Over the summer on a brief break from working at ETC I visited my family and we went to the New Jersey Adventure Aquarium. It was a lot of fun Below is an overview of all the different animals we saw. and at 11:00 minutes in you can see McKelvey be a helper for the Sea Lion Show. We all had a great time.
Also from way back in April, I got Liam and I trying to teach Cloda a new trick. It all started with Liam wanting someone to crawl thru his legs in the same way he has crawled thru my legs. He is pretty cute.
I just started keeping tabs on my old hometown paper The Wednesday Journal. Something that caught my eye was the story on renovating the WWI memorial. It has a list of the the local boys that served in the war.
The list of oak Park Veterans is here. You will see my grandfather Milford Collins as well fellow Oak Parker Ernest Hemingway.
We Collins’ kept some pretty good company back then.
Here is the video of Liam in the dance recital. Someone else shot the video so it wasn’t on Liam and I the whole time. But you can still see how cute it is.
It’s raining again. The difference is that we are in New Jersey instead of Virginia. Our epic summer travel has begun. The house is being watched, as are the dogs. So it is odd to be without some of the usual interruptions.
We already had our quick trip to New York City. Ann’s friend Joanna had her 40th birthday party. We got to go to that. It was fun to talk to other grown ups. I have discovered that I can actually carry on conversations with complete strangers and not be nervous. This is a new thing for me. And, true, in some situations it doesn’t hold up. But more often than not I can do just fine. In high school I was the kid that didn’t want to talk in class, and didn’t talk at parties. In most social situations with large groups of people I would just clam up. So I see this as a great step.
The girls were given a craft kit from Ikea as a christmas present. It is made from the PYSSLA beads kit. You set all the beads on a little frame, put some wax paper on top a little pass with a iron, Viola!
Raw material
I immediately saw the ability to make little pictures pixel by pixel.
Laying out the beautiful masterpiece (McKelvey drew a flower on the grid paper for me)
And a flower for Arden & McKelvey
You can get even fancier by using something to help you layout your pixel art, like Photoshop. I used Pixelego.(link using the Archive.org ‘wayback machine’)
Lately I have begun to think about growing up. not myself mind you, that is a long way off, but my kids.
As a parent I want to savor every bit of cute childhood-ness that I see every day. But at the same time I’m supposed to be prepping the kids to grow up. Part of that is the urge to protect my kids from potential threats ,either physical or social. A dilemma that i have, is that I want to encourage their individuality. Each one is of them is this glorious, funny, smart person that could be anything. That is balanced with my worries about how the group can isolate away the unique. An example of this one of McKelvey’s christmas presents. She asked for a cloak, full length cloak. She asked for one because she doesn’t like big winter coats and loves olden times. Also as a lover of American Girl stories namely Felicity, she wanted a red cloak. Wanting to protect her from all the Little red riding hood jokes that would come her way we convinced her to approve a different color. I’ll find a pic of the cloak for you to see.
But she still gets a lot of comments, all positive, about the cloak. People look and stare, which is not something a kids usually wants, definitely my kids. So she has this great unique point of view and interests, but doesn’t want to stick out. How do you foster that and protect is at the same time?
So there is this tightrope between letting go and holding on, is that being a parent?
How many people out there want to be themselves but don’t want people to make a big deal about it?
@MarqRobinson working on some random stuff, soon will take a week with the family. Then in August I am working on the dept self-assessment. twitter.com/owenscenic2010/07/27
