Upside Down

I love that song. It is the title song from the Curious George movie. I think it describes our lives and the mindset we (maybe mostly me) are attempting to maintain as we (I) go about our daily life.
Mady has had the opportunity to ride some world famous cutting horses the last couple of days. These horses have been trained so well, they will train an inexperienced rider to ride correctly. Amazing horses, intelligent, loving, beautiful. Mady has enjoyed riding immensely. She is looking forward to riding again today. She is easily completing the few "workbook" pages she needs to fill in each day and keeping up with all the 4H vet science work she wants to do. It stuns me that people would think that these simple workbook pages provide learning. We ordered the 5th grade national standards test for Mady to take around Christmas. I am amazed @ how simple it appears. The math...well, we all know by now arithmetic is only part of the math picture and logic is a much larger piece to that picture. She could use practice in the arithmetic section, lol! If people saw the vet science work she is required to do, they would certainly wonder why anyone would question if she is being educated.
I think the newspaper reading is making for some interesting conversation. We talked about GM last night. It was all over the paper. Of course the papers are great for leaving out the real details. Seems as though there is just enough there to make one want to dig for more information.
Today is Nenaw's birthday. We won't mention her age here, but let's just say, it's one of those ages that when you were little you thought was old! (She doesn't read the blog so I think it is safe to say that.) She is not old. We went over yesterday and decorated the house for dinner. Papaw cooked steak and potatoes on the grill and Niki and Mady and Ezra baked her cake while Luke napped. We purchased her a Nintendo DS with several games from all and flowers. We ate dinner outside. The weather was prefect. There was an occasional faint breeze through our tall oaks. So faint, in fact, no leaves fell from the trees when we felt it on our sleeveless arms. About the time the sun began to fade from the sky, we lit a fire in the pit. My parents and I and the girls reclined by the fire for a couple of hours after Dom took the boys home to rest. We spoke about everything from the eyeopening, yet disturbing movie "Bordertown" to hanging out @ our cabin this weekend. We spoke about Christmas and what not to do this year as well as what to do when our cousin Danielle comes down for 3 weeks! Everyone is excited about all the upcoming events.
Today, I think we will take a walk and look for some leaves for some Thanksgiving crafts. We stayed up late last night reading the newspaper, reading riddles (to improve our logic skills) and playing with some unconventional math and science experiments and tricks. I love that we can find things to make learning fun and interesting all the time.
Off to search for leaves I suppose.

Sweet...

one word to describe the day today. I spent most of the day with Niki while Big Daddy stayed home with the boys. We started the day by ourselves when we picked up Reeses from the vet. (That is for another post.) We had donuts for breakfast. Niki rarely gets to eat anything so sweet but since yesterday was difficult for all of us (Reeses accident) we decided a morning spike in the blood sugar would easily be recovered from by mid-afternoon. Once we arrived home Daddy was off to do "Daddy" things and we all jumped on the trampoline. The boys napped and Niki and I read book after book from the library. We haven't been to the library in about 3 weeks. Every time we make it there I rarely locate anything I am looking for since I am chasing the boys around. The boys each chose books, Luke found a giant reference book on classic cars and Ezra found some Dinosaur books. Niki chose some books on Egypt and I got some craft/activity books since our local library has nothing decent to read besides classic literature-which is fine if you don't already own all the classic literature one person can stand! We made it to the check out counter, where the boys sat on the counter and watched the librarian sticker all our books, when suddenly the fire alarm begins blaring. I turn around because the screaming alarm is directly behind me, and I see Niki standing near the fire alarm with her hands behind her back and an embarrassed look on her face. I smiled @ her and she came over to my side. The children's librarian walked past quickly, smiling as she went, to the back office to call the fire department to alert them of the false alarm. The librarian behind the counter did not smile, or comment, or laugh. I smiled as I told her I was sorry, though I wanted to laugh! We all lugged our heavy books outside and loaded up in the Beast and drove home listening to our music loudly.

Flash forward to this afternoon and Niki is sitting in the kitchen in a sea of books asking me to tell her every other word on the page. We played on Wekinz and Club Penguin and then we decided once Big Daddy was home we wanted to go to the new park here in our town. We took one of our friends with us. Then it was onto the book store, as if we need more books! We spent 2 hours there choosing books for everyone. Once we arrived home we had to read ALL of them and play Pirates of the Carribeain. We also watched a movie we purchased. Now I think I may get to sleep...maybe not. Niki is still up asking to play now. We are planning our next big toy purchase!