Upstate Updates: Not Rachel

We had a very chilly start to the week. On Monday afternoon, we looked in the backyard and saw snowflakes. You could count them falling, so it wasn't much, but it was still exciting. As the week went on, we've switched to shorts again, but those flakes sparked excitement for the winter.

At school on Wednesday, I had taken my class out to recess and noticed the entire Upper School outside playing. Josiah came to the fence and informed me that Owen, who had won Upper School Director For a Day, had released everyone from Chapel for a bonus recess. He also brought in donuts for everyone. He was dressed as the real Director, who himself was dressed as a student. The kids had a lot of fun with it.

Their school pictures came in, too. No pumpkins made it like originally thought.

Basketball season has begun and all three kids spent their Friday night watching both boys and girls teams play. Henry has spent a lot of time writing a paper this week. It had a word limit of 900, which he soon discovered was a lot harder than expected. At 1100 words, he thought it impossible to cut 200. And there went the adjectives, the however's, and the also's. He learned the power of editing and got it down to 900 words exactly.

I helped Todd take Benson to the vet for his shots. This was a real country vet - way out with one horse looking at us from the field adjacent and another in a trailer behind our car. Benson showed a lot of interest, but alas he stayed in the car and the tech came to him.

Josiah had his second college tour this weekend. It was at SWU, so we were a bit familiar with this campus, but it was good to see it from a Preview Day perspective. We got a tour before going to their campus fair. Josiah talked to quite a number of professors and administrators, most of whom Todd knew. The incentive was to get six signatures so you could be entered into a drawing at the end. Josiah completed the task and his name was later drawn for the prize. We got meal vouchers which was another highlight for Josiah who is always a big fan of all-you-can-eat campus dining. Josiah said he was interested in their media communications major and one professor told him about the professor in that department who has taken his students to Sundance. He's also working on a movie this summer and has his students as part of that as well. They have a very big media room on campus with green screens and lots of filming equipment. Very cool stuff.

Josiah is also interested in how one gets to be Ty the Warrior:

Saturday night, Todd had created seven rounds for our family to play $10,000 Pyramid. All five of us took turns quizzing each other on the categories. When it was Henry's turn to come up with clues, he had a tendency to say, Umm, umm a bit. When it came to Caroline's turn to quiz Henry she said, Don't worry, I'll stutter, too. That's love right there. The kids did quite well with the categories, so now we are working on harder ones. A good one was "Men in the Bible." I rattled off about 25 different names and Josiah would never say Men in the Bible. I finally told him "Not Rachel" and he got it right away. There were others: "Things Mom Likes" and the kids quickly gave the clue of Clean your room. Clean your area. They weren't wrong. For "Things Henry Likes" we all said, Bouncing a basketball and that's all it took to know it was Henry.

The boys played a bit of football over the weekend before we all headed out to rake up those leaves.

We were getting to the end of finishing the front yard when a slight breeze hit. It felt so good, we stopped and looked up from our work. The refreshing breeze was bringing with it the remainder of the leaves on the trees. Very pretty fall picture, but we didn't appreciate the additional leaves on our clean yard. Meanwhile, Benson helped Todd blow the leaves in the backyard. Todd was hoping Benson would frolic and jump in the piles, but he merely marked them all as his own.

Caroline also spent a bit of time training Benson. He looked like a walking circus bear with the stick.