The Colorado Adventure

A friend on our HS board posted that she was tired of school. They just got back from London and the kids just weren’t in the mood for bookwork. I said it was probably holiday-itis and a change of venue might be a good idea. In fact it sounded like a great idea. So today after helping Joel with some work, the girls and I made PB and J sandwiches

(Hannah was in charge of pretzels)

which we added to our homeless bag collection (we still had some left -our HS group made up bags with things like socks, soap, Gatorade, gum and we call them homeless bags.) We had 7 bags and 16 sandwiches/pretzel bags when we left. We stopped by the $1 store and added gloves to the bags too (it’s cold up here.) Then we headed downtown.

We got a late start so we ate lunch at the SAME café first.

Bethany says it’s funny because their food is never the same (it’s really So All May Eat café.) Right now MSN is having a vote for your favorite charity, the most voted one gets $10,000! So you may want to drop on over here and vote for SAME café.

Here’s the deal with them, you get a choice of 2 kinds of soup, 2 kinds of salad and 2 kinds of pizza all the time. It’s a donation for food, or if you have no money you can work it off in the kitchen (really!) They use local, fresh food and they are awesome.

Bethany and Hannah loved the corn chowder today, Grace gave the pepperoni mushroom pizza (sans mushrooms) a thumbs up, the Greek salad was great and the squash soup was delish. After our meal the girls got a sugar cookie that looked really good. Their mission statement is to help all people eat healthy, good meals and they deliver. So, jump on over to MSN and vote for them (Brad and Libby Birky – SAME cafe), they could use the $10K.

After lunch we went by the Greek theater to hand out homeless bags and food. As we were walking up Hannah asked, ‘Where the homeless peepy at?’ I’m not sure why they choose to camp out at this park,

maybe because it’s right by the capitol, maybe because it’s right by the library and bus stops or maybe just because it’s a nice park.

We quickly ran out of bags and food, no one could resist pretzels from Hannah. One lady came over because another lady told her there was a cute little girl handing out pretzels. Walking back towards the library we met a guy who was taking pictures of the homeless in the area for an exhibit, he was paying them a dollar and they were posing by the Greek columns. That may sound weird but as Vincent (the photographer) said, these are people in our community and they deserve to be seen too.

This lady is a Katrina victim, I say is because here we are almost in 2010 and she is still here in Denver. She has no home in Louisiana and she has no home here. Vincent thought it was cool that we were handing out food, he asked why we were there and I said we wanted a different venue for school today, he thought that was funny. Finally out of people who wanted food we sat down and the girls ate the last 2 sandwiches and bag of pretzels.

Ahh, now it’s time for ‘school’!

We went into the library and sat down for an hour and did decimals, antonyms, reading, science and geometry. Hannah played Scooby-doo on the computer and found a stack of books to check out. After working we rode the shuttle bus to go drop off a letter (since we were downtown anyway.) On the way to the bus a lady said, ‘Hey, it’s the pretzel queen’ to Hannah. Hannah was so happy! Then we walked back to the Colorado history museum and passed by a very happy person who was yelling ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ to invisible people along the street (but, his happiness was definitely not invisible!) At the museum we constructed a new city (where there is a very big open space park in the middle and I guess 1 round road.)

We took off on an imaginary jet, hog tied bulls, worked puzzles and learned about Indian pictograms.

The museum is moving to new digs so every day is free day right now.

They still have a huge Denver is 150 exhibit, but downstairs it’s just a tipi, Lincoln logs and an exhibit about murals. The girls really had fun with those Lincoln logs, apparently they’ve never seen them before. We hustled out right before closing and walked back to the car, passing by the art museum in dusky shadow.

So, a change of venue for school today, but I think we learned about more than decimals and antonyms; and that’s the real lesson for every day.

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