Misc. Happenings

Sandra had a field trip to the bowling alley. I got to be driver/chaperone. They picked me because I have a large car. It was fun to watch her with the other kids. She had the third highest score of her class.

Cammie recently registered for Kindergarten. It was a happy and sad day. Happy because she is excited and ready to be taking this huge step in life. Sad because she is my baby and she is growing up. It is almost enough to make we want another baby, but not quite.

Mindy had her friends birthday party. She went to Libby Lu to have makeovers done with her two best friends and her sisters.

Travis has been providing us with expensive slave labor for the last few weeks. This has been for the purpose of buying an Ipod. Kyle also bought himself one. Now they are motivated by the desire to be able to buy music. Travis is also working to buy Brawl.

We have been going through appliance melt down the last few months. It started with our dishwasher, which we thought we had fixed with the help of a great friend. A few months later our vacuum decided to finally gather its last piece of dust. The dishwasher then decided to develop another problem and not heat, so its gone. The pilot light on the water heater decided not to stay lit, so we forked out money to have it repaired. Three days later as we were getting ready to leave for church, we discovered that it had decided to start leaking water through the wall and all over the garage floor. Thanks once again to our great friend we were able to replace it for no labor cost (except for a pizza dinner for his whole family). We then discovered that our dryer had broken. After working with our friend several times to fix appliances, he has gained the skills needed to start tackling some on his own. He was able to fix the dryer all by himself.

Random Tidbits

Cammie had an evaluation for speech therapy at Loma Vista last week. She tends to leave off beginning sounds on words and had troubles with her blends. We are not really worried about this as the boys had the same problem and self-corrected in kindergarten. But hey, why not spend some time getting it checked out. It turns out she is pretty much age appropriate, with a few problems, but probably not worth trying to actively correct at this time. They will re-evaluate her in 4 or 5 months and see how she is progressing. One interesting issue did come up. When she tries to make the "c", "k", or "t" sounds at beginning of words, she has a back of the tongue clicking sound that precedes them. Apparently this is a trait of the Khoisan (clicking) languages of South Africa, it is very hard and rare for Caucasians to be able to make this noise. Now we have the dilemma of knowing that she may have a special ability to learn a rare language. Should we pursue this? Maybe she is supposed to serve a mission to South Africa, being able to take the Gospel out into the wilds, and we would be remiss not to help her develop her language skills. But would it make her a freaky girl here in America so speak this weird language? Would it mess up her English to try to teach her this? And where would we find someone to help teach her?

In the last two weeks Sandra has had three teeth fall out, for a total of 5 missing. It makes for a cute smile. And a hard time eating apples and carrots. This morning she informed me that another one is loose. I wonder if it will come out before these other ones start growing in.

Cammie went to a party at a gymnastics studio. She had lots of fun playing in the foam pit. This thing is harder to move in than a ball pit. I jumped in and got stuck. The foam grabs onto you and keeps you from moving. I wonder how they control the kids in classes that are actually supposed to be learning. What would a teacher do when a kid refuses to get out. Kids can move around much easier. The kid has a huge advantage, it would be hard to get a hold of one and pull him out. I want to go have an adult party here. It would be lots of fun, if they just let use all the equipment any way we wanted.

Thursday Andrew and I went to yoga. When we came out of the gym and went to get in the car, we noticed these dents on the top of the car over the door. They were not there when we went in. So much for the peaceful calming effect of yoga. What happened? Why would someone bang up a car in a parking lot? They are hard to see in the picture, but it is weird. There were also some weird marks on the window. Our current theory is that some people got in a fight right next to our car, and it took the damage. It is a mystery we will probably never have answered.

Finally just to annoy Kyle, I have to add a picture of him. He was being a not nice boy, so I threatened him with a picture of him being taken and posted on the blog. This is actually one of the better pictures. Kyle be warned, next time I will make it the most embarrassing weird picture of you I take.

Kyle hates to have his picture on here. He is constantly threatening to sue me for posting about him. I just have to make sure he never figures out the password to the blog.