Every week at the boys school, they highlight a different life skill. Mr Hayes, our awesome principal, speaks at the assembly every morning, and hands out awards to recognize students, and talks about life skill. This weeks' life skill is "integrity".
We went to see the Disney movie "Earth" last night.
Before that, the boys had a session at "the little gym". When we went
to see "Earth", Eli hadn't quite finished his homework. When we got
home, it was 9pm.
So, Eli got up before I did this morning (this isn't unusual; he likes
to get up a little early and play video games on the Wii) and
completely on his own, got out his homework and finished it (two pages
of math). I hadn't told him to do this - to be honest, I was figuring
"Earth" was a good excuse to miss some homework...
I told him he should be very proud and that he had great integrity.
Today it was in the mid 90s in San Jose. I got home from work feeling pretty tired, and Joann was recovering from a nasty headache after being out in the sun. Neither one of us felt like cooking dinner. She suggested (perhaps jokingly) that we have ice cream. Sure, I said.
So we dished up some "50/50" (orange sherbet and vanilla) ice cream and called the kids to the dining room. Ben got there first: "They're not kidding, Eli! We really are having ice cream for dinner". Eli: "Yay!" (claps hands).
Today I went to a conference for Salesforce.com (we're using that at work) and there were a few surprising speakers at the keynote. One of them was John Gage, the guy who started "Net Day" in 1995, a project to wire schools for the internet. At the Salesforce conference he said he's starting a new project - he wants to get a ton of engineers to volunteer their time to go back to the schools, but this time with a goal of helping them become more energy efficient. I'm gonna sign up. And evangelize. Awesome.
Today I talked to Causecast.org - they are interested in syndicated volunteer opportuntiies (yay! a good connection!) and I also recently dug out USAService.org's feed (you can get it by manually editing the URL) and added it to Eventfeed. Very cool.
I've been reading more and more in the news about yesterday being a day of service, and a surge of patriotism across America and a continued call for Americans everywhere to get involved in their community and their country.
And I continue to think that Americans who want to answer the call will ask, "where do I go? what can I do?" And the answers are spread across hundreds of websites... so a part of the big answer, is for websites to share that information with each other, so people can spend their time helping, not searching hundreds of websites.
Eventfeed.org isn't website - it's an idea. It's a proposal and a project. An initiative for greater communication and accessibility. If every website that published events marked them up with a little special markup, then pretty soon you could Google for charitable events in your area (as well as other kinds of events).
I was looking at some site statistics, and saw that 9 people googled me in the last month. Me, personally, not my websites. (Okay, six of them could have been googling for some other "Aerik" but three of them googled "Aerik Sylvan".)
That gives me kind of a wierd and interesting feeling... Not sure quite what I think of that.
It's been kind of rainy here the last couple of days, and at the assembly this morning, the school principal asked the kids to stay out of the puddles at recess pointing out that if they got wet, then they'd be sitting in cold wet clothes in class.
Contrast then, the warning of the principal with the story I got from Ben. He asked me if he could wear his clothes to bed, and not change into pajamas (he was wearing sweat pants) because they were still clean. So I asked him when he'd changed. He became quite anmated and told me that he'd changed when he got home from school because his clothes had gotten wet on of the times he was jumping over a puddle at school, and how much fun jumping over the puddle at been, and how sometimes he slid on the wet ground before and/or after he was running up to jump over the puddle. All this re-enacted in our kitchen and dining room in both slow motion and at nearly full speed.
I could only smile and laugh out loud and how much fun it had been. Apparently the wet clothes had been more than worth it. Good for him.
Last night Percival apparently climbed into Eli's bed. Eli says he tried to get him out, but was too tired to make a big deal of it. Personally, I'm pretty sure what actually happened is that Eli called him into bed...
So tonight Eli asked if Percival could sleep in his bed. Up to now, the rule has always been no dogs in kids beds (a long time ago, before kids, we let Ruby into our bed, but she usually left and slept on the couch anyway). So, we're not sure about letting the dogs up into the kids' beds, and said no for now.
A little later I went in to check on some laundry and just about tripped over something. Eli had made a bed for Ruby and Percival (out of the two thick comforters) and was laying on the floor with them, only having the somewhat thin blanket for himself. And he was so crowded his knees are doubled up against his bed.
So, he found the loophole in the rule and took the opportunity to use it to cuddle the dogs. A kid after my own heart.
I've always been grateful to be an American. After 9/11 I felt patriotism in that I was connected to the rest of the country in my mourning and anger. But I've never really experience pride in my country.
But today, reading the news of record voter turnouts and the history making decision we collectively made, for the first time in my lifetime, I felt truly proud of my country.
This country, the America of November 4th 2008, the country that voted this man president, this is the country that is moving forwards. This is the country that aided its allies in World War II. This is the country of hope, the land of opportunity, the home of the free, and this is the country I am proud to be a citizen of.
A friend of ours, a little girl, was Darth Vader for Halloween. She told her dad she wanted one of those Darth Vader voice changer things, and that she wanted to say, "I find your lack of candy disturbing."
We spent a big part of yesterday working around the house. Eli and Ben and I spent a lot of time organizing the playroom, then working in the yard, and finally I went out back to put up some rope lights around the patio cover. Eli offered to help me with the lights, and wanted to go up the ladder. I let him go up the ladder, and he helped put up some little clamps to hold the rope lights. At one point he stopped and thanked me for letting him help, and he said it made him feel (and you could see him grasping for a description) good to do something. I think he was enjoying the sense of productivity and belonging. I need to try to find more opportunities to work on stuff with him. Though I already know he's not too fond of helping clean up after the dogs and put away dishes...
I've surfed more in the last year than in whole rest of my life before that. I went twice this week (which I don't expect to keep up, but there was a good swell, low tide in the later afternoon, and the weather was beautiful - clear and in the the 70's).
Surfing is apparently one of those things that gets funner and funner the better you get at it. Yes, "funner". "More fun" is just to formal sounding for surfing. Joann said our friend Jen, who died last year of breast cancer, once gave her a quite a bad time for saying "funner". Jen, when she was sick and we were all confident she was going to get better, had asked me to teach her to surf some time. I'm sorry I won't get a chance to do that. I think she would have thought it was funner than a lot of other things too.
My birthday was Monday (I turned 39) and as usual, what I really wanted to do was spend the day at the beach, doing all kinds of fun beachy things, with my family. Since the kids have school on Monday, I had this crazy idea that I could stitch together one perfect day from two or three days at the beach. So, Saturday (while Joann was visiting her cousin) I took the kids to Manresa State Beach. It was a little cool, and a little windy, but pretty okay all in all. And we had a great time.
Over the summer I got the boys each a short sleeve wetsuit, which we put to good use with it getting cooler. The tide was low, and the swell almost non-existant, so there were lots of little 1-2 foot waves rolling in - plenty to be fun for kids, but nothing big enough to be intimidating. And since we were at Manresa at low tide, you could walk out 20-30 yards and still only be in knee-high water (the slope of the beach there is very shallow, unlike a lot of other beaches around here, and so it's great for kids). These factors together let the boys feel a little brave, and they both tried riding a could of little waves on my boogie board, and had a great time.
(To be continued... roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over a fire, watching the sunset playing frisbee, buying a Jawa costume the next day, and going back to the beach for more boogie boarding on Monday)
The boys often lay in bed and talk for awhile (too long) when they go to bed. Sometimes they're playing, just imaging stuff and telling each other stories, etc. Tonight they're talking about whether they believe in aliens and God.
The boys love Legos, so I subscribed them to the Legos club, which means they get a little magazine/catalog in the mail. One came, and they went all through it showing me all the stuff they like (pretty much everything).
One of the things was a "knights and trolls" chess set. Ben like this (they both play chess a little). A little later he tells me, "I saw a chess set in the Legos magazine and I was thinking I could make one." So I say, "Yeah, sure you can do that! Great idea." and offer to help him.
So yesterday I dug out a bunch of little squares for the board while he made "Lord of the Rings" (we just got the cartoon from the library and Eli and Ben both like it a lot) themed guys. Ben didn't have quite enough guys for all the chess pieces, so Eli lent him his. And we played chess with Legos guys. Way cool.
On the other hand, recently Ben also got quite frustrated because Eli "just wanted to build stuff" and "that's boring". I think the was on the 4th of July, which we spent at the beach. I'm farly certain it had to do with building sandcastles and Ben wanting to have a battle.
The 4th of July was great. The weather was nice (little windy, but not bad) and we played at the beach all day. The boys even did some body surfing. We stayed until dark and watched fireworks - predominantly ones shot from the beach by locals. There were an amazing amount of fireworks being shot off the beaches, in spite of signs warning of one thousand dollar fines and a fairly impressive presence of park rangers, private security, county sheriffs, and even some firefighters. (I'm not kidding.) And we were at a relatively less crowded beach a little ways down the coast (though it was still the most people I've ever seen at that beach). The evening was beautiful, with clear skies, a crescent moon, and an orange sunset fading into a purple night sky. And then the fireworks, while we ate BBQ hamburgers.
Ben Riding his bicycle (well) for the first time (on July 1):
And Eli is getting quite good and pretty confident by now. Only thing was, he tried to zoom past Ben on the track at the school where we were riding, just as Ben was getting kinda wobbly and they had a pretty good crash. We've got it on video. Maybe I'll post it later.
