Happy Veteran's Day!

The kids' school had a big Veteran's Day celebration on Friday.

It was cold (for Florida) at about 65 degrees, and the program was outside in the front of the school.

The Altamonte Springs Police Department Color Guard came to present the colors. A stilt-walker dressed as Uncle Sam came from EPCOT Center.

There were members from all branches dressed in uniform enjoying the production that the kids put on.

Megan (in glasses and pig-tails) held her part of the big flag the second and third graders created during their number.

A few community veterans spoke telling each of their stories. It was really great, and all the kids listened very intently.

Daniel with the Uncle Sam had pulled down over his eyes, listening to one of the speakers.

The AMERICA dancers.

Joshua listening with his class.

The area was packed and had such a sense of community.

Francis the bald eagle came out to visit with the students. Here he is bravely saying hello to the Kindergarten classes.

It was a really great program. The marching band, chorus and cheerleaders from Lake Brantley High School came to perform. As well as a fly-over from some military planes.

Joshua Breaks His Arm

I worked Saturday and Sunday of last weekend, and my assignment was incredibly challenging. While it is an amazing blessing to be able to help care for the tiniest patients in the hospital, it also extremely difficult some days. Sunday was one of those days. At around 6pm, I saw a text pop up on my phone from Keith telling me to call him right now. As I was putting the finishing touches on my charting for the day, I called Keith to hear that he's planning on loading up the kids and coming up to the hospital to have Joshua seen in the ER. It took a few minutes to sort things out, but I got some wise advice from some of the more experienced moms/nurses and called Keith back with a plan to go to Night Lite Pediatrics, a walk-in after hours clinic. By the time we had a plan, it was going to be about 20 minutes or so until I got home, so in the end, I ended up being the one to take Joshua up to the clinic.

So why this urgent care visit?

Joshua decided he was going to try to ride Grandma's beach bike, and when he started to topple over, the bike was too tall for him and he couldn't put his feet down, so right down he went. I came home and checked him out and was pleased with the ace wrap that Grandma had put on him. When I took the wrap off, he had some localized swelling accompanied by quite a bit of pain holding his arm up off the pillow. So off we went to the clinic.
While we waited in the exam room, we made up all sorts of silly ways that he could have hurt his arm, including being attacked by the scary looking zebra on the wall. Notice that right arm - he was fine with bending the wrist, but the arm itself was bothering him.

After a series of 3 xrays, and some tears with the karate chop view, the physician came in to reveal that he indeed has a fractured right radius. The medical assistant was fantastic and was teasing Joshua that he was going to have to give him a pink splint.

The next morning, we went to the pediatric orthopedist to have the arm properly casted.
I can't say enough great things about the doctor that saw Joshua on Monday morning. The entire office was so nice and we were in and out without feeling rushed.

The doctor showed Joshua his xrays and Joshua thought he had shattered his hand. :) Then after looking a little closer, he saw the fracture line. He picked out a blue cast, and will have to wear it for the next 28 days.

Joshua's cool short-arm cast. He can still write and use that had.

The ortho doc's office is in the medical plaza of the hospital, and so since we were in the area, we stopped by to see Grandma's office in the hospital and she gave Joshua a smiley face on his cast.

We also stopped by to see the lego creations in the gift shop. This creation is mine. The hospital is having a contest to win tickets to Legoland. I couldn't get any of my peers to enter the contest with me, so I entered all by myself. I was given a tote of legos and had to only use what was in that tote to create something based on the mission, vision or values of our hospital. The square thing is a crib with a mobile and a baby - since I work in the NICU. I had no idea the hospital was full of such creative people, there were lots of great submissions for the contest. I don't know when the final numbers will be tallied to see who has won the Legoland tickets.

Einstein Pumpkin Book Report

During the week of Halloween, Joshua's class had to turn in their fall book report. He had to read a biography, write a report and decorate a pumpkin to reflect the subject. Joshua chose to do his report on Albert Einstein.
Joshua wrote some equations and some hard math problems on the back of the pumpkin before putting on the messy hair.

He did a great job decorating his pumpkin. He earned a grade of an A on both the report and the pumpkin.
I couldn't resist adding this picture of Megan. Evidently, the cat and dog think my bed is their bed.

Happy Hallo-week!

This past week has been a blur of activity! Wednesday night was Adventurers at Forest Lake Church. The amazing mom that lead out in Daniel's group taught about the human body. Daniel is studying his shirt to give his "person" an Eager Beaver shirt, as well.

So sweet! The finished product says, "my body is a temple".

Moving on into homework time. We are still taking turns working with Megan. Keith has been doing math flashcards with her almost every night. She's showing huge improvements in math and in spelling.
Studying at the kitchen table. Grandma and Grandpa Holloway got a new dining room set and so we were lucky to get a larger table out of the deal. Our smaller kitchen table will go out in the garage for the kids to play on.

We kicked off Thursday night with a halloween-themed dinner. The kids started to make plans for Dress as Your Favorite Book Character day (the school's activity on Monday).

Sabbath morning found us with 2 sniffly kids and one with a horrific cough. So we opted to stay home from church and spend some time resting. Then we brought the kids to the park to fill up on Vitamin D and fresh air.

After the park, it was tub-time. Saturday night I put some glow sticks in the bathtub and let Megan have a special glowing bath followed with some cold medicine and she slept like a champ that night!

Sunday, I spent the day helping the boys clean their room. I put Joshua to work putting together spice racks from Ikea - they make awesome book shelves.

Up into the loft bed to hang the new shelf.

Daniel's finished shelf.

Joshua leveling his shelf.

The finished product!

That wasn't our only home improvement project. The rains pulled a gutter off the front of the house, and Keith had to go out to work on it.

Which brings us to Halloween day. While there are many different alternatives to trick-or-treating, we choose to visit our neighbors and socialize through the neighborhood. We've been committing ourselves to getting to know our neighbors better and have been spending time sitting around the firepit in the front yard at night.

A little pre-trick or treating dinner before Tinkerbelle goes to visit with Grandma and Grandpa.

Even Lilly gets into the spirit.

We visited a few of Grandma and Grandpa's neighbors to say hello, then we went around the corner to Keith's old neighborhood to visit some of the neighbors that watched Keith grow up. Finally, we hit up some of our neighbors that we are friends with. Overall, we probably visited with about a dozen families.

Keith stayed home and passed out peanut butter cups and glow bracelets.

It was a fun night.

Family Date Night - October Style!

We went out on a family date tonight. It's been a long time since we've gone out to dinner just the 5 of us and it was so nice to just be together. Every other week or so, we order pizza from a locally own shop, Proccolinos. It is authentic New York style pizza and everything is so fresh - it's amazing! With the weather cooling off, we decided that instead of ordering take-out pizza, we'd go down to Proccolinos and eat out on the big deck.

It was so nice. The weather was in the 70's, the sky was clear and the Italian music was fabulous. We seemed to have the whole porch to ourselves, so we were a little crazier than usual.


Our pizza was fantastic. The pizza maker came out to see us and ask how things were, and then the owner came out and chatted with us for a while. Then is was time to head over to the pumpkin patch to pick up pumpkins.

Joshua needs to do a biography book report using a pumpkin, and so he was in search for an Einstein-looking pumpkin. Megan needs to bring a small pumpkin into class and so we picked out one for her, too. Then we ended up with two large pumpkins for the house.

After loading up the wagon with our choices, we took some time to be silly!

It was fun! Then it was time to get everyone in bed for school in the morning.

Progress Reports!

The kids brought home progress reports from school last week. Joshua has all As and 1B - the B is in Science. I asked him why he thought his science grade was different than his other grades and he tells me that he might not be writing neat enough on his observation papers. I told him that it sounds like he knows what the problem is, so we'll see what things look like on the actual report card. Keith and I are both so proud of Joshua - those are great grades for starting a new school year at a new school with new friends and very new expectations. This will be our first year of the FCAT and the test preparation is a huge part of the classroom curriculum. I have a parent-teacher conference with his teacher next week.

Daniel brought home all Ss. He loves school. His teacher has a calendar that she sends home every day for parent's initials. If the face on the calendar is smiling, then Daniel had a good day, if it is a sad-face, then it means there was a discipline issue. So far, all happy faces! Shocking really, since he's such a little free-spirit!

Megan brought home 1 A (Science) 2 Bs (Math and Social Studies) and 2 Cs. Her Cs are in Reading and Language Arts. We can actually see the progression of her grades getting better as she's becoming more adjusted to her new glasses. A few weeks ago, the teacher decided to start printing out the slides from some of the classroom activities, and putting the slides on Megan's desk so that Megan won't have to look up at the screen - focus - read the words - look down at her paper - focus - write the words. Quite a bit was getting lost in translation. I was able to meet with Megan's teacher for a full hour on Monday to talk about some ways that I can build up her reading/writing skills. We are taking every opportunity we have to read/write around here. I've also pulled out some of the homeschooling materials that we've used in the past, and we are playing lots of games to help reinforce some basic skills.

I've inserted all of her spelling words into www.spellingcity.com and allow her to "play" that on the computer when she's done with her homework.

For all of the kids, the school focuses on answering questions both orally and written with complete sentences. So if the question is, "what did Paul eat for dinner last night?" the answer only gets half credit if the kids write or say, "pizza". The correct way to answer is, "Paul ate pizza for dinner last night." or "Last night, Paul ate pizza for dinner."

Megan uses her fingers for math still, and her teacher is trying to emphasize memorization of basic math facts. The second graders have these Math Minute sheets that they do - completing as many basic (1+2, 3+7, etc) math sums as possible in one minute. She's score in the lower third of her class with this. So tonight we made a math mobile to hang in her room and we'll update it every few days with more math facts as she continues to learn.
Monday there was no school for FCE. No school = no homework! There was zero humidity and the weather forcast has been calling for storms to come in tonight, so we knew this was the right time to get outside! The kids rode bikes with Daddy, while I went for a run. Then we all sat around the fire pit grilling hot dogs and making smores.