Joel did Bongos and since he had to work in geography (the topic) he did Cuba because that’s where bongos came from. Actually we found out that a type of drum that became the bongo was transported to South America during the slave-trading going on with the Spanish. So probably the basic drum was a design from an African drum that the Cubans then worked with to make the bongo. Joel wasn’t pleased to find out that Cuba is communist because he’s been learning about communism in the 1950’s era after WWII, but there it is. He also played a little beat.

Bethany picked Scotland, which I thought would be easy. Well, the geography of Scotland went well, but she wanted to make a recipe from there and well, all the dishes were a little too ethnic for our group (meaning that a group of mac and cheese kids aren’t going to try haggis!) We looked at the pastries too, but they were mainly meat pastries and so she decided to make a map on a big cookie, much better. Here’s the map, the saran wrap pulled some of the icing words for Highlands and Lowlands off.

Grace did a project out of the Timothy goes to kindergarten series by Rosemary Wells. I love those books. She made a map of her schoolroom, her school (house) on our street, our street in our town, our town in our state and so on. She was very excited to use her new ruler for the project, but not so excited to copy the letters that got smaller and smaller as we zoomed out.

I tried to get the kids to go sledding, but they waited too long and now the snow’s gone. They’re too busy playing outside with friends, oh well.

A blanket of snow
gracefully coming to rest
on the green of Spring.

See the pretty purple flowers that already came up? They got a shock this morning! We have 5 inches of snow and it’s still gently coming down.

Later we’re going to sled by the post office. That poor weatherman, he never knows what the mountains will bring. Will there be a high or a low, will it rain or snow? He was partly right last night; it did start snowing (he said it would rain.) It’s supposed to snow tomorrow too, maybe.

Finally it is over.

Today was Joel’s 3rd day of testing and he’s done. We had to wake up at 6am Monday to get him there by 7:30am and each day after we woke up later and later to get him there by 8:20. I know, poor baby, but some of us don’t wake up until 8 (thank you Hannah.) Monday, after we dropped off Joel, I took the girls to the thrift store. We found 2 really neat games. One is a baseball math card game. You have to play the colors and add them up to 9 to win the set. The other is a game called Arch rival. You set up this arch that has cups as the blocks; then you roll the number and color dice. Let’s say you roll 4-red, you have to get 4 tokens (different shape plastic things) and put them in the red stone. We’ve been able to go 4 rounds with 3 people before it either falls down or Hannah knocks it down. After that I took the girls over to Prospect park and we played on the playground and then took a hike by clear creek. It was a very nice walk with the rushing water sounds, birds and woodpeckers and blowing leaves. By then it was time to pick up Joel and he commenced moaning about how he only had two 5 minutes breaks during the whole test.

Tuesday after dropping Joel off we went to Mcd’s and did some schoolwork, played and chatted with other moms from COVA. Hannah had fun coloring in her Dora book. She can say ‘Dora (doree), boots, map, backpack and something that sounds like swiper (wiee).’ We went by the library and everyone got to play on the computers and get some books. Hannah thought she was entitled to a computer too and she played for a few minutes, then I saw a kid that really wanted to get on the computer so I pulled Hannah off. You’d have thought she was bleeding with that bloody scream of indignation! The librarian got her interested in a dog book and she eventually stopped crying. Then to Red rocks to pick up Joel, less moaning this time.

Today we went through the same routine. Drop off Joel, got to Mcd’s, get school done, got to the library, listen to story time, color a picture, annoy the frog. (They have a water frog in a tank on the desk and Hannah was sitting there tapping on the plastic, saying ‘froee, froee!’ He has a stuffed Larry doll that you can move around the tank and he’ll
swim over to it, maybe he thinks it’s his mom!) Then we picked up Joel and went home.

I had to scarf down food and get Hannah over to the GI doc. He says wait another 6 weeks and then we’ll scope her out if she’s still having diarrhea. Great another 6 weeks of this! He also wants her to drink pediasure to up her weight (22 lbs.) but he doesn’t know she doesn’t like it, so I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. I guess if it’s calories he wants I can mix chocolate powder into her rice milk. All I know is still no milk for her! (I forgot that Wendy’s frosties have milk or something to that effect in them and I gave her a few bites Monday, 30 minutes later she threw it up, let’s not do that again!) Also she was tested for celiac disease, thyroid problems, viruses, blood in stool and malabsorption, all normal.

Tomorrow a ‘normal’ day for us after all the running around this week. It’s been so long it feels like a Friday.

That means I’m 34 today, no longer a double-double digit (33). But, my new age does add up to 7, that’s a lucky number right?

What I like about being 34….people don’t think I’m 34 and wonder how I can have a 12 yr. old son, or 4 kids for that matter. (Easy, step 1. meet husband at age 17, step 2. marry him at 19, step 3. have baby at age 21 1/2, repeat step 3 three more times at various ages!)

What I don’t like about being 34……..people don’t think I’m 34. Maybe one day I will be glad about that.

We went to the Arvada flourmill today. Half of us went on the old town Arvada walking tour while the other half toured the mill, then we switched.


On the walking tour we saw the location of the water tower, the first bank, first Safeway, schoolhouse and King Soopers. The first paved road went from Arvada to Denver and the railroad tracks are 137 years old going from Golden, through Arvada to Denver. We saw the alley where wagons would pull in to see the blacksmith and the 2nd story window where a lady would wring chickens’ necks until the chicken flew off into the alley and then her children would go pick it up for her to pluck (no, I’m not making that up!)

Arvada was platted as a town by Mr. Wadsworth (Wads blvd a major street now), he and another man, who I guess isn’t important because I don’t know his name, started the town in 1870. He named the town after his brother-in-law Hiriam Arvada Haskins. (Arvada is a Biblical city.) Arvada was famous for 2 things; celery and the first recorded gold strike in Co. (note maybe not the ‘first’, but the ‘first recorded’ one.) The celery they grew was white, sweet and not stringy, it was called Paschal celery.

The Flourmill we visited was started in 1925. It has a belt and pulley system with tin cups for transporting the wheat to different sections of the mill.

Rollers crushed the wheat 3 times to get it smooth. We saw old farm tools and the engine in the basement, the belt and pulleys and the scale where farmers would drive up to weigh their grain.



Mr. Benjamin was the first to use flour sacks for the flour instead of paper bags. A boon to the farmer’s wives who then asked for 50lb bags at the Safeway so they could make dresses, curtains and other clothing items out of it. We saw some of the bags and they were pretty, flowers, ivy, not just plain white. The mill existed until the 60’s and then shut down.


Although Arvada was once known as the ‘celery capital of the world’ and was farmed extensively, now days the land is rather full of clay and not suitable for growing. (Bethany said they should plant peanuts to get the ground back in condition.) Interesting side notes: the person who invented the turn signal for autos lived in Arvada, the water tower was the first to be raised to such a great height (for back then) and every harvest festival the firefighters would hook up to the tower and let the water pressure knock each other over for fun, the old one room school house was turned into a movie theater in the 20’s which showed movies for 10 cents. Here’s the ‘throw this at the fire if there is one’ thing.


And you thought Arvada was boring!

Today she said, “Sampson licked me on my five-head.”
That’s the part of the head after fore, I guess.

We went to the Fox Theater today and saw the Pow-Wow. There was an elder from the Kiowa tribe there to start us off with a blessing ceremony. After a story about a rabbit that was lost from his tribe and then found them and a song, he introduced the Aztec dancers. They usually don’t dance the pow-wow, but they were invited so we could see the difference between Plains Indians and South American Indians. They did a four directions blessing and then danced. We’ve seen them before at the Santa Fe Luminaries during December.

After that group the 7 falls dancers came out. They are from Co. Springs and dance at the 7 falls waterfall. There was a mother, daughter, granddaughter and a nephew. The nephew, Derek, was dressed in an outfit of rainbow colors with fringe and a mask and feathers all over, also bells on his feet. The kids all ohh-ed when he came out. They did some dances from different tribes across the plains such as the swan dance, eagle dance and butterfly dance. Then the little girl, she was 4, did a hoop dance with 3 hoops; she was cute. Derek came out again and did a 7 hoop dance, he was awesome. He made different patterns with the hoops and rolled one and then it came back to him and he added it to the others on his body.

After this they asked if any kids wanted to come up and dance so Grace and her friend Athena jumped up and went onstage. Bethany wasn’t fast enough and had to sit it out. The did a round circle dance and then the snake dance. They had fun up there. The dancers did one more dance, a two-step, with older kids and then said good-bye. After the program Bethany talked to one of the Aztec dancers about her feather fan. She was told about how to make it, what it’s made of and what kind of feathers were on it. A very good program indeed.

She’s got it! Bethany can round to tens, hundreds, and thousands! Yeah! No more tears!

We went to the park today for a friend’s b-day that was cancelled last week due to bad weather. But today was nice, sunny, a few clouds, 70 or so. The kids ran around the park and ate chips and hot dogs. Joel’s friend S told Joel and A that he has a………..shhh………….girlfriend! This made Joel and A scream and then they locked S in jail. Ahh, puberty!

After that we rushed Joel to fencing class. He complained afterwards that they made him hold his arm straight and his feet straight. I told him you know they do KNOW what they are doing, you only THINK you know what you are doing. He huffed, but told James that his class was cool.

I think we might play the dictionary game tonight. That’s where you get a dictionary and one person looks up a word and picks a person to spell it. I’m sure the kids will pick really hard words for me and James (and no supercalafragalisticexpealadocious isn’t a word.)

Tomorrow it’s off to the Pow-wow and hopefully my camera cable will let me put the pics on the computer.

I had Bethany in tears today trying to explain rounding. She gets so upset if she can’t “get it” the first time. I expect more tears to follow and then in a few days she’ll “get it” and we’ll be fine.

During Bethany’s dance class today Grace and I took a walk on the high-line canal trail. We saw budding trees, a dried up stream, 5 boys playing hooky, and horse footprints. It was a very nice 30-minute walk. Then we got Bethany and headed to Penney’s (yes, glasses are broken, again.) The glass lady (Linda) twisted them pretty much back into shape. The eye doc says maybe in 4 months the glasses will be gone, yeah!

We played ‘Hail to the chief’ after dinner. First we had to go around the outside of the board and answer presidential questions. We didn’t play the second part, which is inside the board where you travel around the country getting enough electoral votes to become president. We found out some interesting facts….Robert E. Lee’s wife’s great-grandmother was Martha Washington, Jimmy Carter grew peanuts as a crop, Ronald Reagan starred in a movie with his future wife as co-star, and stuff like that. Grace won (we helped her) and Joel was in second place. I think it’s a great game, but it could go on for a long time. Even Hannah tried to play by grabbing the dice every chance she got and throwing them

Today we went on with the last 24 hours of Jesus’ life. We’re up to his prayer in the garden. Praying earnestly for His followers and his betrayer. Praying that we would have peace, but know that this world doesn’t give peace. That we would have the strength to follow Him through tough times and good times, in 3 feet of snow and 100 degree heat. (Ok, that’s my take) He was crying out, not to be delivered, but that His sacrifice would enable us to live with Him in Heaven. His world is done, it’s been done, and those who accept His Life, Death and Resurrection will be waiting for an eternal life of rest and singing to the God who made them. I don’t dance, I am too white to dance well, but one day I will dance with fervor for God and He will think it’s the best dance ever. I also don’t sing well, but I imagine that God’s ears are more tuned to the heart of the singer and not the voice. So, as I remember Jesus crying out in prayer for ME, I close my eyes and think what a day it will be when I can thank Him in person!

After this we decided to go to Chuck E Cheeses. I don’t know why we torture ourselves this way for the kid’s enjoyment. I’m sure Hell is like C.E.C: where no games (well 50%) work, a giant mouse is running around scaring little kids, no drinks will come out of the drink dispenser and they’ve run out of pepperoni. Not my idea of a good time, but the kids had fun.

Grace has been teaching Hannah to say a sentence from ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’. It’s ‘How I wonder what you are.’ Now we already taught Hannah to say 2 after she hears 1. So it goes like this….G: ” Ok, Hannah repeat after me. How”
“how”
“I”
“I”
“Won-”
“two”
“Der”
“two”
“What”
“no”
“You”
“no”
“Are”
“ arrrr!”
Oh, and she can say ‘sky’. Grace says teaching Hannah to talk is a hard job!