John's homework

One of John's weekly assignments is spelling. He has ten words a week and he has a list of different activities to do with the words.
This week he took a written test via dry erase board, with Pa via Skype as the test administrator.
It was great!

 Christopher got into the act. He mostly drew "elephants."

Life is good

Here is a picture of John jumping off the climbing wall at the Children's Museum. We took several shots to get the best action.

 

Here are the boys having dinner/snack at a concert at the botanical garden.They have free concerts each Friday in September and October. 

On Friday and Saturday nights, we let the boys sleep in the same room. That way our early bird (Christopher) can get up without help getting out of the crib and and they go downstairs and gorge themselves on cartoons without our help. The parent elves leave accessible breakfast (cheerios, fruit, granola bars) on the kitchen table, and the boys are told to let us sleep and work out their problems together. Sometimes we get extra sleep, sometimes we don't. Usually one of us gets at least an extra hour...

Apple Festival

These pictures were from the Walhalla Apple Festival in September.
The upstate is great for small local festivals. You can count on lots of fair food, local vendors, live music, and traveling amusement park rides.

This one also had a 5K and Fun run. Tony was in Louisville for Dracula. I signed myself, John, and Christopher for the one-mile fun run. I had no idea how it would go, but I was hoping we could finish in under an hour. We did. It took about a half hour. It was a battle though. I bribed Christopher with M&Ms to wear the number. He was very excited as we lined up, but the second the race director shouted "Go!" he started crying. Then it was basically a sort of taffy pull: I would go a little ahead and then coax the kids to me, then a little further, for the entire loop. Not our best teamwork, but I was too ambitious. I was hoping John would come through for me... He was excited about the number at least...

Unfortunately, I misread the web site and we had to wait an hour between the time that we got there and the start of the one mile... that didn't help us either. Thank goodness for portable DVD players.

After we put the run behind us, we went to downtown Walhalla for the festival itself. And how can you have an apple festival without ice cream at 9:30 in the morning? The boys liked the swivel stools on the ice cream cart.

Christopher rode the "roller coaster" by himself. It was a caterpillar that went around a loop, complete with small tunnel. He held on like that the whole time.

John enjoyed the strawberry with another 6-year-old. I was just happy I didn't have to ride with either of them!

Then of course, apples!!!

However, the big score were the Lions Club mini-brooms. After we walked the length of the main street, we sat and they practiced light saber and ninja moves with the brooms for a good 45 minutes. And I do mean "good."

Then another break for apples.

They went through the 10 pounds of apples I bought in about a week and a half!

John waiting for Miss Kerri to drive him to school

"Manny" Pedi

Christopher loves toenail polish. He tried the nail polish also, but wanted it off after about 5 minutes.

Just the boys