Weekend in Review

This is our first fall season in six years that none of our kids were involved in a team sport. We did soccer from 2013-2016 and flag football in 2017. We went from one child being on a team (2013) to two children (2014-15) to three children being on teams (2016-17). I thought that since we weren't involved with a team sport one thing we'd have more opportunities to do was Saturday Science at Susquehanna University. However, it turns out we are only attending once this semester! We won't be able to go in the beginning part of the spring semester due to basketball games, but we should be able to go a few times after basketball is done. We missed a rocket building session because I knew we'd miss the rocket launch session when we were in Maryland last month, we didn't go last week because of the Upward basketball evaluations, we will miss the next one because we'll be at the Corning Museum of Glass, and we missed another one earlier this month because we were at the Pop-Up playground at my university. Even when not playing a sport we only made it

to one of seven sessions this semester. It's a good thing we went yesterday because including my children there were only four kids there! Usually attendance is much higher than that. I'm not sure if it was because of the snow outside or the fact that Thanksgiving is this week, but there were 3 professors, 2 parents, and several college students there for just four kids. We spent part of the time in the science building and part of it near the Susquehanna River. The alpaca farm was less than 4 miles from the university so we drove there in the hopes of feeding and meeting the alpacas, but it turns out they are going out of business and while we were there the very last two alpacas (they owned more than 50 a few months ago) were being loaded onto a trailer. We ran a few errands on the way home, which meant we scratched our plans to go to the children's museum.

After church we drove to Sky Zone. We had three free passes for the kids. We just had to buy them special socks ($3 each). They could have bounced for an hour, but we had to leave after

30 minutes because we had tickets to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert. I've had it on my "bucket list" for many years to attend a TSO concert.

Today I'm giving thanks....

1. Although it means I need to observe four student teachers tomorrow, it was nice having a partial snow day on Thursday and a complete snow day on Friday. My university had a two hour delay on Friday, but that didn't effect me because I don't teach on campus on Fridays. The school I was going to visit was closed due to the snow. The roads weren't good between here and the plant (Paul's brother said many roads were closed) so Paul didn't attempt to go to work on Friday either. He had no trouble getting to work yesterday The kids had fun playing in the snow. We usually don't do much school work on Fridays because of gym and art classes, and I just kept the lesson plan the same even though those classes were cancelled yesterday. I knew they'd be doing science for three hours on Saturday. This meant that I had time to do some cooking, laundry, and grading in addition to homeschooling on Friday.

2. For the Saturday Science program at Susquehanna University. It means the kids get experiences such as using an electron microscope.

3. Usually Sunday is the only day the five of us eat meals together, but we were able to eat our meals together on Friday due to the snow day.

4. That the kids were able to make it to Sky Zone trampoline park for the first time. The boys had never been to a trampoline park before, and it was Nadia's first time at this particular one. We can go once a year for free. We will hold onto those socks and hopefully bounce again next spring!

5. We heard Christopher Yuan and his parents share their story at our church this morning. They have a very powerful story to tell as Christopher went from prison to being a professor at Moody Bible.

6. That we were able to enjoy some Christmas music at the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert this afternoon.

7. Neither of us were able to see our games today because of the time we spent in Wilkes Barre at the trampoline park and concert, but the Steelers and the Giants won today!

8. We packed our lunch today, but we used a gift card to get dinner at Burger King on the way home. Yesterday we got breakfast bagels for our lunch also using a gift card. I'm thankful for gift cards through credit card points!