Cute cartoon

Family Circus

Off-track fun!

Yes, I'm still trying to catch up on some events that happened back in October! Here are some pictures from a trip to Tracy Aviary and Hogle Zoo while the kids were off-track.

October 4th
My parents & sister met us at Tracy Aviary. We walked around a little, ate some sack lunches that we had brought and then saw the rest of the aviary.

This toucan loved posing for the cameras.

They have some coin operated machines there where you can put in a quarter and get a handful of food to feed the birds. The kids loved feeding them all and kept looking around on the ground for pieces that had been dropped along the path. In this picture Kitty is trying to throw food to the ducks because she was too short to reach over the railing.

These two pelicans kept dipping their beaks under the water and opening them like they were trying to get some food in the water (even though we couldn't see anything). It was neat to watch this because the skin under their lower beak would expand with the weight from the water (see the one on the right).

After the aviary I took the kids over to Liberty Park to play before we went home. In this picture Kitty is trying to climb the rock-climbing wall. Before we left she was able to do it without help.

October 11th
A week later we went to Hogle Zoo with my parents. It was beautiful weather and we saw a few animals that we haven't seen before there.

This is a rare white alligator that is on loan from the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, LA. It is not an albino, but is an alligator with a rare genetic mutation that causes white skin & blue eyes. There are only 10 known white alligators in the world. Apparently they can't survive in the wild because they can't hide or blend in to their surroundings and they sunburn easily.

This is the first time that I have ever seen penguins at this zoo. Every time we go they are not out so I was beginning to wonder if they really had any or not. When we first got to the penguin exhibit they were all in the water but then they quickly got out and started following one another to the other side of the enclosure. It was really cute watching them try and hop up and down the rocks along the edge.

It is very hard trying to get all 4 kids to look at the camera & smile at the same time (this is the closest I got this day).

This animal is called a bat-eared fox. There were 2 of them and Kitty loved watching them because they kept coming over to the window right where she was.

When we were getting ready to leave the zoo, we walked by the duck ponds and just as we were walking through there was a zoo worker who was feeding 2 loaves of bread to the birds. He handed out pieces to the kids and they had a blast breaking off pieces and feeding it to the ducks & swans.

Great editorial on parenting...

This was an editorial written in the opinion section of the paper about a week and a half ago. I thought that it was a great commentary on parenting today. If you don't want to read the whole thing, skim down to the bottom where I've highlighted my favorite part of the article...

Too many parents pushing for little Einsteins

By Betsy Hart
Scripps Howard News Service

I'm not sure when I lost the competitive-parent race. But make no mistake, I lost.
Or rather, decided early not to compete.
I'm not sure when it all began. But my kids didn't go to preschool because that seemed rather unnecessary to me, and I wanted them home for those years anyway.
Later my then-second-grade daughter, along with her classmates, was tested as a matter of routine for the "gifted" program, which began in third grade at her public school. I was barely aware of the testing, and only glanced at her raw number results before filing them away. So I was surprised when I received an e-mail from the teacher to all of the parents, literally begging them to stop barraging her with inquiries about the "cutoff" for the gifted program before she herself had the information.
Flash forward: When my family moved to the Chicago area from the D.C. suburbs, I couldn't have been happier to discover that here, children were not expected to be fully reading in kindergarten.
So, I was more than a little pleased to read "Rush, Little Baby: How the Push for Infant Academics May Actually be a Waste of Time — or Worse" by Neil Swidey of the Boston Globe. Featured in the recent Sunday Magazine, it was a great profile of parents who push their littlest kids to intellectual extremes. And for what?
He writes about mothers who show their 3-month-old reading and math flashcards every day. Several studies released in recent years show that such efforts have no positive effect on the child's cognitive development. But Swidey says that's just one part of the picture. Flashcards for babies "might actually be no more extreme than the increasing mania among professional parents to armor their youngsters with every educational enrichment program available — Baby Einstein DVDs at 3 months, junior Kumon tutoring at 2 1/2 years, SAT summer camps at 15 — all at the expense of old-fashioned but vitally important unstructured play."
Maybe I'm not on that track because of how my parents raised me. I'm the youngest of five. Yes, there were a few horseback-riding and ballet lessons. But that was about it.
Only, that wasn't "it." Our house was full of books, my mother read to me a lot and pursued an advanced degree and professional success, my father was busy supporting the family, and my parents' friends were interesting and our home was one where ideas were discussed and debated. But here's what I remember most: My parents and their friends didn't talk down to us. We kids had to get our act together and talk "up" to them.
My parents' world didn't revolve around me. Their egos weren't tied up in me. They wanted their children to become whole people of character. What a gift. What freedom, in the best sense, to develop all of me. And what a difference, I think, from many of today's parents who are on the competitive track.
Of course I want my own kids to do well in school. Not because it's a "ticket" to something, but because it's their calling to be the best students they can be. And yes, education is a gift.
So look, maybe I'm just an anti-snob snob or a rebel at heart. Maybe I know at some level that I couldn't successfully push my kids anyway. For me, just successfully chasing all four children into their pajamas at night can be a stretch.
And yes, I know that the "competitive parents" love their kids like crazy, too, and want the best for them.
But I also know I want so much more for my kids than a Baby Einstein DVD could give them, even if it worked. When it comes to my children, my ultimate goal for them is heaven, not Harvard. If they go to the latter on their way to heaven, that's great. But if I reverse that equation, I've failed them.
For this parent, that's the ultimate motivation.


Betsy Hart hosts the "It Takes a Parent" radio show on WYLL-AM 1160 in Chicago. Reach her through betsysblog.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.

Keep checking...

I have been trying to get a few posts up over the last couple of days but I am having numerous problems trying to get my pictures uploaded - so stay tuned in and know that I am working on it...

Halloween 2007

(Note: After trying for 3 days to upload all of these pictures, I have finally been successful! Talk about frustrating...)
This year was one of my easier years for Halloween costumes. Blondie wanted to be a butterfly at first and then changed her mind to a fairy princess but all it required was buying a pair of wings for her and then she wore her ballet leotard with it. Kitty was a ballerina which we already had a ballet leotard & tutu for and Luke was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luke's costume consisted of a light brown shirt with a belt tie that I made for his birthday party last year and the only thing I had to make was a dark brown overcoat with hood. I found some cheap fabric at Wal-Mart and was able to construct something without any type of pattern. It took me a couple of tries to get the hood looking the way I wanted but I think it ended up looking pretty good - and Luke loved it. I couldn't take a single picture of him without him posing in some type of fighting stance. M&M was my only difficult one because she couldn't decide what she wanted to be. Finally just 2 days before Halloween we were at the grocery store and they had a few costumes there that we looked at and we found one doctor costume that was just the right size and M&M ended up being that for Halloween.

We kept things pretty low key this year and only went to the school parade and then trick-or-treating that night in our neighborhood. Kitty unfortunately ended up being sick so she stayed home most of the evening with me. Kitty threw up at lunchtime and then seemed totally fine for a few hours. Late in the afternoon she ended up falling asleep on the couch (which is very unusual for her). When it was getting close to dinnertime I tried waking her up but she was so tired and not quite herself that I sent DH & the rest of the kids to a neighbors' house for hot dogs (an annual thing that the neighbors do) and told them to check in with us in a little bit to see how Kitty was. Well, when they came back she still didn't appear to be feeling too great so we decided to just leave her at home with me. She loved giving out candy to the trick-or-treaters (except for the bigger "kids") and got mad at me the few times when I didn't let her do it.

After Luke & Blondie got tired DH brought all the kids home & I decided to go out with Kitty to a few houses that they hadn't been to yet with M&M so she could get some candy and experience some trick-or-treating herself this year. I ended up carrying her most of the time and I would put her down when we got to the door of the house. She enjoyed herself & loves candy.

Luckily for us it was a fairly warm evening for Halloween in Utah (our warmest since having kids I think). The kids still wore jackets either over or under their costumes & most of them wore gloves/mittens to keep their hands warm. It also helped that we didn't change the clocks back until after Halloween this year. It was weird having it so light outside at 6:30 or 7 in the evening.

DH's work had a little trick-or-treat activity at their office again this year but it was on the afternoon of Halloween which made it impractical for us to drive all the way down there and then try and get back to our house for dinner & trick-or-treating, so we didn't go this year. (At left is a Halloween haunted house that M&M made at school.)

DH the plumber

This seems to be our year for water problems. On the Monday morning before Halloween I went downstairs to the basement to look in DH's office for something and noticed that the carpet was wet at the bottom of the stairs. The only place that the water could be coming from that I could think of was the storage room right next to the hallway where the water heater and furnace are. I quickly went in the room and noticed that there was water all around the water heater. I quickly called DH downstairs to take a look at it and we found that there was a pin-size hole in the pipe connector between the water intake and the water heater. Water was just shooting out to the side of the pipe. Luckily it was a small hole but we had no idea how long it had been leaking - probably for several days at least to get all of the floor wet and to leak under the wall to the carpet in the hallway. DH tried putting some tape over the hole and we mopped up what we could with towels. Then DH went to work & after I took a shower I turned the water off to the hot water heater so it would quit leaking. DH was able to stop at the store on his way home from work and bought some new connectors and a pipe wrench. I called my dad to see if he had any advice and he said that he would need to take a look at it first. So I invited my parents to come over and carve pumpkins with us and then DH & my dad could look at the water heater. As soon as DH got home from work he started on trying to fix the problem and my dad went down to offer any help he could. Luckily DH was able to replace both connectors without too much difficulty and now we have our hot water back! We are grateful that it ended up being a problem that wasn't too big and that DH was able to fix it himself. It took a couple of days to get the carpet dried out with a fan blowing on it but everything appears to be alright now. (Now he just needs to fix 2 of our toilets that have leaks...)