or they don’t make them to last when 2 people are trying to pull them out of each other’s hands. I got home from a GS parent meeting last night to find Grace’s glasses broken in two, again. I’m sure the Penney lady is going to be like “What do you do with your glasses?” We JUST replaced them earlier this month due to Hannah’s repeated grabbing of them till they broke. Now I have to go again and hope I luck out and she has the Dora glasses in stock. Then another co-pay and we’ll be back in business. I’m waiting till Grace see the doc again in Feb. before I order a back-up pair, just in case the lens prescription changes.

I swear I don’t know why pulling those glasses off Grace’s face interest Hannah so much. But she got the message it was wrong. This morning when she woke up I took the glasses and showed them to her and asked, “Did you break sissy’s glasses?” Hannah immediately started crying and covered her face with her hands; yeah she knew what she was doing.

So among my other things to do today I now have to add going to J.C. Penney’s to get new glasses…..ugh!

Here’s Bethany at the Jr. bee. You have to ‘bee’ 4th grade or more to ‘bee’ in the “real” bee. Okay, I’ll stop!

Bethany was in a row of 12 kids and was out on round 3, 6th person out, after missing the word ‘away’. What!? Well she was nervous and excited, I told her to say the word before she spelled it, so she did the first 2 times. But, on this word she opened her mouth and said “Oh!….w…a..y” which counted as wrong, since it starts WIth an A, not an Oh!

Oh well, better luck next time. Hmm…next year Grace will be in the Jr. bee too, that could be problematic.
Here’s Hannah licking her bottle

My new van

And a bunny that was in the backyard

of Me!
I saw this on another site and thought it would be fun.

A. Available or Single? Married.
B. Best friend? Now, if I picked 1 the others would be jealous!
C. Cake or pie? Cake.
D. Drink of choice? Cherry vanilla Coke.
E. Essential item? BP pills.
F. Favorite color? Green.
G. Gummi bears or worms? Worms, there’s more of ‘em.
H. Hometown? Pasadena and Spring, TX.
I. Indulgence? Eating Reese’s and not sharing.
J. January or February? January.
K. Kids and names? Joel - firtsborn male child and heir to the Carberry throne, Bethany - first born girl, Grace - second born girl, Hannah - apparently the last born girl-child.
L. Life incomplete without? Jesus.
M. Marriage date? May 30, 1992.
N. Number of Siblings? 1 sister, 2 brothers.
O. Oranges or Apples? Seedless oranges.
P. Phobias/fears? Dying and leaving my children behind.
Q. Favorite Quotation? In this world everything changes except good deeds and bad deeds; these follow you as the shadow follows the body. Unknown
R. Reason to smile? A messy house (I’m needed.)
S. Season? Winter.
T. Tag three people: Don’t do that.
U. Unknown fact about me: I like to watch the Rifleman. and try to guess the actors before I see their names (Sammy Davis Jr. was just on!)
V. Vegetable you hate: Mushrooms (are they a vegetable or a fungus?)
W. Worst habit? Picking my cuticles.
X. X-rays I’ve had: Dental, toe, foot, chest, neck and back.
Y. Your favorite food? Chocolate (yes, that is food.)
Z. Zodiac? Aries, a stubborn ram, hmmm………

Went to presentation club today. Joel spoke about 15th century weapons and answered a few questions afterwards. Bethany pretended to be Sacagawea telling her life story. Here’s her indian pottery art and her map of Sacagawea’s travel:

Grace read 3 sentences from her book and showed her number caterpillar:

Other kids talked about money, numbers, rats, a trip to Grandma’s house, sugar gliders, Charlotte’s web, a story about a horse; that’s all I can remember right now (it was speakers choice for the topic.)

The bus/train/bus ride there was great, we hardly waited at all at any stop. Here’s the Orchard station they have silver birds every few feet on the fence.

Here’s Joel and Hannah waiting for the train ride home.

Before the shuttle to the mall came the kids played in the snow next to the giant plow, appropriate.

We ate at the mall and then caught the bus home. Next month the topic is science. Bethany has already picked flowers as a topic, Joel said he might do cats or video games and Grace hasn’t decided yet.

Let’s see…….Joel had a major history test from Lincoln to Wilson, from emancipation to flappers and WWI and he made a 96% on it. He also had a major grammar test from transitive verbs, predicate nominatives, sentences, fragments, adverbs, pronouns, antecedents, and such; he made a 91% on it. He finished the short version of the Jungle book and did multi-step word problems in math (100%.) He finished his presentation for tomorrow, Weapons of the 1400’s and vacuumed 2 floors and emptied the dishwasher for me.

Bethany finished her Sacagawea project with a map and some art. She did some math and picked up the house for me.

Grace will read some of her book for tomorrow, so she worked on that. Hannah worked on not sleeping the entire day.

I took Grace to the eye doc to check out her right eye that she said was hurting after the accident. Everything’s fine, in fact her vision has improved since the last visit. Here’s the covered bridge they moved from somewhere and put up across the street from the doc’s.

Here’s goofy Grace.

Here’s Hannah with a mouth as blue as her eyes!

And here’s my snow melting….oh, noooooooo,

no really it is. See here’s a closer pic

Oh well, probably more snow coming Sat. or so and it will make up for the lost snow.
And today is day 41 with snow on the ground.

Bethany got dressed in her new skirt and shirt this morning and I did her hair. I’m in trouble, she looked in the mirror and said “Ohh, I look like a woman”……….That was not my intention!

Grace is looking much better

We went to the Fox theater today and heard a black troupe singing gospel music and spirituals. I haven’t heard music like that since I was a kid. We once switched our choir with that of a black church and I’d say we got the better deal. It was so different from our ‘white bread’ church, I loved it. I kept asking when we would have them back, but my Baptist church back then was mostly older white folks who thought that black music was ‘too loud, too fast and too ……..whatever” I was so disappointed. Later in life when James and I had Joel we went to a black church and the songs we sang were contemporary, but still full of noise and rhythm. Every once in awhile we’d have a gospel song or hymn and it would take me back to the day. So today was refreshing as we heard, ‘Swing low’, ‘Happy day’, ‘Jesus is calling my name’ and lots of others, all sung by a choir of 4 men and 5 ladies.

Then we were treated to the Black hands drum ensemble. Four members who played all kinds of African drums and two dancers. They had the kids jumping in the aisles and even dancing down the aisle. They called for teachers to go on stage, but I backed down because I was holding Hannah, now I wish I would have done it. How long before I get the chance to dance an African dance to native drums again?

After the show we went to BK to play with the other HS’ers, not as many there as last week, but enough to have a boy fight with. Now I need to get hopping on a new timeline I’m making out of index cards. Hopefully this will make events stick in our minds.

………And a short rant about the bus, why can’t they make a route that goes up Holly st. so I don’t have to take the 402L to the train and then the call and ride from there to my destination? C’mon people! Greenwood village needs to share the love (ahem, money) with RTD and get a bus going down Holly and Orchard!

School, cleaning, laundry, dishes.

We had a rental car so we got out to go to the store and library. Joel got a book entitled Medieval weapons of the 15th century, he likes it. Bethany got a new Magic tree house book that she will probably devour tomorrow. Grace got a manners book and Hannah got nothing this time.

We ate at Mcd’s for dinner (yes, Grandpa (Opa) we ate out, but I did make dinner the past 2 nights!) Hannah is the shoe person; when it’s time to go she collects the shoes and gives them to the right person. So, she gave Bethany her shoes, Grace her shoes and was looking for Joel’s shoes. She couldn’t find them (because Joel didn’t take off his shoes) so she looked at me and said “Joel? shoe?” I said ‘Oh are you looking for Joel’s shoes? He has them on his feet’ So Hannah walked over to Joel and tried to take the shoes off his feet - so she could put them in the bin and then give them back to him. It was quite a sight with her tugging on his shoelaces and Joel saying “No, noofy, they’re on!”

Eventually she gave up. It’s funny how she knows whose shoes are whose, even if there is a big pile, she’ll take only her sibling shoes out of it. I guess that’s her superpower.

We got another 6″ of snow yesterday, so I shoveled that off this morning. We’re closing in on the record to beat: 66 days of snow on the ground. I’d have to check, but I think we’re at day 38. Looks like we’ll beat it no problem, though this weekend may be the first that we don’t have a snow shower. Hannah says ‘Great I love the snow because mama has to put puppets on my hands’ (anything that touches her hands becomes a puppet, so I don’t ask her to put gloves on, I ask her to put puppets on. Then she flaps her hand around and says ‘rarr, rar, rarr.)

Grace read ‘That rat is sad’ today and worked on her number caterpillar. She cut out, glued and colored the numbers from 1-10 on the caterpillar’s body. Bethany started her report on Sacagawea and did some Viking history (she says ‘Did you know Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are named after Viking gods?) She did some math games in the computer and a month game. Joel finished a history unit about the flappers, jazz, Herbert Hoover and the great migration. His math was problem solving and his grammar was indefinite pronoun antecedents. Hannah scribbled at her desk and watched the backyardigans.

I’ve got to make an appointment for the eye doc to see Grace and make sure our accident didn’t hurt what her eye surgery accomplished. Her bruise is almost gone and she isn’t complaining about her legs anymore. I still think she’s doing bruises for presentation club since she hasn’t given any thought to any other topic.

Well off to read A civil war narrative.

It was free day at the Natural science museum today, so we went. The girls dug in the dino pit for about an hour, how can uncovering the same bones over and over be so cool? We put organs back in a human body model, I don’t think he’ll live; his heart was upside down and there were a few parts left over, but, we tried. Hannah sat and watched the fish for a while and we were fascinated by the digital microscope. I have to get one of those. We were looking at hairs, fingernails, skin, and nose hairs. You could see the miniscule black dirt from the dino pit still on Grace’s face.

Mr. Bones was walking around (he’s a puppeteer who wears a dino skeleton.) He ate Hannah’s hand and was lingering on Grace. He had a new addition to costume, dino baby skeletons on his feet that looked like they were following the big dino.

We wandered through the animal dioramas so Hannah could see them. They are so detailed they even include poop from the different animals in each diorama. So we started a poop scavenger hunt, who could find: the most poop, different animal poop and the smallest/biggest poop in each diorama. That was good for another 20 minutes.

We went into the mummy room; it’s still a mummy. We went though the prehistoric journey, which is riddled with lies, and crazy made up science, not to mention the ending where we all came from apes, no room for creationism here! People ask if I mind my kids seeing it, it’s so incredibly ridiculous, that no, I don’t mind. They look at the pic of the slime turning into an ape and then turning into a human and mock it. They’re not stupid or gullible.

We stopped by the observation area and sat and looked at Mt. Evans, the capitol is in the middle of the pic, and still lots of snow on the ground. Hannah thought it was neat to look down from there.

After going through the gift shop we drove to the downtown library to look at the scroll book On The Road by Jack Kerouac, apparently a famous writer of the 50’s.
*(From the DPL site) This winter, the Denver Public Library will be exhibiting the original 120-foot scroll on which Kerouac wrote his first typewritten draft of On The Road. In 1951, a young writer named Jack Kerouac rolled several scrolls of teletype paper into his typewriter and then in a three-week burst of creative energy wrote On The Road, a novel, which, after it was published six years later, came to define a generation. Loosely based on his own life hitchhiking back and forth across the United States in the mid to late 1940s, On The Road was written in a spontaneous but highly disciplined style of writing, which beautifully captured the ways people during this time lived and spoke. Most notable of these people, perhaps, was the character of Dean Moriarty, a brilliant and charming raconteur, heartbreaker and car thief from Denver, Colorado, whom Kerouac based on his close friend and travel companion, Neal Cassady.*

They had 40 feet unrolled in a glass case and another 20 still rolled up. In Feb. they will take the other 60 feet and unroll it under the glass and put the first roll back in storage. It was neat to see, but hard to read. There were no paragraphs and no indentations. One wonders how the translation of it to a “real” book made it lose its artsy-ness. The kids were also interested in how he typed 100 words a minute and typed out 120 feet of novel in 3 weeks! A high goal to shoot for. After leaving the library we went by the pony on a chair statue and then drove home.

Nutty bars have peanuts in them. I forgot, so I had to deal with the consequences - Hannah throwing up 3 times tonight. And I have to wash the booster seat, coat, pants, pajamas, and 1 set of blankets. Thank you Little Debbie for your peanut nutty bars, I hate you!