Monday, February 20

President's Day, so no school for R and no dance for L.  Instead, L had a birthday party to go to.  T had physical therapy on his elbow this morning, and I drove R up to meet him for breakfast afterward.  I sat with them, but had already eaten.  T got free tickets to see Van Halen with a customer, lucky duck (eye roll), so he was out for the evening.  The kids and I had a quiet evening here. 

Anyone who reads this blog or my Small Dog, Tall Weeds blog will not be surprised that the birthday party, while lovely, did not elicit my happy moment, and certainly Van Halen would not have if I'd gone.  My happy moment was watching R show us his "magic tricks," which were really little science experiments.  For the first one, R set a candle in a shallow dish with a bit of water in it.  He lit the candle, placed a tall drinking glass over the top, and the water was sucked up into the glass.  For the other one, R emptied a tea bag and opened the tea liner into a sort of a tube.  He stood the tube on an end on the sidewalk outside and lit it on fire.  It burned down very neatly, and at the end the ash floated up into the air.  Cool.

The other happy moment was eating dinner with the kids.  L is neck deep into the Hunger Games Trilogy and I'm reading The Autobiography of Henry VIII, a novel by Margaret George, so I tossed The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury, to R since it happened to be sitting on the counter, and for a blessed 20 or 30 minutes sweet silence reigned.  That was a happy half hour!

Okay, one more happy moment that I forgot about.  L and I were checking out of Target today and the cashier looked at L and said, "You look familiar.  What high school did you go to?" L replied that she was homeschooled, and the cashier said, "Oh, you look like someone I went to high school with."

Did that make L's day!  She, being only in 8th grade, is always thrilled when someone thinks she's in high school, but that has happened often in the past year or so.  Now this gal thought she had actually graduated from high school!  It was funny to see how ridiculously happy that made L.  =)