfect little spot to grow herbs.  We had to pick up all the pavers and lay new stones and weed guard.  We planted lettuce, spinach, onions and carrots, but I'm pretty sure the squirrels dug some up already.  I'm not exactly sure who they sniff out those tiny little seeds, but they did.  I have zero experience with gardening, so I will take any advice to keep critters out.  Especially my cats who think the garden beds are really fancy litter boxes.

I also pulled out all the vinery that had completely overtaken the front yard.  All in all after one weekend of work, we had a lot of sore muscles and this giant pile of yard waste.

Living like the 1%

Last Friday I got the chance to watch a Columbus Blue Jackets game from the owners suite.  To say I was excited was a bit of an understatement.

We walked in to the amazing smells of our own chef cooking made to order fajitas.

During the first intermission, we were entertained by some Zoo folk who brought in a cheetah for us to hang out with.

The dessert cart was entirely too enticing, and I tried to be good.

Oh yeah, there was a free bar that I enjoyed as well.

While I was rubbing elbows with Jack Hannah, Joe and Harper were down with the common folk trying on jersey's that were too expensive. (Seriously, $85 for a kids jersey.  No Way!)

I could definitely get used to the life of a wealthy sports fan!

Is anybody there….

Well it's been a really long time since I've posted anything.  I was looking back though and realized this is like my baby book for Harper.  I've documented everything on here.  I don't want to lose those memories, so I'm going to try to be better.

Today Harper's fish died.  It was one of those beta fish that somehow managed to live two years even though I was terrible at cleaning it's little tank and remembering to feed it.  Part of me just wanted to flush the thing down the toilet figuring Harper probably wouldn't even notice.  But I knew this was my opportunity to talk with Harper in a not so scary way about death.  We just told her that Red was really old and had lived longer than little fish like him were supposed to.  Joe had the good idea of taking him to the river and saying goodbye to him there.  So we walked down to the path and said one nice thing each about Red and then put him in the river.

I tried to avoid saying Red was sick because I wasn't sure if she would think that if she or one of us got sick that we would die.  All in all, I really don't know how much she understood anyway.  But I figured it was a small chance to start talking about something really big.

I know that we will have many big talks in our future.  I just don't think I'm ready to have such a grown up little kid.  It's too bad we can't shelter them from scary things forever.  I'm glad we took even just the littlest bit of time to talk with her about death.  I hope that we won't have to talk about it again for a very long time.