Mommy's Blog: Of trees and prizes and wizards and rain...

A quiet weekend around here. My last day with students came and went with little fanfare. It's a little strange to have one's "last day of school" be NOT on the real "last day." It was a busy, crazy day with busy, hyper students and then it was over and I was on my way home and I kind of had to pinch myself to remember-- oh! that's right! I'm DONE teaching students!

Back to "work" tomorrow, in the form of waking obscenely early to be on a bus with fifty 8th graders heading off to Washington DC. Wish me luck.

Weekend recap, for posterity's sake:

Friday, we cut down some trees.

Three, to be precise, including the big one that used to cover the entire left side of the house as seen in the picture above. Can't even tell it was there, can you? A great tall silver maple, which we were at first sad to see go until we learned that many of it's large limbs were mostly hollow. It needed to go. We are excited to get a bit more sun in our front yard and high hopes for producing more than 6 tomatoes in our front garden.

Friday evening we went to the Boulevard Blast, the adorable annual festival at Jack's school (Jack and Ivy's school, soon!). The kids LOVE the Boulevard Blast. And what's not to love? For starters, there's Hook a Prize, the exciting game of chance wherein you throw a line over this board and then pull back a prize, every time. Every single time. Best game of chance ever. The brown paper bags are opened with eager anticipation: will it be a few pencils and strange mouse shaped Christmas ornament? Perhaps a ceramic pelican? One of the ubiquitous pre-loved Beanie Babies? Or, a ticket to trade in for one of the BIG prizes in a box behind the booth? It doesn't matter. They love them all. All 47million pieces of junk that we brought back home with us.

It's worth waiting in line for. Again and again.

Jack begged for another punch card and stated that he was going to play "hook a prize" all night. Then, out of the corner of his eye he saw the arc of a ball being thrown and handed his punch card to me, racing off to join in a round of that game where one kid throws the ball and all the other kids run and try to get it. It is, apparently, the favorite game of a majority of the boys at Boulevard, from what I could see. THAT'S what Jack spent the rest of the night doing.

Ivy and I visited each of the ticket-games at least twice where she dutifully tried her best and happily brandished her hard earned tickets. We also ate popsicles, climbed on giant truck-robots, and said hi to some friends. And then played Hook-a-prize some more...

We had a lovely evening out in the summery-sunshine, seeing friends and neighbors, music thumping from a DJ, kids dashing everywhere. The event was well attended and I was impressed, as always, by the genuine friendliness of all of the children there. Happily playing and dancing and waiting in lines together, not a speck of meanness to be seen.

We love our school.

I went straight from the Blast to a Mama Speakeasy night, a wonderful laid back evening of drinks and conversation with my inspirational mama - friends. Had to tear myself away to get home for bed a reasonable hour, as the Medina Half-Marathon was set to start at 6:45am on Saturday.

While it wasn't the best race of my life ( more walking than I would like to admit between miles 9 and 11) I was proud of my finish time (2:12:10) considering that we were running in 80% humidity on a course with a 250 foot elevation increase between miles 5 and 10. It was brutal and I was in a complete stupor after finishing. Had to think really hard to lift my arm enough to pick up a donut .

Here I am once I regained enough coordination to take a selfie. One does not have to get a new P.R. in each race in order to feel accomplished.

A quiet midday at home and then I hobbled my sore and tired self off to attend the sweetest birthday party for one of our friends' daughters.

Ruthie is turning 7 and into all things princess and doll-related and so the afternoon was a "doll tea party" complete with bone china and a glitter paint craft. Ivy was a bit overwhelmed by all of the boisterous big girls and was uncharacteristically quiet, but I think she had a nice time.

Nat and Jack joined for the "after party" dinner and with a smaller group our kids relaxed and had a lovely time while the grown ups talked. We are so lucky to have so many intelligent, interesting, generous people in our lives. I love our friends.

As we ate dinner, the line of thunderstorms rolled in. Three rounds of downpours later, and the streets looked like this on the way home:

We decided to take a drive down MLK to check out the big puddles and the stream. The kids had a blast watching the huge sprays of water as we drove through the soaked streets.

At MLK we were treated to quite a show. Normally this is a quiet creek running a good 5 feet below the edge walls you see here. In a few places it had breached the wall and water was rushing on the road. It was very dramatic, beautiful and compelling that way destruction can be...

The rain continued unabated all night and we've had the fun of looking for water infiltration in various parts of our house. We're better off than many friends and have avoided, so far, any full on flooding. While the storms have subsided the rain has kept up, off and on, all day. It did not inspire a trip to the lake, so we instead spent the day sleeping in and doing errands.

Here we are making the most of a trip to the library...

The kids love this bridge. An indoor space with an outdoor feel, it inspires footraces, tickle fights, and generally merriment...

Look at this great big boy. All of a sudden he's turning into a third grader. He's been super sweet all weekend. I'm a fan of 7 and three quarters. It's a good age.

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This evening we had the dinner swap crew over for a dinner playdate wherein we offered a house to meet at and a leftover buffet. For us, that's all it takes for make a party. Have I mentioned I love our friends? We don't have to clean or fuss or even prepare an actual meal and they will come and be wonderful and make for a fun night. Plus, eight kids IS an instant party. Tonight, thanks to Jack's (very) new obsession with wizarding (thanks, book we got from Hook-a-Prize), ALL the kids were donning capes and making wands and wanted to partake in wizarding school. So, here they are dutifully painting glitter glue (magic paint) onto tiny pinecones (dragon eggs) using "charmed" paintbrushes so they can use their eggs in potions later.

Look at these faces. They totally bought it.

(The wizard of the hour did not want to be photographed but here he is stalking off in his new wizard gear. He cut the belt himself. Earlier this afternoon he emerged from his room: "Mom? Do you know where there are some scissors? And, I'm gonna need my cloak."