Aug - Dec, excluding Thanksgiving

After our summer vacation adventures, we got back into our routine at home.  School started and that meant new grades as Lydia joined Karina in middle school (6th and 8th grades) leaving Derek alone in elementary school in 3rd grade.  Lydia had to adjust to an earlier school start time which is a struggle some days.

Our batteries in our smoke detectors ran out and after replacing them to stop the incessant chirping, I invited Derek and Lydia to help me test the alarms.  They managed to reach the test button with a step stool and one of their swords.

At some point over the year, a bird had apparently decided our front door on top of our wreath would make a good spot to build a nest.

You can see the nest hidden on top of the wreath here.  Not a bad hiding spot I suppose, but I don't think that was a great spot to build.  They certainly didn't file for any permits.

Derek had another successful season playing soccer and he helped lock down his team's defensive line.

 

 

I decided I could indulge my desire to shout and cheer and give directions to the team by doing it officially as an assistant coach instead of a loud parent on the sideline.  So I signed up to help coach and had fun trying to teach the kids some skills and strategies.  We had a good team with some players that were aggressive enough to pressure and keep the ball away from our goal, so we had a good season and only lost one game.  I also took advantage of a coach's discount on the portrait - I think we look pretty cool.

 

Karina went to her friend Maizy's birthday party and painted a painting.

We fostered another dog for a few weeks.  Susie Q is a Plott Hound, a breed used for hunting bears and designated the state dog of North Carolina.  We suspect that before she wound up in the shelter where the rescue agency we foster with got her that she was used for breeding as she didn't seem to have any socialization and she had enlarged nipples.

She got comfortable with us and started to come out of her shell over the three weeks we had her.

After three weeks, the agency was hosting an adoption event and they brought Susie Q there.  A family had expressed interest in her but hadn't arranged to meet her yet, but they showed up at the adoption event and adopted her there.  This was a mixup on the part of the agency volunteer as the standard was for her to come back home to our house where we had her supplies, etc. and the family would pick her up from us.  We didn't get to say goodbye to her at the time, but we arranged with the family to meet up with us at a park where we could say goodbye and give them the rest of her supplies.

Derek and Lydia were proud of their drawing of what I think was a dragon on the iPad.

Derek and Karina being silly.

Tanja and the kids went to a pumpkin patch with some friends.

And we decorated some jack-o-lanterns (that rotted before Halloween).

Derek was proud of his long hair that he could style back to look "cool."  I thought he ended up looking a little like the Draco Malfoy character in the Harry Potter movies.

The elementary school hosted a Halloween/Fall Festival.  All three of our kids have had Mrs. Cordelli (nee Mansour) who is currently Derek's teacher.  Lydia was excited to see her and catch up, and it seemed Mrs. Cordelli was as well.

Lydia also reconnected with her former math teacher, Mrs. Parkinson, who was rocking a Miss Frizzle costume (from the Magic School Bus series).  Mrs. Parkinson was one of both our girls' favorite teachers in elementary school and we hope Derek will get her next year for math.

We had a trunk or treat at church and Karina dressed up in her piggy pajama onesie (that she has decided is cool and comfy and has occasionally worn as pajamas since) to help hand out candy from our decorated trunk.

Lydia and Derek were dragons after both of them got hooked on the Wings of Fire novel series.

Derek getting ready to go trick or treating Halloween night (a night that he had been anxiously awaiting for over a month asking nearly every day how much longer until Halloween).

I got to bring Lydia to a STEM day at work.  These are great because they cap attendance at around 30 kids so people aren't stuck waiting in long lines to do activities.  I had taken Karina a few years ago, so now it was Lydia's turn.  Here she is getting ready to race robot cars that are controlled with the computer (and the staff will occasionally "hack" the cars which sends them spinning around in circles until you deploy a proper countermeasure).  She got pretty good at the controls and beat me a couple times.

This is a cool activity - you set up a maze with different squares, tunnels, and walls for a mouse to go find the cheese.  Then you program the mouse to follow a certain path by pushing different buttons on it (for example, to go forward one square, turn left, go forward two squares, turn right, etc.).  When you think you have the path correct, press go and see if your mouse is able to get the cheese with the instructions you gave it.  Lydia got pretty good at this one too.

But her activity and chance to shine was with Rubiks cubes.  The activity was to illustrate the concept of cryptographic hashing (basically a method for two parties to prove that they knew a shared secret without actually sharing the secret).  The activity works by twisting different faces of the cube different directions for each letter of a word - if you do it properly, you can pass the cube to someone else who can reverse all the twists to get the word back.  I had told Lydia (who is very good at solving Rubiks cubes) about this activity and mentioned that when Karina did it, they needed a lot of help to reset the cubes to a solved state after inevitably someone made a wrong twist when doing the activity.  She was confident she could help them out and fix all the cubes and sure enough, she was in her element at this station (and stayed there for a while afterward continuing to solve cubes that were left there).

One of the families at church has pet snakes and they brought their corn snake to church one evening when they were picking up their son from activities.  Derek was thrilled to hold it.

Derek's hair got really long.  Here it is before he agreed to get a haircut.

Lydia participated in Heart and Sole (the middle school equivalent to the Girls on the Run program she did in elementary school).  She trained after school each week until it was time to run the 5k race with the other participants from schools across the county.  Race day was chilly cold, so everyone was armed with coats, but she and Tanja pushed through it and finished the 5k.

 

 

Lydia beat her time from last year in spite of the cold weather.

 

 

 

In December, we fostered another dog, Lucy.  She is a small beagle and was very affectionate and cuddly with us.

The kids built a fort under the dining room table and made sure Lucy had a spot there.

We were going on a trip for Christmas this year and so were a little worried about fostering her and hoping she would be adopted before we had to leave so she wouldn't just get shuttled to another foster family.  Fortunately, after five days with her, she was adopted by a nice elderly couple that were looking for a small dog that liked relaxing and cuddling.  She could fulfill that job assignment easily.

We made our pilgrimage to the fire station for their Christmas holiday model train display and had fun doing their scavenger hunt looking for various items among the display.