Stuffnstuff

School:

School started last week for Anders and Addie. Aani started kindergarten on Tuesday of this week. Ava  has cried and cried every day that Aani has left for school. "I go school too!" Super sad.

Anders' 4th grade teacher is very nice, but it's not the party-every-day that 3rd grade was. A lot more homework, a lot higher expectations. I'm fine with that, I just hope that they're able to mix some fun in there so school doesn't become a total drag. Quoth he, "School is so boring now." Fractions and decimals. Shudder.

Addie's teacher from first grade now teaches 2nd grade, and by some stroke of luck Addie got her again! Hoorah! Addie loves to read and talks all the time about  how much she loves to do math. "MORE MATH!", she says. Maybe she was switched at birth. Or, perhaps she got the very recessive math gene that neither Nils or I have ever had access to.

Aani's teacher is nice-ish. Not too sure about her yet, but Aani's excited to go to school every day and hasn't come home in tears or anything, so as long as teach is good with the kids, I don't care if she's a teensy bit awkward with adults. Heh-heh.

Summer:

The kids had a great time playing with friends, eating inordinate amounts of otter pops, playing in water, selling lemonade and cookies on the corner, watching Netflix. They also really enjoyed cleaning up the messes they made. "Thanks, mom! We love cleaning! You're the BEST!"

I made that last part up.

We had a family reunion in Heber which was lovely, then in late July/beginning of August our little fam rented a loft type house for the weekend in Smithfield. We went to Bear Lake and hung out in Logan for a few days; we swam, went to the li'l zoo, ate cupcakes, etc. Mmm, cupcakes.

I took the kids to Kennecott Copper Mine one day. That really is something you only need to do once in your life. I've done it twice now. Yup, it's a big hole. The kids liked it well enough, but they liked stopping at the gas station on the way home to get a donut even more.

Voles:

Our yard has been infested with voles. What is a vole, you say? It's like a big, stupid, ugly mouse that acts like a gopher by digging holes and tunnels in your grass and eating everything it possibly can. They also reproduce at an alarming rate and should be shown no mercy. Our back yard has been ravaged by them, in spite of Nils shooting them with a BB gun, wacking them with PVC pipes, trying to drown them out of their tunnels, etc. We were hesitant to use poison, since the poison will kill lots of things besides voles- like dogs, cats, neighbor kids, etc. Anyway, we have had to resort to it, so here's hoping the voles are rotting. Yay!

Memories:

So in trying to dig information out of my kids about how school was, etc., I was thinking about my elementary years, and have had some funny random memories pop up. Like the time I was in 3rd grade, and there was a girl in the school who all of a sudden had a new sister, but she wasn't really her sister... but you know how 3rd graders have a limited ability to explain things that are somewhat complex... I think she must have been a foster kid or something, because she wasn't around for that long. Anyhoo, we were at recess playing on the field, when this new sister grabbed me by the shirt and gathered it up in her fist so she could get in my face and said to me, "You wanna knuckle sandwich?" and I was like, "Um, no?" The thing was that I was like a foot taller than her and could have taken her to lunch and given her her own dang knuckle sandwich. I've often wondered what happened to that girl. I wish I could remember her name so I could Facebook stalk her. Knuckle sandwich, indeed.