We have such a busy week I thought we’d play a game. Look at the pictures and try to guess where we are. It’s an honor code thing, after the pics I’ll tell you about the place.

Ready?

Where is bunny?

Where can you find half of a jet?

A big yellow plane hooked up to the ceiling?

This chapel?



If you guessed the Air force academy in Colorado Springs, you’re right. We had a COVA event at Pump it up in the Springs, so we left early to visit the academy. (Also Joel just joined CAP (Civil Air Patrol) last night, so I thought I’d show him where he could go if he finished CAP.) )

Here’s some info about them:

MISSION:

To inspire and develop outstanding young men and women to become Air Force officers with knowledge, character and discipline; motivated to lead the world’s greatest aerospace force in service to the nation.

HISTORY:

Youngest of the four service academies

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill authorizing establishment of the Academy
April 1, 1954.

The first class entered in July 1955 at temporary facilities at Lowry Air Force Base, Denver. Construction of the present site also began that year.

The Cadet Wing moved into its permanent home in August 1958.

First class of 207 graduated in June 1959.

More than 37,800 cadets have graduated in 46 classes.

Approximately 38 percent of those commissioned in the Air Force are still on active duty.

The visitor’s center has a movie about the academy, planes, a gift shop, and lots of info about the college. Joel saw that they have fencing, hockey and falconry there and he thought the uniforms were cool. After watching the movie we took the trail to the chapel. Isn’t this cool?


The stained glass was reflecting off the ceiling and walls. Here’s a giant pipe organ and the cross behind the podium.


This place was so awesome!

After lunch we headed over to pump it up and played around. Hannah just rode on the baby scooters, I think it was too busy for her liking. Joel, Bethany and Grace however worked up a sweat jumping and bouncing.

I can’t believe we spent 2 hours there. After an hour long ride and nice nap in the car, we’re home.
Oh, yes. Here is Grace, the most excited Kindergartener you’ve ever seen, with her new materials.

Our devotional for the week:

Psalm 1

1 Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.
2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
4 Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

We have a busy week, so I thought we’d go in-depth with this verse. We can go beyond righteous people go to Heaven and wicked people do not. We are going to consider what it means to bear fruit or be chaff. On the one hand we have what a good guy does and on the other what the bad guy does.

We already know what a tree looks like that stays by the water. It is tall and strong and has lots of leaves. If it bears fruit, then it bears juicy fruit, because it has a source of water.

Not so the tree that sits in a dry, barren land. We have seen what happens to trees at 11,000 feet. They are deprived of water and oxygen, they are twisted, gnarled trunks of tree that bear little leaf and no fruit.

We know which we want to be.

Today I am thinking how wonderful it is to be a home schooling mom. I am so blessed that my husband goes to work everyday to provide for our family, so I can stay home. I am so blessed that I have four wonderful children who like me to teach them.

I am so blessed that I am aware of God’s great love, grace and mercy for me.

I am always wondering about God’s plan for our lives, the great adventure. That’s why my blog is the Colorado adventure. We have been here two years (well, we’ve been back two years) and every day is an adventure. I can’t wait to wake up and see what is in store. I don’t just mean are we studying participle phrases or Sumerian history, I mean what is it that we are supposed to be doing? Like a shepherd guides his sheep to graze in bountiful places, we are guiding our children to find out there talents and strengths so they can be a blessing to others.

Our new motto (see the sidebar) is Non ut sibi ministretur sed ut ministret. (Not to be served, but to serve.) This is going to be our guiding force in the coming year. As we seek out what we need to do we will find ourselves in the path of God’s plan for our lives. To go along with our adventure quest we look to this song by Stephen Chapman and find that we are delving into a new chapter in our lives as we go on this grand thing called: living for God!

Saddle up your horses

Come on get ready for the ride of your life
Gonna leave long faced religion in a cloud of dust behind
And discover all the new horizons just waiting to be explored
This is what we were created for

We’ll travel over, over mountains so high
We’ll go through valleys below
Still through it all we’ll find that
This is the greatest journey that the human heart will ever see
The love of God will take us far beyond our wildest dreams

Yeah… oh saddle up your horses… come on get ready to ride.

That’s what I hear upstairs; Joel got juggling clubs yesterday. He hasn’t mastered them yet, so I think I will hear the above for many more days.

Devotion for the day.

Ecclesiastes 7
8 The end of a matter is better than its beginning,
and patience is better than pride.
9 Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit,
for anger resides in the lap of fools.
10 Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?”
For it is not wise to ask such questions.
11 Wisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing
and benefits those who see the sun.
12 Wisdom is a shelter
as money is a shelter,
but the advantage of knowledge is this:
that wisdom preserves the life of its possessor.
13 Consider what God has done:
Who can straighten
what he has made crooked?
14 When times are good, be happy;
but when times are bad, consider:
God has made the one
as well as the other.
Therefore, a man cannot discover
anything about his future.

We’ve been talking about patience and anger, pride and wisdom, so these verses are great. I love the ‘don’t talk about the good old days’ I think of the story of the wandering Israelites, what did they say? ‘Oh, remember the good old days in Egypt? We had food and didn’t have to wander around.’ Hello! You were slaves in a foreign land. Don’t look to the past, though it is nostalgic, it won’t help you today. Today you need wisdom, a shelter that preserves the life. Not the mortal life, the eternal life. For wisdom will let you see God’s grace and therefore save your soul.

I also like the when times are happy/bad verses. We fail to see in bad times that God is still there watching out for us. He didn’t leave us to our fate; He is there with us. So we must try to find in the bad things what God is trying to do for us: prepare us, mold us, awaken us? Which brought us to this verse:

Romans 9:21
21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

We need to find our purpose in life and throw ourselves into whatever it is God wants us to do. Is it noble, is it common? If God has called you to His purpose then whatever you do is a high calling from Him, so do it well.

After school we headed over to the park for park day with our HS group. There was a good turnout and I almost got rid of all my watermelon (it was really big so I wanted to share it.) The kids played and the adults talked, ah, bliss. The only thing I hate about that park is the sand, it gets everywhere; especially when you eat watermelon and then go play in it. A friend brought a copy of the paper that had Grace’s picture in it. Grace came up and saw it and ran off saying, “What you think I’m famous because I was in the paper? I’m not famous!” Joel was ready to go because he was the only big kid there; the girls outnumbered him too. So, we packed it up and drove to the natural science museum (yes, free day of course!)

Mr. Bones (the dinosaur puppet) ate Bethany’s head while Grace looked on.

Hannah wasn’t too scared of him this time (last time she freaked out!) This is what you would have looked like if you were on the Titanic:


We went into the discovery room and dug for dino bones,

played some djembe drums, messed with bubbles and played with the digital microscope. I really need to get one of those. It’s so cool to see your skin cells, hair, the weave of your clothes and nose hairs (I mean the hairs, not the weave of your nose hairs!). After playing in the dino dig you can spot microscopic black dirt in your hair too.

We went by the mummy room and Grace told everyone that they were real. It caused us to think, would we want our bodies on display after we died? Why do we think it’s so cool to see a wrapped up mummy? I guess just because it’s different. We went through the gem area next. They have it set up like a mineshaft and you wander through under wooden beams looking into a cavern at crystals. It made me want to go rock hunting again. Maybe I could find the largest rhodochrosite gem in the world! Then we went into the Mars mission area and played in the baby moon landing site, listened to a story and played in the water model.

On the way out we stopped at the water playground to run through it.

I didn’t even know this was here, you learn something new everyday. I grabbed Grace and we raced through the water as it shot up trying not to get wet, I guess we weren’t that good at it! I wonder why all the adults were looking at me so funny, because I was playing in the water? I don’t get it, sometimes you need to look like a fool and have fun. Joel decided that he would rather not get wet.


Walking back to the car Bethany grabbed some crabapples off the tree and started eating them. I warned her not to get any with holes in them, because they might have worms. As we were driving off (and after a few apples) Grace yelled that there was a worm in the cup holder. I stopped, got out, and looked. Yep, there was a crabapple core and a worm crawling around it. I threw all the apples outside and told the girls, “What’s worse than seeing a worm in your apple? Seeing half a worm!” They didn’t think it was very funny.

We drove out the back entrance (or the front if you come in on Colfax) and found a wooden playground that I didn’t know was there. Also a huge fountain, how could I have missed that? And, oh that’s what that building is, Denver East High School. I thought it was a university every time I passed it on Colfax. I guess it just looks prestigious because it’s probably a hundred year old.


Speaking of 100 years old, we went to Lakeside with Daddy last night. Lakeside was built on 1908 and the trolley ran right up to it. The biggest draw was the ballroom and big band dancing, the bathhouse and the lake attractions.

It’s so cool to see the old photos of people in their big hats and dresses about to go down the roller coaster.


How neat! It’s not 100 yet (next year.) So, what does a 99-year-old theme park look like? Well, except for the kiddie rides circa 1960’s, pretty much the same as it did in the 1900’s.


The casino/hotel is an arcade (no you can’t go up in the tower! It’s a fire hazard; I did say this place was 99 years old!) The ballroom is a picnic area, the bath house (took me a second to get this one) is the bumper boat area, or at least part of the bathhouse is.


There aren’t speedboats on the lake anymore, probably because they found out it was hurting the marine life. The train still goes around the lake though, and Bethany said she saw killer dolphins in the water. James and Joel went on the chipmunk roller coaster. Sounds very non-threatening doesn’t it? Well, at first you think so, it’s so quiet and you have a lovely view of the Rockies before – ahhhhhhh, death is coming. Apparently it should be called the killer chipmunk.

As I was waiting for the kids to get off the carousel I heard the buzzing of the neon like thousands of cicadas on a hot southern night. Then I thought, ‘should the neon be buzzing like that?’ and I quietly moved away from it.


When the girls came running up they said, ‘let’s go to the kiddie rides’ and Hannah trailed after them saying, ‘yeah, right, kiddie ride, kiddie ride.’

Now these rides are from my era, I swear. There’s this canoe ride that always gets stuck on the turns and sure enough it got stuck. I told Bethany to wiggle and it would unstick, then Grace saw her chance.

She wiggled and caught her canoe up to Bethany’s. They hit and stopped; more wiggling and Bethany broke free and continued on. Grace rode the Ferris wheel and then all the girls rode the boats, planes, motorcycles and such. The plane ride was a bit too tame for Hannah; she was lying back in the seat with her hands behind her head as if to say, ‘what, it’s too slow!’

As far as other rides I remember (as a kid) there was the whip ride, the auto scooter (bumper cars), a gravity defying ride and a dragon ride. There must be the same rides at carnies everywhere. Though we didn’t stay long it was neat. I think Elitch’s slogan ‘Not to see Elitch is not to see Denver’ is wrong. It should be Lakeside. Although it’s old and crappy, you can peel away the veneer and see something awesome that has stood the test of time.

(And I spelled that right!)

Grace has been in a fog for a few weeks, just like in March and November and October, and…………..you get it. She’s in that cycle again that the doc thought might be Landau-Kleffner epilepsy (which is mostly language oriented.)

She’s angry, tired, blanking out, frustrated, whiny, and has this, for lack of a better term, stupid look on her face most of the time. She can’t remember her abc’s and can’t read something she read a few weeks ago. A friend suggested I write the symptoms down and I did. Then I thought about what happens before this, what do all of the episodes have in common, what did they start with.

Aha! She has these episodes right before and for a little after she gets sick. Grace has RAD (reactive airway disorder); not asthma, but a kind of lung infection that pops up if she gets a cold or cough. She gets like this (above symptoms) when she is coughing. So, I think I’ve got it: she has lack of oxygen to her brain during these times and that’s why she’d tired, foggy, moody, etc. It makes perfect sense. Last year the doc scanned her head just to make sure it wasn’t a tumor and then gave her diagnosis as L-K syndrome, but I think it’s the RAD depriving her of oxygen that makes her like this. That’s why it only cycles around when she’s having an attack.

So I upped her nebulizer treatment and the doc said something about getting a device that will tell me if she’s about to have an attack so we can jump on it quicker. After one day of increased treatments I’m, already seeing an improvement. She wrote her abc’s yesterday and didn’t fall asleep every 20 minutes. Yeah! I know it’s a relief to Grace who can’t understand why she gets like this, but it’s a relief to me to knowing that this isn’t
L-K epilepsy and that we need to be on constant guard against the effects of her RAD disorder.

I think it’s going to be a great week next week.

Bethany had to rewrite a story from a different perspective. So, she wrote this about the Lion and mouse.

Mouse and Lion

One day I ran across a lions’ paw. The lion woke up and was about to kill me, but I cried out, “No, please do not eat me, for I can help you one day.” The lion burst out laughing. “Even if it were a million years later you could not help me”, he said. He dropped me and I ran off happily.
Later I heard a lions’ roar. I came to help him. He was stuck in a net and I chewed the ropes and let him out of it. He said, “I laughed when you said you could help me. But now I see that even a mouse can help a lion.”
The end

She got all answers right on her grammar test and did some extra practice on regular and irregular verbs.

Joel had history (still on the Sumerians), math (exponents), science (cells), grammar (participles, how do you know when they’re a verb or being an adjective, pretty tricky) and vocabulary test. Oh, yes, and 3 chapters of Tuck Everlasting, almost done with that.

Now we are on our way to bowling and hopefully I will beat everyone! Oh, I mean I hope the kids all score better than they did last week (mwah, hah, hah!)

Today the kids had a pizza making class at Whole foods. It was so much fun! They got to wear chef jackets, roll out the dough, top it off, watch it bake, and then eat! Hannah had fun sampling while they were cooking. Joel even put a mushroom on his pizza to try it while Bethany and Grace stuck with cheese and olives. I think this goes under field trip and cooking skills.

We went to Elitch’s today and had fun. We met our friend Kim and her daughter R there, so the girls had someone to ride rides with. It was not as nice as yesterday, it was hot (for here.) I made sure everyone had on sunscreen before we went into the park, then after lunch I smothered them again, but Joel still got a little sunburn on his face.



We went inside and Joel took off for the big rides while we went to the star-toon studios. The girls rode the bus, balloons, swings, cars, boats, planes and played in the ball pit. I thought it would be a good idea to play, eat and then swim. It worked out great.


The water was cold though. You don’t get used to it, I think you actually freeze your skin into numbness and then you can’t feel how cold it is.



It could be 100 here and the water would still be cold. Poor Hannah loved the water, but she stood there shivering and chattering her teeth because she didn’t want to come out. Bethany helped Hannah go down the water slide and then Hannah decided she’d do it herself, she was pretty good at it too.





After the wave pool, lazy river and Hook’s lagoon we dried off and went back to see a show. It was kind of styled after Cirque de Soleil . There was a Chinese acrobat, juggler, trapeze dude, contortionists and this guy who kept stacking cylinders and boards to stand on. It was really a neat show and the girls enjoyed it thoroughly.

After that we went searching for more rides, here’s the ferris wheel.


We also found out that just because you can ride a ride, doesn’t mean you should ride it. Grace hit her mouth on a bar at one big ride and Bethany bumped her back on the seat in that same ride, note to self don’t ride that next time. Our last stop was the carousel.

Hannah as worn out after all of this and took a nap on the way home. We didn’t stay as late as we did last year, since we’re going twice I told the kids this was the early day (10-6pm) I think next time we’ll leave the parking lot for lunch though, it was really hot eating under the tree.

Our hiking co-op with the HS group took us to Matthew-winters park by Red Rocks in Morrison. I thought this was our first time at the park, but we came here once in 2003.

Hannah took Mr. Otter on the hike, he looks very natural here:

J (from our group) was leading the hike and after dipping our toes in the creek we started off.



It was a grand day for a hike in the foothills, cloudy and cool. We were warned about snakes and it seems lots of people saw them (rattlesnakes) but I think our kids were too loud, so we saw none (not that that’s a bad thing!) We did see red beetles, bees, hummingbirds, grasshoppers and other bugs.

There are lions and bears (no tigers, oh my!) in the park, but again I think there were too many people around. Better not see a snake, bear and lion at the same time otherwise you’d have to: be still; crouch down and be quiet; make loud noises and throw rocks to get rid of each animal.



This trail is behind the hogback and when you come over the ridge you can see the hogback all the way towards Pikes and the other mountains too. We walked past a cemetery and J told me that one day they were just hiking here and she saw that the headstone had the name of one of her relatives. She looked it up and this boy who died up here at age 21 went back 5 generations and was her cousin! How cool is that! She gave us a history of him and her family.

She thinks he might have been up here working on the railroad, but she’s not sure how he died. There were a few other crosses and monuments, but only 2 that were readable. Who knows, maybe they were working on the railroad from Golden and fell ill or died from a disease. The town of Mt. Vernon is non-existent now except (as far as I know) for this cemetery.

After looking at the view we hiked back and went to eat. I would have picnicked with her, but I had free kids meals at Village Inn and the kids were looking forward to eating breakfast for lunch.



After lunch I took Joel to the library for a forensic science lab. He got to act like a CSI tech looking for clues to solve a case. I wish they had that when I was a kid. I would have thought that was so cool. He had to go through a toxicology report, handwriting analysis, blood samples, DNA samples, fingerprints and examine the bones of the victim. (No it wasn’t real, it was a made up case.) Joel and his team determined that the victim was poisoned with penicillin (which he was allergic to) by his sister (the least likely suspect.) Her blood was at the scene and she wrote some forged checks and letters 10 years after the crime. Joel said it was really cool and he was glad we went, high praise from a picky 12 year old!

Tomorrow we’re off to Elitch’s (like Astroworld) for some free fun, thank you library!