Skate party

I used to check Facebook and post far more regularly than I have the past several years. The past four years I have sometimes gone many months without checking Facebook even once. I would say I have a love/hate attitude toward Facebook. One thing I do love about Facebook is that sometimes I learn about special events. For about eight years I've been a member of a homeschooling group. We have enjoyed doing a wide variety of activities with them over the years, but there have been many times we've opted not to participate in a meet-up because of the location. Most of the members in the group live on average about 40 minutes south of us. We live on the very northern edge of our county. The county just a few miles to the north of us also has a homeschool group. They paid for a party at the roller skating rink, which meant that 75 homeschoolers could skate for free from 10:00-12:30 if you had your own skates. If you didn't, you only had to pay $2 to rent a pair. I bought two more pairs of rollerblades in April so the skating party today didn't cost me a dime. Nadia knew one girl (another 7th grader) as they had been in history camp together last year as well as a theatre camp this summer. Ian won the four corners game, which meant he was allowed to get either a free popcorn or free drink from the snack bar. He picked a popcorn because he wanted a root beer and didn't know that Barq's was root beer. The kids had the unhealthiest lunch possible today -cookies, oatmeal creme pies, popcorn, Cheez-its, chips, pretzels, etc. The boys each had one piece of ring bologna so at least they had a tiny bit of protein. The boys and I didn't eat anything else once we came home. Nadia had some baby carrots and a strawberry yogurt around 1pm. The group is having a Christmas skating party there in December in which they rented the whole rink (meaning up to 150 can attend), and they are also hosting a monthly event at another location beginning the first week of October. We will miss that one because of our vacation, but hopefully we can begin attending in November. That event won't be free, but for $10 a child can spend one hour either bowling or playing arcade games in addition to one hour in the trampoline park and/or playing laser tag. The roller skating rink and the place where the trampoline park is located are each about 20 minutes from our house. I am thankful I learned about this group on Facebook.

I also discovered this week that the same county has a library system like the one we have used the last several years. The one we've been using has three libraries. This other one has six libraries, and the biggest library in this system is bigger than the biggest library in the other system. After we left the roller skating rink, I got another library card. I now have six different library cards! One of the libraries in this system is a little less than 10 minutes from our house whereas the library I have used the most often the last several years is 20 minutes from our house. These libraries actually let people walk in the library and get books off the shelves themselves, which we haven't been allowed to do since early March. I have placed some requests online using my new library card. I have a feeling that I will probably use the "new" library some and also continue to use the "old" library some as well as I imagine it will vary which one has what I am looking for. And I still have in the back of my mind that if it seems that the libraries might be totally shut down again due to COVID-19, I plan to stockpile books so we have some to use while the libraries are closed. I hope they aren't closed again, but if they are, I hope I figure out that it's likely to happen soon enough to stock pile before they are closed. Speaking of stock piling, last Friday the grocery store had an amazing sale on ice cream. If you bought a half gallon (or whatever that size actually is now) of Turkey Hill ice cream, you could get the same size container of Weis ice cream for free. Basically it worked out to about $1.60 per container of ice cream! I got two of the Turkey Hill brand and two of the Weis brand for around $6.50. If we had a chest freezer, I would have purchased more ice cream. Here's to hoping Lowe's actually does deliver a freezer to our house in November. Time will tell.