The kids finished their first full week of school. Leo noticed there was a kid that played guitar at lunchtime. He got permission to bring his guitar too, so on Thursday he took it to school. He shared it during their "mentor circle" class (kind of like homeroom). His teacher sent me this picture of him playing for Mr. Rob, who is in charge of the cafeteria and also plays guitar.
He got to play at lunch with Ethan, the other guitar player, and Johnny, a bass player, but Leo was the only one that made it on the school's social media.
We celebrated a successful first full week of school by driving through Starbucks. Mousse got a "puppuccino" (unsweetened whipped cream in a little cup).
When Mousse was tiny, he took over Serafina's slipper socks and they became his "slobber socks". They are his comfort object; the way he soothes himself. When I come home after being out of the house, he'll grab a sock and sit on my lap, even though he barely fits on my lap. His socks are in bad shape after lots of love and washes, so when I found a fresh pack at Costco today, I grabbed them.
It was the first day of school! For both kids! In person! At the same school! It was so exciting and nerve-wracking. Well, they were calm and confident. Me? I was much more anxious. It helped that yesterday they had a full-day orientation at school.
I made them take a picture even though they objected because it was just the orientation day.
The orientation day helped them feel more comfortable starting today. It also gave me a chance to learn the best spot for drop off to avoid the absolute madness of the school parking lot. The orientation was only for new students. There were 14 new 8th graders, and Leo thought that was all that was going to be in the 8th grade this year. I guess coming from a super small school previously made him think this was an acceptable number. Each grade has a max of 100 kids, so there were a lot more people today, but still just a fraction of the population of our local public school. All the sixth graders were there for orientation, and Serafina got to reconnect with girls she met at a summer meet-and-greet, as well as make some new friends. Leo came home with plans to join the Dungeons and Dragons club that meets on Thursdays at lunch run by the English teacher. They also got to meet most of their teachers.
Today was the official first day. Things went smoothly in the morning, and I had no problems at drop off because I knew how to do it.
Required first day pictures.
Serafina was super annoyed that I made them take this picture out front of the school. She was in a hurry to go see her new friends.
They still had more of an introduction day than a real day of school, but they got their schedules and rotated to different classes. I'm optimistic it will be a good year for both of them. I'll certainly enjoy having both kids at the same school for a year. I just have to keep my fingers crossed that this damn pandemic doesn't cause problems and they can go to school in a mostly normal fashion.
No matter where I've lived or what is happening in my life, I've always seen my Aunt Sheila a couple of times a year, at least. But along came a global pandemic and we went way too long without seeing her. That all changed this week when she made the visit up to see us. Yay vaccines! I didn't take nearly enough pictures, but we did a lot of catching up, marveling at the goofiness of Mousse, and of course, planning and eating good food.
We went to Santa Cruz on Friday afternoon.
It was beautiful and windy. We hit our favorite ice cream spot, Marianne's, on the way back home. I had the dog with us at the order window and the cashier asked if they could him a "doggy scoop". Um, yes! This dog loves all food. He gobbled up his scoop in the back of the car.
My mom got to do lots of visiting with Sheila too.
Her visit was exactly what we needed to take our minds off the stress of school starting and the Delta variant rearing its ugly head. We hope to take a trip down to Southern California to visit with Sheila and all my family down there some time this fall. Keeping my fingers crossed things go in the right direction, and we can make that happen.
School starts in two weeks. It's been a long time since my kids were in a classroom. Despite the rise of covid cases because of Delta variant and the return of mandatory masking, the school is committed to bringing kids back on campus. Last week we did a little back-to-school shopping with our friends at the mall. It was fun, but of course, we needed to make a return. So today we went back to the mall and had lunch outside before making our return.
It was great weather out and we had a table in the shade.
There were some photo spots in the mall, so obviously we had to take some pictures.
In the spring, I was optimistic about the direction of the pandemic, and made plans with my best friend Tracy and her daughter to get together in central California for a couple of nights in an Airbnb. But unfortunately, the Delta variant has me worried, and with Serafina unvaccinated, we had to postpone our plans. The girls were beyond disappointed. But luckily, Tracy had a surprise trip planned for her and Maya to come up to the Monterey area. We decide to double down on the surprise and meet up in Monterey during their trip, but not tell the girls. Fortunately, we take trips to the coast at least a handful of times during the summer, so my kids weren't suspicious when we loaded up the car for a day trip. It's a little longer drive than we usually do to Santa Cruz, but take a look at this video and you'll see it was totally worth it.
The girls were shocked and so thrilled.
They played a bit at the park until it was time to go get some lunch.
Waiting for the lunch order...
We ate at a park, but I took no pictures because Mousse was being a total pain. He was pretty high maintenance the whole time, honestly.
After lunch, it was time for ice cream, of course.
Don't be fooled by Mousse's cute face in this picture. He was super annoying.
After all our treats, we headed to some beach dunes. We had to pass under Highway 1.
The beach was warm, beautiful and not crowded at all. And finally (FINALLY) Mousse was happy to run around in the sand and wasn't a total pest for the first time all day.
Leo's masterpiece.
Fun photo shoot for the girls.
We were quite proud of ourselves for pulling off such an awesome surprise.
The kids had fun playing our backyard games during my birthday party last month, so I decided to host Backyard Olympics this afternoon.
We had four events, and I made "medals" from foam and ribbon.
And of course, we had lots of snacks.
The first event was hula hooping. Here's Serafina and Sunny competing first. Each athlete got two attempts to hula hoop for the longest time. Sunny's second attempt was an impressive two minutes and 37 seconds. Leo's one and only attempt blew that away though when he managed to hoop for 6 minutes and 40 seconds. He wanted to reach 10 minutes, but he was okay with his time and first place win.
The next event was a ping pong toss. Serafina helped me create this.
They all bounced 8 balls (that's how many usable ones we currently have) to see how many points they could rack up.
The other two events were darts and cornhole (bean bag toss). I was so happy that everyone willingly participated without any eye rolling. In fact, I think they had fun. Leo was surprisingly competitive.
Here he is with his gold medal for hula hoop. Sunny took silver and Sophie got bronze.
Winners for darts.
Ping pong winners.
Cornhole champs. Sidney came late because she was hanging with her friends. We made her do all the events once she showed up, while we all watched. Just what a teenager loves! Ha! She was a good sport about it and even handled some heckling from her sister.
Leo declared himself overall champion and wore this garland that had previously been decor.
I made sure all the kids got goody bags regardless of how they did during the events. It was a fun way to spend a Friday afternoon.
