Fellan turned nine!

This past weekend was Fellan's birthday.  We had two parties for him - one with just the family and one with a few friends.

For the family party, Fellan requested a chocolate, chocolate chip cake.  This happens to be our family's favorite cake (and also pretty much the easiest cake to make!), so I happily obliged.

You can never have too much chocolate!

Fellan originally wanted to have another "Mad Science" birthday party with his friends, but we had talked about only inviting his good friends and I didn't want to pay that much for a party with only 6 kids!

So I talked him into having a party at the park with water guns and water balloons.

It turned out to be great weather and the kids had an excellent time.

One of the kids apparently didn't think the water guns got him wet enough...

Water balloon fight!

Fellan's request: Chocolate cake with green letters. "Happy Birthday" in cursive.

A Better Year

It's been awhile since I wrote an update about Fellan and his Dysgraphia and eyesight problems.  I guess I haven't been thinking about it as much because everything is going so much better this year for him in school than last year!

Last year, at the end of the year, his teacher had basically told us that public school was not the place for Fellan.  That sent us into a whole tailspin of testing, touring and applying to alternate private schools, more testing, receiving a diagnosis of Dysgraphia, and eventually MORE testing and determining that he has some vision problems.

Luckily, after all of that, this year has been so much better than last year.

Within the first week of school last fall, we met with Fellan's teacher to explain to her about his problems with Dysgraphia.  The woman who did the testing gave us a list of suggestions for his teacher - such as not forcing him to do writing work and trying to help him to focus better on his work by folding his paper over, etc. She was extremely receptive to the idea and it has shown in Fellan's confidence and enjoyment of school this year.

We've met with her a few time throughout the year, too, and every time we meet with her, she gives him glowing reports.  He still can't sit still, but she's able to redirect him most of the time and he does fine on his tests, so even though it looks like he's not paying attention, he's definitely still learning.

The most significant change we've seen in him, though, has been his reading.  About 3 months ago, it was like a light bulb went off in his head and he started devouring his Percy Jackson books.  He had been slowly, slowly reading The Lightning Thief over the previous three months, but Zoom! In about three weeks, he read the remaining 3/4 of the book!

And he was off to the races from there.  He is now starting the 5th book of the series and I'm thinking about maybe doing a family book club this summer to start reading the Harry Potter books.  None of us have ever read them, so it could be a fun thing for the whole family to do.

I'm so happy and proud to see him finally blossoming scholastically.  We knew it was in there from the beginning, we just didn't know how to get it out!  Maybe it's all the testing we had done and the occupational therapy that he's been doing.  Maybe it's the fact that the teacher is supportive of him as a person this year.  Maybe it's just that he's maturing and all of this would have happened naturally even without the extra work.  Honestly, I don't care what made the difference.  I just hope it sticks.  :)

Proud Cub Scout with the awards and belt loops he earned this year

One year older

This past weekend was my birthday.  I'm getting really old now.

The husband and Fellan went camping (which I had previously given them permission to do), so it was just the girls hanging out on my birthday day.

We went over to a friend's house and she fed us lunch and had cake for me.  I thanked her for not putting 41 candles on the cake and she said, "Oh! I told my mom you were 42!" Oy vey!

Quick trip to Frederickburg

The kids got Good Friday off from school, so we packed up some stuff and headed out to Fredericksburg, TX for some hiking, biking, wine tasting, and brats.

We drove up on Thursday evening so we could get a head start on the fun on Friday morning.  Unfortunately, by the time we actually got up, had breakfast and headed out to Enchanted Rock for the hiking part of our plan, the park was full!  I had never heard of a state park being full before, but since there was a line of cars parked on the highway leading to the entrance, we decided to rearrange our schedule a little and go to the wineries first and come back in the late afternoon for our hike.

On the way to the wineries, we found some bluebonnets to force the kids to sit in and have their pictures taken.  It's a rite of passage for all children living in Texas...

Again, with the Bluebonnets?!

After taking a million pictures with the Bluebonnets, we headed on to the wineries for some wine tasting (and buying) and then made our way to have a late lunch at Alamo Springs Cafe, home of the "Best Burger in Texas".  Well, since I haven't tried all of the burgers in Texas, I can't say it was the best, but it was definitely good!  :)

We finally made it to Enchanted Rock for the second time at about 5:30 - perfect timing for a late afternoon/sunset hike!

The kids didn't let the slope and rocks slow them down at all.

Mountain Goats

It's so pretty in that part of the state that we had to stop and take several pictures on the way up, but it's really hard to capture it.

Yo

'Sup?

We made it to the top in about 20 minutes!  The husband and I were wheezing along behind the kids, who exclaimed something like, "That's it?! I wanted to climb more!"

We had to get them to curb their enthusiasm a little bit, though, because we got there just in time to witness a sunset marriage proposal and we didn't want them to wreck it.  (She said yes!)

We had to re-enact the same picture that we took the last time we were there...

 

 

Some of these feet seem to have grown.

And then we had a little fun with the camera angle on the way down.  ;)

Whoa!

The evening finished by stopping by the Altdorf Biergarten for a beer and a couple of bratwurst, but we were still so full from our late lunch that we had to split an appetizer order.  What a shame.

While we were tasting the wines that afternoon, one of the girls pouring wine for us mentioned that there was a somewhat new bourbon distillery in the area, so we made it a point to stop there for a tour on the way to mountain biking the next morning!

One of the stills - not sure if this one was "Fat Man" or "Little Boy"

Yum

And then we were off for some mountain biking at Pedernales Falls State Park.  But we kind of forgot that the terrain in the Hill Country is actually pretty hilly!  The kids had a hard time riding up the hills in the park.  Plus, it was actually a really hot day.  This picture was taken after a rather long hill.

Our family motto: Torture them early and often.

We made it back to Houston on Saturday evening and on Sunday morning, we headed off to church.

Much happier and well-rested

The last couple of months

Well, I would like to say that I have a good reason I haven't been updating my blog lately, but I don't.  So let's just get a move on.

Since we last spoke...

The Pinewood Derby happened.  Fellan's X304 ended up sort of mid-pack for his age group and I managed to snap a picture of it coming in 2nd in one of his heats!  (it's in the closest lane to the camera)

The first heat, the X304 takes 2nd!

The X304 - "Most Lunar"

Marxo had to put together a science project.  She chose to see how much water beans absorb and if it makes a difference if they are small-, medium-, or large-sized beans.  (the medium-sized beans actually absorbed the most water)

We went to Mardi Gras and got to hang out with the extended family.

The girl-cousins are bead magnets, man!

We went skiing and dog sledding in Colorado over Spring Break.  This year, the husband's brother and family joined us, so the cousins got to spend even more time together!

Teaching them the correct way to pose with their skis for the TV cameras

Isn't it fun to have cousins?!  :)

Feeding the dogs after their run

And the Bluebonnets have run their course in Texas. (If I remember correctly, this was the weekend after we got back from Colorado. Amazing what ten degrees latitude does for the weather.)

Obligatory Texas "Kids with Bluebonnets" picture

 Now, I think that catches us up!  Until next time...  :)

Yin and Yang

Azaleas

No winter this year - the azaleas are blooming early.

Leonardo

The big 3rd grade project is due today - it's a "Living Wax Museum", which means that each child was supposed to choose a famous person from history, read a book about him/her, write a book report about him/her, and then give a presentation about him/her in the first person.

There are all kinds of grading criteria for the presentation, too.  It has to be between 1 and 2 minutes (you get points deducted for going over the time limit), you have to include 3 interesting facts about your person, if you dress up as the person, you get extra points, etc.

It turned out to be an extremely time-consuming and in-depth project and the husband and Fellan spent a lot of time together over the last week to get it all put together.  But, I think the result was great.  And Fellan learned a lot in the process.

So, the kids are giving their presentations this morning at school and the husband sent me a picture of Fellan as his historic person.

Meet Leonardo da Vinci:

My father was a notary and my mother was a peasant

I can't wait to hear how it goes!

Fun Friday, or Adventures with Bike Trails in Houston

I am "lucky" to have a job at a company that works four 10-hour days per week.  I put lucky in quotations because while it might sound great to have every Friday off, those 10-hour days are really long.  I'm supposed to be to work between 6am and 7am and then if I get here at 6am, I can leave at 4:45pm (45 minute lunch), but if I get here at 7am (which is when I normally get here because I am NOT a morning person), I have to stay until 5:45pm.  It makes for a late evening.

So I try to look on the bright side and think about all the bicycling I can get done every Friday!  But that bicycling is usually non-existent...

However, last Friday, the husband and I finally got to take advantage of my day off from work to go for a bike ride together.  We had been checking out Google maps and found a bike path that runs from The Heights (called Heights Bike Trail, oddly enough) all the way to U of H downtown, so we thought it would be fun to go exploring and see if we could find a way to get to it from the Buffalo Bayou Trail, which also ends at U of H downtown.

I know what you're thinking - it sounds like that's a complete no-brainer.  They both end at the same location, so it should be easy to figure out how they connect.  Well, you obviously haven't done any bicycling around Houston.

First of all, we had to ride on the Buffalo Bayou Trail to U of H Downtown.  We've ridden this trail frequently enough to know that it dead-ends right before getting to U of H Downtown.  But we haven't ridden it lately and once you get past all the homeless people living under the bridges, you come upon this:

The hazards of building a bike path along a bayou that regularly floods...

It had rained some in the last couple of weeks and after riding/walking through a considerable amount of mud, you reach this debris field.

But we didn't let it stop us, we grabbed some sticks out of the debris, scraped off our shoes and tires, and trudged through the worst of it.

And we finally got to the end of the path.  That's when the fun started: trying to figure out how to get across the train tracks and the U of H Campus to get to the Heights Bike Trail.  The people who "plan" the bike trails in Houston like to provide challenges to the bicyclists in town.  It's kind of like taking part in one of those extreme adventure races - you never know what they're going to throw at you!

Luckily, the husband and I love a challenge.  We hiked up the embankment towards the railroad tracks and got to a point where we could see what looks like a bike path on the other side of the fenced-off tracks and down another embankment.

The only way to get over there was to head back towards the trail, find the sidewalk that runs next to Travis street, follow that to the other side of U of H, and then ride through the loading dock area of the campus to eventually get to another street (1st Street?), which we could follow to the parking lot and then ride over to the start/end of the Heights Bike Trail.  Piece of cake!  :)

We did have a nice time, though, despite the adventures of our ride.  We ended up riding through The Heights, which is a really pretty and very distinctive neighborhood, and then took Heights Boulevard (which has an actual bike path!) down south to get back to the Buffalo Bayou area and then rode back home.  It turned out to be about an 18-mile ride.

It was a beautiful day and I got my first bike short tan-line sunburn of the year.  :)

Does anyone have an Ark?

By all estimates, yesterday was supposed to be the end of the world in Houston... but it just turned out to be a normal day.  So boring.  ;)

On Tuesday, there was apparently a storm brewing out in west/southwest Texas that the weather people were predicting would hit Houston in the next 24 hours.

I don't know why weather people get so overly-excited and melodramatic when they know that a big storm is coming.  I guess it must be because there's so much uncertainty in what they usually know that they're ecstatic when they find something they can actually predict.

Anyway, they were predicting floods of biblical proportions.  We got an e-mail here at work on Tuesday afternoon warning us that if our office site is prone to flooding that we were to "please pay particular attention to the road conditions in the areas you intend to travel and avoid streets that are flooded."

So yesterday morning when I woke up and it wasn't even raining, I was a little disappointed.

After checking the Weather Channel, though, I saw that the storm had just passed through San Antonio and that it would make it to Houston later in the morning.  That was good news - I would have time to get to work before having to deal with idiot Houston drivers.

All morning, I kept looking outside, waiting for the carnage to begin.

At around 10:30 or so, the dark clouds made their way to our area.  And it began to rain.  But it was just normal rain - not the torrential downpour it was supposed to be.  I must admit that I was disappointed.

It continued to rain for a couple of hours and by about 1:00, it was done in the area around my office.  But at about that time, we got an e-mail and a voice message from the school system saying that they were cancelling all after-school activities for the day.

Puh-lease!  Since when did the people of Houston get so scared of a little thunderstorm?  Oh, right.  I guess there IS a history of this happening...

But seriously, it was nothing like the sudden rain that took the city by surprise a couple of weeks ago.  This is what our street looked like on January 9.

Row, row, row your boat...

Gently down the street...

The husband was at home during the storm and he kept sending me picture updates of the street.  It was a good thing he didn't have to go anywhere!

Luckily, the rain only lasted a couple of hours and the flooding in the street was gone about 30 minutes later.  He was able to make it to his afternoon meeting without any problems, but when he opened the garage door, he was met by a pile of leaves that the waves had washed up to our garage door!

Leaf dam

Now THAT'S what I call flooding.