Holiday Weekend

This weekend is H O T in our neck of the woods, and I am looking forward to joining the pool next week (as long as I can win the battle against the head cold that keeps threatening to overtake me--echinacea, fresh veggies, zinc, and lots of sleep are my weapons). 

Our children now have bikes!  And helmets! And may I just say that Annie, wearing a ladybag helmet, riding on her pink princess bike with the iridescent streamers, is THE cutest thing in the world.  We only have gravel on our lane and driveway, so the children are learning the way I did as a kid: the hard way.  Gravel is tricky! But they're doing great, and after dinner when it's not 3,000 degrees, I go out and help them ride.  (I hibernate during the afternoon hours.)

My husband has been diligently putting plants into the vegetable garden and covering the ground with straw.  In addition to lettuces and snow peas (which probably won't last too long if this heat wave continues), we now have peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers--and I can't remember what else.  The vegetable garden is his domain.  The flower beds are mine. 

And the big news is that Finn and I have finished our end-of-the-year standardized testing (required by our state). This miserable experience is particularly hard on the visual-spatial learner, and yesterday was rough.  But today we rallied and he did so well.  I realized that the huge math computation section is basically his worst nightmare.  And then when we got to math concepts and word problems?  He nailed it!  Even for the concepts that were above his grade level or he hadn't learned yet--many of them he was simply able to infer or figure out.  

I tried to make testing more palatable with offerings of chocolate, popcorn, and cookies between sections, and breaks for swinging on the swingset and dancing.  It helped, sort of.

My reward for finishing standardized testing?  

Takeout Thai food + sewing. Happy, happy day!