Havoc and Mayhem

Summer Plans

We are in the final stretch of the school year.

We have 3.5-4 weeks left.

I’m not sure just how many days are left because of all the snow days & because we had so many ‘banked’ days to offset them (we go to school 15 minutes or so longer than other schools in the area so we get more ‘saved’ days toward bad weather). I’m sure sooner or later they will tell us when the actual last day is

Or maybe they want it to be a surprise.

I’m starting to make plans for the summer.

First, I am scouring Craigslist for a new pool.

Ours is so out of whack from being blown over in a hurricane and has developed a bunch of small holes, most of which I have found & sealed but it’s still leaking & now I can’t find where. They are all pretty much in the same square 6 inches of space. But no doubt this final one is on the other side of the pool, just to mess with me.

Second, I have decided that the boys only get 2 hours of screen time a day – that’s Wii, computer, DS & tv combined so they’ll need to plan these things.

To save arguing about how long they have been online I am setting up the parental controls on their laptop to only allow logins at certain times of day & for certain amounts of time. They’ll each have their own user ID & password so they can’t argue about someone logging in as them.

Third, we will be reading the Lemony Snickett Series of Unfortunate Events series together for a non specified number of minutes a day. Usually I opt for having each boy doing one of those Summer Bridge activity books to keep their school skills a bit current. But this year I got my hands on some used homeschool curriculum & I’m going to mix in bits & pieces of that with reading the series. Plus there will be our weekly library visit.

Fourth, they will be able to earn extra screen time by being outside or reading – half as much screen time as activity time & you can’t use it for 24 hours, but you can save it up. So they can’t earn more screen time usable that day but if they read an hour a day Mon-Fri, they can earn & save up an additional 2.5 hours for the weekend.

I’m going to need to find a way to track time earned & used.

Fifth, we are signed up for some online classes at Big Picture Classes.

The boys will be taking Kidding Around 4, which will give them a series of prompts and activities that have them put together a sort of art journal 5 days a week for all of July. I think Havoc will mostly enjoy it but Mayhem will moan, as he does, because he has to use his fingers to work the paint brush, pen, crayon, etc, but he needs to keep up with his fine motor skills use.

I am signed up for the Phone Photography Project, which is also through July & challenges, plus lots of tips & tricks & apps to help improve your phone pics. DH & I just upgraded our phones at long last so I have a new phone to work with! Plus our old phones still work as cameras & can connect to the web for apps like Instagram & Flickr, if there is wifi for the connection, so I am hoping to get Havoc, if not he & Mayhem both involved in this class as well

Sixth, we are planning some excursions we’d like to have happen, barring financial emergencies like last year or DH’s job suddenly needing him in Connecticut for weeks like the year before last. We want to go to an amusement park, either King’s Dominion or Busch Gardens. DH wants to take them to another major league game. I’m thinking of taking them museum visiting in either Richmond or DC, depending on train ticket prices & what the sequester does to the Smithsonian operating hours this summer. We’re thinking of trying some geocaching on weekends. We’d also like to hit up a water park or two if I can find some reasonably priced less than hour away.

So no water parks probably, unless I am in the mood to drive.

Some people might go camping.

Not me. But others think it could be fun.

Seventh, I am getting a tattoo. The one I was thinking of getting for my 40th birthday but didn’t, and then was thinking again of getting for my 45th birthday but didn’t. I figure your 46th birthday only comes around once so you might as well make it special. I’m going to get a tree on the inside of my wrist. I’m still sorting out the design but I’ve a decent idea of the general look - http://pinterest.com/staceylynn42/body-art/

Eighth, we will be Vadering and working on Rinda’s summer photo list.

Ninth, the local bowling alley has Kids Bowl Free days Tue-Fri all summer long, just pay for the shoe rental, and the skating rink will have discount open skate from 2-4 on Wednesdays, as well as their Sat 2-4 time. Not sure how much either will happen but I expect it depends on what their friends are doing. They are almost, but not quite, old enough to spend the summer texting friends & making plans. I’m already saving up the cost of adding a ‘non-smart’ phone to the cell plan in a year, as I suspect next summer will be the one when Havoc having a phone might come in very handy

Tenth, it appears there is data stuff for me to do this summer. There is a random task that a former employee used to do once a quarter, going through all the customers’ logged equipment & checking it’s status to make sure they still have it, or if it’s been returned to inventory & new stuff replaced in the system. I can do all the data part of it from home. I can’t go through the actual equipment matching serial numbers (and if people are doing their jobs, there shouldn’t be much equipment to match), but I can make a list for someone else to look (like maybe the people who ought to have done it in the first place), or I can drop the kids at the skating rink and spend 2 hours on random Wednesdays do it. But it ought to pretty much take me about 12-15 hours a week, over 6-7 weeks, to get through it all and summer vacation is only 10 weeks long. So yay for only being underemployed instead of unemployed over the summer!

And then football practice will begin in early August and that will be that for any other plans.

Monday Meander

We’ve had an interesting few days.

Wednesday was a baseball game & we ended up tying.

Saturday was another game & we won, so so far we have a 7-2-2 record.

I think we win the league for ‘most tie games’

I also found my missing travel mug

It’s been in my car all this time. It was on the passenger side, tucked between the seat and the console between the front seats. Tucked in just enough that I couldn’t see it from the driver’s side or the passenger side, and I have sat in the passenger side at least 3 times between losing the mug and finding it again. It wasn’t until we got to the baseball field and I got out of the car and looked in that area for a ball that I saw it.

But now that I have become reacquainted with the lasting heat of the new travel thermos I think I will keep this one for trips where I am drinking the coffee not ones involving keeping the coffee hot for a couple hours, like I need with my job.

Mayhem is getting better with the shoe tying. He is successful at making a knot about 80% of the time, though about half of those are too loose to stay tied.

Still, it’s progress.

We’ve also been playing more dominos with friends

Sunday DH & I went to Lowes armed with measurements

This is the depth of the hallway nook where the washer & dryer are. I want some cabinets built above them, like I saw in a different Lowes a month ago.

There is no reason my laundry nook can’t look like this.

Except there is.

As you can see from above the nook is 37.5” deep.

But cabinets are 12” or at best 16.5”, which is no where near deep enough.

We have a 12” deep shelf over the washer & dryer but I can’t reach anything on it without a step ladder because I can’t reach over the machines & back that far.

Cabinets up flush with the washer & dryer would work so much better!

But DH would have to build some sort of custom support structure to hold it up near the front & it would leave me with at least of 20” of unused space behind as a dust & spider area, which doesn’t work for me. So we’d need custom built cabinets.

So that’s not going to happen any time in 2013

This week I made a frittata & bought a roast chicken & we had chicken & dumplings one night & triangle sandwiches, plus leftover frittata or roast chicken one night.

It was a very poultry centric week for meals. Plus we had fish once.

And I made that 10 egg pound cake again. Using a metal pan & remembering to adjust the temp resulted in a much better pound cake. This cake will be making monthly appearance. Next time with raspberries instead of chocolate chips.

How was your week? Any interesting developments?

Skills Test

These are Mayhem’s shoes

or rather they were Mayhem’s shoes.

As you can see they are unwearable

Cheap or pricy, all of Mayhem’s shoes blow out the same way. The little tab of sole that wraps up over the front of the toes gets ripped down and takes the sole with it eventually.

Please note these are velcro shoes.

All velcro shoes available around here have this sole design; one that catches easily on playground tarmac & field dirt & gets dragged on the ground on swings & bikes. The kind of shoes that have a sole edge that wraps around the shoes only come in tie style shoes.

Like these

Mayhem’s new shoes.

But there is a problem.

Mayhem, at age 9, cannot tie his shoes.

Mayhem has issues with fine motor skills. It’s why his handwriting is atrocious & why there is always a huge mess around his plate after using silverware.

Oh the issues aren’t that bad – not bad enough to require outside intervention, though I have tried. The tests always come back with him just inside ‘normal’ range, so no IEP & no help. Though his teachers are good about letting him write out his answers on an ipad, just like two other kids who do have an IEP, so his school work isn’t suffering.

But he can’t tie his shoes and that isn’t the school’s problem, it’s ours.

Here is the thing about Mayhem – if he can’t do it perfectly on the first attempt it’s hopeless and he’ll never do it right ever; BUT! if he can do it once, then he has mastered it and never has to do it again.

It makes it very hard to teach him some things, especially things that involve fine motor skills, like tying shoes.

This is the reaction we end up with 98% of the time.

Because he is “DOING EXCATLY WHAT YOU SAID AND IT DOESN’T WORK!!!! EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID!! WHAT DO YOU MEAN OVER?!? YOU SAID UNDER!!!”

We’ve tried 3 different tying methods. All 3 of us (including Havoc) have taken turns trying to show Mayhem how to tie his shoes. I’ve stooped to threats, telling him he has to learn to tie his shoes because if he thinks I am coming to all his college football games & tying his cleats for him he better start thinking again right now.

Basically he can’t hold a loop of lace in one hand and work the other lace around it. He also can’t hold two loops of lace & cross them over and pull one through to tie them. Nor can he work the ‘magic fingers’ version because it involves opening his fingers & grasping the lace around one finger at the same time as another.

His fingers just don’t want to work that way.

Havoc had a frustrating time learning too, which is why I can now tie shoes 3 different ways. The double loop method worked best for Havoc. DH had never seen it before so he was confused when Havoc showed him.

It took me a dozen tries to figure out the magic fingers one and I too was “DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOU SAID!!” and couldn’t make the knot work.

So I understand the frustration with seeing it and not understanding it, even with photos, & step by step instructions & a youtube video. There was a point I just wasn’t getting. I even succeeded twice before I realized how I was doing it.

But we are now on day 6 of the “shoe tying lesson” and we still have about a 50% success rate with Mayhem.

It’s a problem we often forget. He just has bad handwriting & is a messy eater. But then we encounter this and remember it’s an actual issue. Not just him being lazy or not trying to be neat. He genuinely has a problem with his fine motor skills. His fingers really can’t work the way he wants them too without far more effort than most people have to make.

But we are getting there.

It just takes more time than we expect.

Wordy Wednesday

Our back atrium.

Before we put the clear roofing over it the drains would clog with dead leaves & rain would back up and if there was enough of it it would flood the back bedrooms. After the last such flooding we had to replace the carpet in both rooms with wood flooring & and we put the clear roofing over the atrium itself.

But now we have a new issue. By covering the area we have apparently created the perfect wasp habitat. We can’t open either sliding glass door to allow for a cross breeze because there multiple wasp nests around the door frames & the screens don’t fit so well that they keep the wasps out of the house.

We’d started using the area as storage for things that don’t need to be 100% sheltered from the weather but as you can see, lack of upkeep due to the wasp issue has made the place a dump.

And as you can also see we have a vine/weed/honeysuckle overgrowth issue because the conditions are perfect and the fear of wasps keeps us from weeding.

We need to get rid of the wasps, then clear the atrium out & weed, then power wash the whole thing, then get new screens for the doors.

Then we have to come up with some way to keep the wasps from reinfesting the place.

Which is why we’ve let it go for so long. The wasps are only just now really becoming an issue for the season. Now is a good time to spray & clean & weed. But then what? How do we keep them from coming back?

Any ideas for keeping wasps away?