Happy New Year!

 Since we are studying various different cultures and countries around the world this year, we are also celebrating more holidays than we usually do. Paul is looking forward to celebrating the Canadian Thanksgiving Day because the foods they eat on their Thanksgiving are very similar to what we eat at our Thanksgiving dinner here in the US. Since he loves a turkey dinner, he's looking forward to having a Thanksgiving meal in both October and November this year. Yesterday we celebrated the Jewish New Year - Rosh Hashanah. At lunch the boys had honey on their apple slices, which is a Rosh Hashanah tradition related to asking God for a sweet new year. In the afternoon the kids threw rocks into the river, which is called Tashlich and has to do with confessing our sins. For dinner we had beef brisket, potato kugel, carrots, and honey cake, which are typical things served for Rosh Hashanah. No one had trouble eating the meal (except Paul doesn't like onions so he didn't like the potato kugel), but I don't think anyone was crazy about it either except Ian really liked the brisket. Since the brisket was expensive and the kugel took a long time to make, I'm fine with never making that meal again. The kids seemed to like the honey cake, but in general cakes don't get eaten in a timely manner in our house. Nadia helped make the cake and kugel, and she was very taken aback that one of the ingredients in the cake was a cup of strong coffee. If we don't have trouble finishing the cake over the next several days, then there is a better chance I'll make the cake again at some point in the future. I had cut the recipe for the potato kugel in half. It hit me afterward that I probably should have done the same for the cake. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future when trying new recipes. We put candles in the cake and the kids blew them out. I also had one candle in a candlestick for our meal as it was supposed to be a fancy dinner. I could have used a lace tablecloth, but I didn't. I don't own any china, or we would have used that. I could have brought home some of my mom's china set in 2016, but since I had never minded up until then that I didn't own any china, I passed on that. Originally I had planned to make challah today, but I decided it was too much for one day. We are celebrating several other Jewish holidays this year so I will definitely have other chances to make challah. The next holiday we'll be celebrating is Yom Kippur, which is in about 10 days.  We also read that a new fruit is to be included at dinner. I bought a mango. It's quite obvious I've never purchased a mango before, because when I started cutting it, I realized it wasn't ripe. I'm hoping we can still enjoy the mango in a few days even though we couldn't eat any of it last night. 

The hotel was gracious and allowed me to cancel the reservation with a full refund for October 5-6 even though I had booked a nonrefundable room. Yesterday I made a reservation at a different hotel for that night. I chose to spend a second night at the hotel we were already planning to stay at the night of October 4-5. I thought the rates would be cheaper right now due to COVID-19, but actually I paid more for the second night than I did for the first night 6+ months ago. However, I paid less than what was refunded to me for the hotel I had originally booked so making the switch actually saved us money. Also the hotel I booked last night has an indoor pool, which means four of the seven nights we will be staying at a hotel with an indoor pool. I finally chose what activities to do in place of the ones that aren't possible due to COVID-19. At the moment the plan includes eight National Park sites, four science museums we can get into free with our ASTC membership, four industrial tours, one bison ranch, and seven museums. Those seven "museums" vary greatly - art museum, Underground Railroad Freedom Center, US Air Force Museum, Creation Museum, Kentucky Derby/Churchill Downs, Ark, and Shaker Village. Three national park sites that I had included in the original plan aren't open. I replaced the Hopewell Culture site for the First Ladies site. The original plan included a science museum in Columbus. It's been closed since March, but I added a science museum in Louisville. Two industrial tours were scratched from the original plan (Toyota and printing house for the blind), but I added the Boone Creek Creamery in Lexington, Kentucky where they make cheese and Schimpff's Confectionery in Jacksonville, Indiana. The Kentucky Horse Park won't be open on the day we are in that area. I considered booking a horse farm tour instead, but I ended up adding a tour of a bison ranch instead. I've also included a water front park that has playgrounds into the schedule when we're in Cincinnati as well as walking across a pedestrian bridge over the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky to Jacksonville, Indiana. I typically include at least one amusement park. I had included two for the trip in August that was cancelled. In light of the fact we are paying each month for our Six Flags membership, I am reticent to go to another amusement park right now. Provided life is closer to normal next summer, I assume we will visit other amusement parks next year.

I have a goal of seeing how many states plus provinces of Canada our kids can visit before they are adults. I do not expect that they will visit all fifty states, but I'm thinking the list of states + provinces + DC might reach at least forty. I only count a state if we actually DO something in that state. I've done things in Indiana several times, including attending graduate school there in the summer of 1993, but the kids have only driven through the state when I took them to Chicago in 2017. I had planned to take them to the Indiana Dunes National Park in April, but that trip was cancelled due to COVID. Because I decided to spend an extra night in Louisville I was again searching online for recommended things to do with kids in that city, and that is when I discovered the Big Four Bridge that links IN and KY. I figured if we were going to walk across the bridge to Indiana, surely there had to be something we could do on that side. At first I picked a playground near the waterfront on the IN side, but then I read about Schimpff's Confectionery. We had already done things in Ohio in 2017, but this trip will add three states to the kids' list - Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia. I had included a brief stop in Charleston, West Virginia to the trip when I realized it would hardly add any driving time to our trip as I was already planning to go from Kentucky to five national parks in southwestern Pennsylvania. We're going to be visiting the Flight 93 National Memorial a little less than one month after the 9/11 anniversary. By the time this trip is over the kids will have visited seventeen states plus Ontario and the District of Columbia. I had thought the kids would also visit Wisconsin, Michigan, Delaware, Quebec, and Vermont for the first time this year, but COVID-19 cancelled those plans.

I rescheduled two of Nadia's voice lessons due to our vacation. I purposefully didn't sign up to teach a kids' Sunday School class on October 4. I am signed up to teach the 1st/2nd grade class the other three Sundays in October. Thankfully they are going to offer more kids' classes next month. Inch by inch we're making steps back toward "normal." The kids will miss the gym class on October 2, and Nadia will miss two drama rehearsals. Where she is located is irrelevant since they are done by Zoom, but the times don't work out given our schedule on those particular days. Paul has only taken one day off so far this year for a fun reason - he skied with us on February 24. He's taken off some other days for medical appointments. So I'm grateful he will have eight days off for this trip. I honestly don't know how he functions on as little sleep as he typically gets. There have been days this week that he went to bed after I was asleep, I woke up at 3:30am and discover he'd already left for work sometime prior to that, and then he got home from work as late as 8:15pm. On Saturdays he usually comes home from work sometime in the afternoon, and he usually doesn't go to work on Sundays, but that still amounts to a lot of time at work and very little time in bed each week.. He was looking forward to the Canadian trip in August more than this one, but hopefully everyone will have a nice time. Paul has lobbied for me to add more battlefields to the trip in Kentucky, but I have kept those to a minimum as we did quite a few during the last school year. Nadia's opinion of touring a battlefield is quite the opposite of Paul's.