a peaceful afternoon

I often write about being exasperated with my tweener (who made that word anyway?) but not today. Today big fry and I ran errands for a couple hours just the two of us. I don't know if it was because I let him sit in the front seat, but the kid was cool to be with. No rolling eyes, rude tone, or arguing. Just him and me in the car, talking about learning to drive, what does the P, R, and N mean, doggy diapers and sperm. We talked about hiking harney peak-a friend told him he couldn't-I told him we would, as soon as it was warm enough. The hiking talk led us to my memories of hiking as a child-that is a whole other blog entry-and his papa. He misses his papa, I wish my dad could have heard the admiration and love in big fry's voice when he said "I love papa a lot, he is funny and smart, I admire him". Hmmm maybe I will email him the story right now, I think I should.

Anyway, thanks for the great day big fry, I know there is hope-for many things.

2 more days...

2 more days until the big jump, it looks to be a balmy 42! My goal of 101 jumpers for our them fell quite short, we have 30-one third, which is still awesome!! Our school raised about 20.00 per student which is so inspiring considering the economic times and alot of our families have needs of their own. We have many parents jumping and some community members so I am still super proud! Amazing what a group of people can do, pictures coming on Sunday or when I warm up.

For Bobbi-part 2
I don't make these with the bread coating though


http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Fish-Tacos-with-Honey-Cumin-Cilantro-Slaw-and-Chipotle-Mayo/Detail.aspx

For Bobbi

Here is some love from our Heart day celebration:) The heart shaped meatloaf was small fry's idea.By the way the meatloaf tastes better than it looks in the picture. Hubby laughed at me when I wanted to put it on a different plate for presentation.

sad paper

Small fry has this idea in his head that origami is fun. He brings home books, we buy a kit, and extra funky specially made paper. He starts on his first creature. After about one fold I hear "moooommmmm I need help". I go to save the day, really how hard can folding paper be? Guess what? Pretty darn hard. After the first attempt-folding, creasing, unfolding more creasing-a little bit of scrunching, some choice words, I hand it to him "Hmm it doesn't really look like the picture". WHAT? This was two weeks ago, I conveniently "hid" the origami paper, which somehow found its way on the breakfast bar today. "Mooommmm can you help me do origami" which again translates into "Can you make me a dove?" I think I have met my creative match-origami ranks right up there with sewing

Big Fry

My big fry is going to drive me crazy! As we head into the second half of 5th grade I am getting more terrified of middle school. The kid is seriously moving backwards in the organization and school motivation department. He is continuously forgetting things that he needs for studying, getting discouraged when the assignment is hard AND when he doesn't bring the necessary materials home, and snappy when I try to help. Case in point, he tells me TODAY he needs materials for a scrapbook binder due on Tuesday-AFTER we had looked on the teacher's website and saw it was due-UMMMM was he going to tell me this on his own?? He enjoys getting good grades and is very proud of it. Of couse we have the usual "spring" parent teacher conference-for those select few students that teachers feel they need to absolutely meet with. (And not surprising small fry does NOT have a conference). His midterm stated "no academic or work skill concerns at this time" yet we are still meeting. Who knows. His level of rude tone and even a little absolute refusal is getting past the annoying stage. This weekend we have put the foot down and every rude remark, eye roll, whine is answered with a loss of privilege-the big one being a sleepover he really want to have tomorrow. As of right now it is no go and when he gets the final answer tomorrow it is going to UGLY, but my guess is a lesson well learned. We will see...

Running update

On Thursday after my fabulous appt, I felt so good I went for a run-2miles, I was not impressed with myself. Ugggg it just reinforced my thoughts about running. SO instead of getting discouraged I looked online for some hints. The big one was if you run until you are gasping-you probably won't try it again. Note to self don't do this. The second training tip was to go for distance or length of time, not for speed. So I tried again today, this time on the tread mill and going for longer time and distance. I made it 3 miles with only 3 small walking fast breaks. I am now a little more hopeful, it wasn't so terrible and hmmmm it actually felt a little...good?