Who's Birthday is it?

Chuck and the kids had fun today with our webcam. Jared and Ruth wanted to look just like their dad for his birthday picture. We celebrated by opening presents, eating cake and homemade ice cream and playing Chuck's favorite game.

You know you are getting old when your favorite game is: "take a nap." (really, that's what he wanted to play - so we figured it was his birthday, so we left him alone - evidently this is a one player game).






Dinos!

The kids and I visited our local Dino museum, which also happens to be the largest dino museum in the USA (or so they say). It is a very nice museum and is usually $10.00 a person, but this month they were having $2 Tuesdays, and so we went. It was very crowded but we had a great time.


Back to School for Chaz and Kaitlin

The older kids went back to school this week.

Chaz now rides a school bus for the first time in his life. His bus comes and some unearthly early hour and lets him off at school 40 minutes early. The bright side is that Chaz has extra time to work on forgotten homework in the a.m. Chaz has already take his first test (on a summer reading book) and has his new (old) french horn to start practicing on again. On Friday Chaz went to his first ever football game with some friends. He had a great time and his team won.

We are amazed at how much money high school is costing! It cost us 75$ to get him registered, another $40 to rent his instrument, and a payment to his lunch account. Those fees we expected. What we didn't expect is that every day he came home to inform us of a new fee that he had to pay. $10 for Chemistry, $12 for a workbook, $20 for "band participation" and then another $5 for I don't know what. That isn't considering the optional fees - yearbook, PTA, etc... Wow! Forget collage, we will have to start a savings fund just to get our kids through high school.

Kaitlin stressed a little this week getting the hang of 7 classes and her first locker. She said that all her friends "freaked out" over the summer. I told her that it was that puberty thing, it wreaks havoc with everyone at this age.

I don't have first day pictures of the older kids because they go to school way to early for my mind to think of taking pictures. So you'll just have to imagine seeing pictures of them smiling, backpacks and school books in hand, in front of their new schools.

Skype

We've been on Skype a long time but I haven't used it much. A while ago I talked to my brother in TX using my webcam. Now that I know that I can do that I'm going to try logging onto Skype a lot more often. If you have a webcam you can sign up for Skype for free and then we can talk with you.