August?!?!?! Already!?!??!!

I may have hit upon a theme for this poor neglected blog.

Last week the Mountain Man took a staycation. We went rock climbing twice, went to a baby shower in Berea, went to see Ice Age 3 (though not in 3D because our movie theatre doesn't have that capability - we wanted to see UP, but we waited too long and it was gone), went to the Explorium in Lexington, had friends over, and got several projects done around the house. Not as many as we hoped, but more than I expected.

Here are the kids in the Explorium. It's a very cool hands-on children's museum.


My shoes fell apart on the hike out on Sunday after climbing. I guess that should be expected given that I've had them since 1986. I'm going to glue them and hope that works. They're Vasque after all, not some cheap Walmart brand. Not that I'm opposed to Walmart brands. I have those, too.
The Mountain Man mulched the giant stick pile that's been collecting for a year and a half, and chopped into firewood an entire truckload of logs he got from a friend who is building a house. The next day the tree man came and cut down 4 dead trees. Suddenly we have a new giant stick pile and an entire truckload of logs to chop into firewood. He said to just call him Sisyphus. (And I know you won't believe me but I spelled that right on the first try.)

I finished the guest room shades, which have been hanging there useless for 2 years. It was too cool to go swimming (I know, it's JULY but you wouldn't know it from the weather). I finished a cross-stitched baby bib for the baby shower approximately 8 minutes before we had to leave for it. I would show you a picture of it, but I forgot to take one. Hopefully in a few months I can take a picture of the baby wearing it.

And we've been getting ready for school starting. Yesterday was a back-to-school bash, which was basically finding out what teacher the Queen will have, getting some fun bags of goodies from various local places, free eye exams and physicals for those who needed them (we didn't). They let DeBoy have some goodies as well. They both got jump ropes and frisbees (which we played with in the park before we went home), and some candy, school supplies from the library (fun pencils, crayons and colored pencils, erasers, etc.), and the library also put out a whole table of old books for free. We got one on the solar system that the Queen LOVES. We found out how to bring her to school and how to pick her up (you'd think that would be something you'd just automatically know, but every school does it differently, depending on their setup). Lunch is $1.50, and they can bill us if she suddenly decides she hates what's in her lunchbox.

I found it highly entertaining that the people with the fruit rollup candy (and the frisbees) were NEXT to the people with the healthy eating display that showed how much sugar is in different foods.

We also went to the store last week and bought back-to-school items. (DeBoy got some as well, because he's quite devastated that he can't go to school with his sister - lightup Spiderman shoes make everything better.)

We got a backpack.
And a lunchbox.
And shoes. (She refused to model them, but DeBoy was quite agreeable.)
And a thermos.


"But wait," you say.

Yes, it's Tinkerbell. Only because no princess thermos was available. Now I ask you, how am I supposed to tolerate a thermos with the made-up word "Flitterific" on it? Yes, I know I make up words all the time. Hopefully they're not that stupid. If they are please tell me. Seriously.

And we bought them bikes a few weeks ago.
DeBoy spies his new bike.


You guessed it.

Princesses.

Shoot me.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, August 5) is the First Day of School. The Queen is beside herself and can't wait to go. Her backpack is packed with her school supplies, she has ordered her lunch and picked out her clothes.

Me? Not so much.

I have no memory of my first day of kindergarten. Of course, it was a bit different. I walked to the church within sight of our house, and I was only there for 3 hours. No backpacks, no supplies, no lunchbox. Mom says my brother sat in our front window the entire 3 hours waiting for me to come home. The entire first week. Then he got over it, having realized that my room and all my things were suddenly available for an uninterrupted period of time every day.

I do remember the first day of first grade. The day after Labor Day, 1968. Again we walked to school, it was about 2 blocks from our house, but there were lots of other kids with us, and the crossing guard at the only street we had to cross was a good friend of our family.

It was the same school my mother had attended. She says I loved school back then. I think I did. I don't remember actively hating it until 5th grade when I started at the private Christian prison camp school. My 3rd grade teacher was kind of mean, but looking back I'm pretty sure she was ready to retire and was pretty much done with kids. That was also the year they started allowing girls to wear pants to school (but they had to be nice pant suits (my Mom made me really spiffy bright pink pants with a vest that were both trimmed with some kind of decorated ribbon and a white blouse under it) and the first day all the girls showed up in pants Mrs. Sherrod twisted up her face and looked at us as if we had brought in something obscene), so I'm pretty sure that didn't help her disposition any.

We had metal lunchboxes with the thermoses that shattered if you looked at them funny. (Eventually Mom quit letting us carry lunchboxes because we kept bringing them home full of caterpillars.) There was a cloakroom with hooks for our coats (which in Nashville we didn't need for awhile) and cubbies for our lunchboxes. We had our own little bathroom in our room with one commode and sink. At the front of the room was a blackboard, which I mostly couldn't see for a few weeks until my mother realized I needed glasses.

Sometime during the morning of that first day, the boy in front of me threw up on his desk (the wooden desks with the attached seat and made like a box to keep your stuff in) because he was so nervous. I have never done barf well, and I had trouble keeping my own breakfast down after I saw that. His name was Jack.

Remember those old readers that had Dick and Jane and Spot? "Run, Spot, Run!"
Our reading books were all about Jack and Janet. You can imagine what that caused. I can't remember the dog's name.

We had recess every day. Our playground was in two sections. One had 3 basketball courts - asphalt. The other section was filled with pea gravel and had those big metal monkey bars, a couple of concrete culverts for tunnels, very tall swings, a very tall metal slide, a set of uneven bars and probably a couple of other things I can't recall now. In the four years I attended that school I don't remember anybody doing anything worse than getting a knee or elbow scraped up. Of course, that playground now would be condemned as a deathtrap.

Being first graders we were too short for basketball so we played that evil mutation of baseball and soccer known as kickball. Remember those ugly red dimpled rubber balls? I was always taller than most of the other kids (until about 9th grade) and was terribly uncoordinated. Even 41 years ago, playing sports was very competitive. After the first couple of days, I got picked last. Eventually I stopped playing organized games unless forced to by some evil teacher. I would climb to the top of the monkey bars and try to see my house. I did a lot of jump-roping. I was good at that for some reason. (I did play volleyball in high school, but I have trouble with depth perception. My serve was great, but I never could judge where the ball was if it came back over.)

The Queen's experience is going to be quite different. The school is 30 minutes from our house (everything is 30 minutes from our house). Even in kindergarten she starts at 8 and goes until 3. Her playground equipment is molded plastic on a field of shredded tires. Her classroom has a dry-erase board. And computers. The kids sit around tables in those little tiny kid-sized chairs of blue and yellow and red.

COMPUTERS.

We had fat pencils and those newsprint pads with the solid lines and dotted lines to help you learn to write uppercase and lowercase letters. I kept those fat pencils and a 6-inch ruler in one of those cigar boxes with a school bus design on it. We kept the boxes and the pads inside our desks. No one bothered anyone else's stuff, because it all looked the same.

Computers. I got my first Texas Instruments calculator in my senior year of high school. It cost $30. I used it in trigonometry for the sine and cosine functions. We weren't allowed it during regular college algebra. We learned how to spell things with them. I took Basic and COBOL in college. I used my first PC in college 1983, my first word processor in my job in 1988. The friends we took climbing on Sunday have older kids with their own Nintendo DSes, which they graciously shared with my kids. Who could operate them. Even though they CAN'T READ.

Several of her friends from dance class are attending kindergarten at the same school, but I neglected to see if any of them are in her class. We'll find out tomorrow.

Today we are going to the library. I was going to take them swimming also but it's raining.

I am so not ready for this.