The Slinky

The kids have been obsessed with trying to get it to walk down our too-wide stairs:

Girl Scout "Cookout"

Abby's girl scout troop has long been interested in doing more outdoor stuff, but we have had a hard time getting the right timing/training/support to do any hard core camping. This year, we lucked into finding a trainer (a friend of my mom's) who really wanted to work with the girls on this. As a first step, she suggested we plan a cookout where the girls could learn fire building, foil pack cooking, how to set up a dish washing station and basic tent building. Unfortunately, we had 2 straight weeks of rain. We postponed the first week, but the second week decided to improvise with an inside cookout:

Making edible practice fires

tending the fire

The Dance

Benji got it into his head that he wanted to host a dance. For weeks, he kept announcing that his dance would be on September 26th and would anyone like to buy a ticket? He was holding a number of tickets at "will call," i.e. sealed inside his pretend laptop. When the day finally came, he asked Gammy (who had previously purchased a ticket) to come over and off he went.  He asked Abby to create a welcome message and Kevin to cue up some Mozart on his phone:

Abby was Benji's date

But he took time to dance with Gammy, who taught him to waltz

At the end of the night, Abby had some special words for her date

Meeting Baby Thomas

Ryan and Nikki had their baby while we were in Chesepeake, but we finally had a chance to visit and meet Thomas Daniel:

Benji was so taken with him that he begged to be allowed to hold him again. We promised him we'd visit again soon.

At the Kroger

Benji and I had to run to the store one day last week after school.  He was resistant at first, but warmed up once he figured out that I'd let him scan all the groceries by himself.  Simple pleasures:

Writing Woes

Benji continues to dislike writing sentences, so when this paper came home from school last week, we all had a chuckle:

Under the prompt "My biggest challenge this week was..." Benji answered "Thinking of things to write. Like on this." His teacher took it in good humor (she told me later she respected his honesty).

Decorating the Sukkah

Monday was a teacher workday, so we decided to take our quiet morning and eat breakfast in the not-quite-finished sukkah.  First, we went to the store to buy some pastries (who wants to eat cheerios in a sukkah?) and while we were there we saw some perfect mini-pumpkins and gourds.  Once we were outside, the kids really wanted to get going on the decorating, which turned into the perfect morning project: