Change

The high point and low point of this week came seconds apart from each other on Friday night. We had a re-celebration of Josh’s birthday with some friends. Last week we weren’t feeling great and had a really busy day so I opted for a low key celebrations and a quick and easy cake. This week we had some of our best friends over for a simple, but tasty dinner and a german chocolate cake. Everything was going perfectly until I took my first bite of dinner and...my front tooth broke. There is nothing that can so quickly make you look ridiculous as loosing your front tooth. Lucky Josh gets to celebrate Valentine’s Day tomorrow with a toothless wonder wife.

We have been talking about some basic geography concepts in Kate’s preschool like how the world is round, learning to name the continents, and looking at maps. Kate drew a map of the world on her own this week. She even labeled it: Texas, Brazil (where Makenna will be moving), Roosevelt, and Philadelphia. As far as her world goes, those are all the places of importance.

Jane has discovered coloring this week. If she isn’t playing with polly pockets you will find her hunched over a coloring book intently coloring. She is surprisingly close to staying in the lines, but she hasn’t figured out that you can use more than one color on a page. You can see her concentration as she works on her pictures and there is no distracting her while she is at work (I wonder where she got that?). As soon as she finishes a picture she brings it over and asks me to rip it out so we can hang it on the wall.

We are doing all we can to encourage the arrival of Spring. We even dashed out for a couple of runs this week. The first day of running we were loving the sunshine and bubbling over with energy. The next day, although the temperature was higher, we just about froze to death with the wind gusting along the river. I couldn’t tell whether my legs weren’t working because they were sore or just because they were frozen. Oh well, at least we got out. I also made a brilliant discovery. They say that chocolate milk is the perfect recovery drink, well I came up with a better formula--a slice of german chocolate cake and a glass of milk! Doesn’t get much better than that.

We are just about over all the bugs that have been plaguing us. Kate typed a note to Grandpa Larry one day in the midst of the battle:

GRAMPA MA YOU TAK MI COF A OWA FOR ME LOVE KATE

Translation: Grandpa, May you take my cough away for me? Love, Kate.

I finished reading another book about the American Revolution. It has also been interesting to hear about the events in Egypt unfolding over the last couple of weeks. I can’t help but think that if there had been live, moment by moment news coverage of the American Revolution we never would have won. For starters, the British would have known how weak the Continental Army was and destroyed us after the battle of New York, at Valley Forge, or any of the other opportunities they had to do so. But even things like replacing the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. That process began in a rather backhanded manner. What if “the people” had know exactly what was going on in Philadelphia at the time? Kind of interesting to think about at least. For better AND for worse the world is a changin’.