How to Ruin the Moment - by Owen

Below you will find two videos of the surprise we gave Owen tonight. The first one is the funny one that you should watch, as long as there are no children in the room (unless you have had "THE TALK" with your children, then it is fine). If there are young ears around, watch the second video; it doesn't have The Boy's really funny comment, but it will save you some explaining:

Video One: Not Safe for Children

Video Two: Show this one when children are present

And in case you are wondering - October 12th.

St. Patrick's Day and stuff

Owen had a project for school where he needed to write a report on an influential woman for Women's History Month (March).  He choose to do the report on his Grandma White (Beki's Mom).  He filled in all the information and at the end he had to draw a portrait of the influential woman.  This is - HANDS DOWN - the best person Owen has ever drawn.  He did a pretty good job of answering the questions and hopefully he did a good job presenting it to his class.  

(Yes, Grandma White is playing basketball, we don't know why....)

On Friday Owen could wear St. Patrick's Day accessories to school.  He was very excited to wear his green tie and "Kiss Me I'm Irish" button.  Though he said that if anyone tried to kiss him he would take off the button.

 For St. Patrick's Day we made a traditional Irish feast: corned beef, roast potatoes, boiled cabbage, crusty bread, Irish cheese and homemade root beer (pretty good Guinness substitute).  Owen loves making the root beer and his favorite part is when we get to add the dry ice.  Mommy was a little heavy on the dry ice this time and it was bubbling pretty hard.

Our feast!!  It was great and we will be eating left overs for a while.

In other news, the Roman Catholic Church has a new Pope.  Since Owen attends a Catholic school, this was a pretty big deal at school.  Beki was at the school to help out in Owen's class when the white smoke starting coming from the Vatican - so we spent a good 15 minutes watching the white smoke.   Over the next few days they did quite a few different Pope centered activities.  At some point, Channel 7 News came to Owen's school and was filming some of the things the children were doing to celebrate a new Pope.  Apparently Owen got some camera time, thought we have not been able to find this footage online.
We just find it quite interesting that the LDS child at the Catholic school was the one on camera talking about being excited about the new Pope.  

Chris still has his class to get his teaching certification renewed.  This last through 15 April and we are counting down the days.  We are looking forward to spring break the first week of April and hopefully we be able to take a little trip.

Just a short clip of the boy working on his gymnastics skills.

Full sized Twix

Owen's bribery today for helping Mom with the shopping while Papa was at a band festival.

More then a month make-up in one post....

As you can tell from our last post, we have been busy and sick, so many things have fallen through the cracks.  I am just going to put some of the highlights of the last month.  Honestly we didn't take that many pictures, since we have been at home, sick most of the time.

Chris' present to me for Valentine's Day!  Perfect!  We did go out to eat at Bobby's Burger Palace on Valentine's Day, so we did something. 

Owen got a valentine form his cousin Piper.  It was the first time he had ever seen one of these things - we have no idea what it is called but we have all played with them.  He spent many days playing with it.

 He also got a valentine form Grandma Nettie.

Then he called Grandma Nettie to say thank you.

This is Owen's box from school.  He did a pretty good job. 

Owen's last game of the season was in mid-February.  Chris was sick, of course, and drugged himself so he could go coach the last game.   We were a little early, so the boy took the time to get a snack before the game.

Just a shot of him warming up.  Can't remember if this one went in, but it looks good.  So we're just going to say that it did.

 No idea what he is doing here.

Half-time pep talk. 

OWEN ACTUALLY SHOT THE BALL!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Video of one of the warm-ups that Chris did with Owen.

HE ACTUALLY MADE A SHOT TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coincidentally the last game of the season was against the other team from Owen's school.  It was nice to not have to worry about play being too physical and the other team not obeying the rules.  All the kids had fun.  This is their final, "Go Hawks!" cheer.

One of the parents on the team organized to get the players trophies.  At first it was only for the parents that wanted to participate, and we were not going to get him a trophy.  But apparently we were the ONLY parents that were not going to get our child a trophy and they were going to do it at school, so the organizer took pity on Owen and got him a trophy anyways.  He is pretty proud of it too.

So we had a snow day this past week, and no actual snow fell, but we enjoyed the time together as a family anyways.  For Christmas Owen and Chris received Wii Lego Lord of the Rings and they finished the game a few weeks ago.  Then Owen started asking about the movies.  So we borrowed them from a friend and ended up watching them on our snow day.  They are the extended editions, so we only watched the first two on the snow day and we watched the third on Saturday.  Owen never actually watches a movie - he is always off doing many different things or playing with something else and every once in a while he will wonder back and watch a few minutes.  Consequently he missed most of the violent parts, which was good.  He knows the whole story and the names of all the characters from the Wii game.  As of late he has taken to putting on his life jacket (i.e. armor) and being Aragorn or Gimli or Legolas or Etc.  He goes around the house killing all sorts of things like Orcs, Nazgul, Shelob, or Uruk-hai.  Mommy and Daddy end of playing roles as well.  Yesterday, Mommy was Treebeard and Daddy was Frodo.  Just one picture of him playing something else while dressed as some Lord of the Rings character. 

We are not dead

So it has been a month since our last post.  Things have been VERY crazy!  We have all been battling some respiratory virus for a while and Chris got the worst of it.  He ended up missing a week of work.  We are mostly back to 100%, just really tired.  

Just a quick update other then being sick and busy.  Basketball has ended.  The last game of the season was in the middle of February.  Of course Chris was sick, but he drugged himself and went to coach the last game of the season.  There are videos and pictures that will eventually make it into a blog post soon.  Owen is doing well in school and getting good marks.  We think his favorite subject is math.  He HATES writing - really hates it - but we work really hard with him to help him take his time and write the letters and numbers in a legible fashion.  We have worked on many different projects for school including a science project on magnets and another on soil.  He did a report on Michael Jordan for Black History Month.  He has also written a few book reports on a Dr. Suess book, a book about St. Patrick's Day, and another on an Elephant & Piggie book.  He is also doing well on his spelling - they normally have 7-9 words a week and he has done really good.  His favorite thing is After Care.  He is always sad when we show up to pick him up, regardless of what time it is.  He really likes to play with all the other children and has quite a few friends in many different grades.  He saved up his money from his chore chart and finally bought himself a LEGO Ninjago set and a PokeMon card pack.  He is VERY excited about spring and summer so that is is warmer outside and he can go to the pool and have swimming lessons.  

Chris is only slightly less busy now.  He still has a class on Tuesday evenings that he has to attend in order to renew his teaching license for Maryland.  Our Tuesdays are pretty crazy, but we have managed to make it work and we only have to keep it up until mid April and then his class is over.  On Thursdays he is helping out the Band Director at his high school and running rehearsal for one of the bands so they can prepare for District Festival.  Other then that, he spends A LOT of time working on his lessons plans for teaching and preparing to teach.  He has made his Music Survey class the most requested class in the school - so his hard work is paying off.  

Beki is working like crazy.  She has the start of a paper, but has to do all the experiments to fill in the details.  You can't publish a paper with just one figure, so there are lot of other experiments that she needs to do in order to finish the story.  She has been working on multiple projects at the same time as well, so she is quite busy all the time - a little more busy then normal PhD school busy.  She has been "awarded" a fellowship for 6 more months, so her boss is happy that she doesn't have to pay her stipend until July.  She is still the Camp Director and planning for Girl's Camp this year is already in full swing.  Hopefully this year will be better then last year - there is a little more planning and organizing and "reality" going on this time around, so things should be better.  

In other news, we have joined the work of smartphone users.  It still is very CRAZY to me that I carry a small computer around with me where ever I go.  We opted for the Samsung Galaxy SIII after doing a lot of research.  Learning a new operating system is interesting, but we are getting there.  

Hopefully this week will be less crazy then the last four and we will be able to get a real blog update done next week.