Life At The Circus

This weekend was our annual raking of the leaves, which is always followed by the annual Daddy tossing the kids high into the sky. And truthfully when I saw our annual raking of the leaves…. I mean Scott’s annual raking.  I occupied myself with indoor cleaning and only went out to snap some pictures of the fun at the end.   The kids LOVE when Daddy throws them high into the pile. Not sure how many more falls he’ll be able to toss them so high.  But those smiles seem to push him to try “just one more time.”   Even our dog Wendy got into the fun, much to the kids delight.  Sadly our oldest wasn’t here for the leaf fun as we camping with the scouts, but much to his delight, he also got to miss out on the raking.  

Last week was a busy week at our house.  Scott was on travel for three full days.  The girls had a big meet at their gym.  They had to score out of level 5 in order to be able to compete this year as level 6’s. Saturday the boys had a tournament.  It was the first one for our 5 year old.  Throw in the normal hustle and bustle of school and practices and scouts and you get the idea.  It was busy… in the midst of the busy my Dad called Wed afternoon and said he had been given three tickets to the Steelers game on Sunday.  He was offering two of us to join him.  Hmmmm….. can we tack on a 5 hour drive to PA and back that weekend?  The answer Scott gave me when I texted him as he was boarding his airplane late Wed night was, “You know we will find a way to make this work.” Oh how I love his willingness to embrace the crazy to make the memories!  Two years ago when we were given this opportunity, Scott and my oldest son joined my dad. ...

We went on a field trip today to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.   Man, I forgot how many cool exhibits it has.  We haven’t been for several years .  While we had seen some of these things before, it was so neat to see them again.  And we added new things to our experience this time around. We started the day by attending a class with some of our friends from our tutorial, which was  led by some museum workers.  Our oldest son got to go in their lab and examine and learn about bones.  Our girls attended a class on Egyptian artifacts, and while this was going on our youngest toured the mammal exhibit with dad.    Then we all joined up and visited The Butterfly Tunnel.  This was so so fun and brought back memories to me, of the time we went 6 years ago.  My how they have grown since that visit!   Next up was the mummies since that is what we are studying in history this quarter.  I was truly struck b...

This year we had another eclectic crew going door to door pedaling for candy.  We had Big Ben Roethlisberger.  Cleopatra Athena and a knight…. who put together his own costume with the help of his older sister, Athena, all with supplies gathered in our costume bin.  Things I loved were the fact that the boys costumes cost me nothing, as they gathered the supplies from around our house… and the girls costumes can be used again this spring for our history night at school, since we are studying ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome this year. We also had an eclectic group of pumpkins…. a butterfly, a gymnast, a dragon, and our 11 year old did his entirely on his own this year…. It was a fun and full day!