Fishing, and Other Randomness

    

From Labor day weekend: Albert and his bff since JH about to help Jacob fly.

Because I love random pictures, I will be posting many older photos that come up in my photo app. I was testing out a moby I made on a very hesitant toddler. I wonder if she'd let me put her in one now?

Ellie chose a Spiderman pole. It failed miserably so we had to return it and get a plain, non-superhero one. Bummer.

Reeled in one of Dad's fish. He is one determined little man.

Caught some algae which she likened to the algae kombucha I drank earlier in the week. Their sense of humor is coming along nicely, thanks to their inappropriate parents. Notice she's wearing a hoodie?? Praise God for a nice rainy day.

     This week was spent mostly outdoors. Albert's schedule is a little screwy this month so we took full advantage of his days off. Homeschooling has allowed us complete flexibility of our schedule and this week we are grateful for all the time we've spent together.
    
     The kids are doing an impromptu, interest-led unit study on fish, and I was honestly getting sick of being walled in, so we picked up some fishing rods and went fishing. Twice. For hours at a time. On Monday it rained the entire 3.5 hours we were there and we experienced a huge benefit of living in Scottsdale... amazing parks. This park had trees and ramadas to protect from the elements (mostly sun, but on the rare occasion, rain), amazingly clean bathrooms, and REAL GREEN grass. I should stop complaining about Scottsdale being so "uppity" because I benefit from the "uppity-ness" nearly everyday. More on that later.

     Although they didn't catch anything on either of the days, they managed to stay super enthusiastic about fishing. None of them got bored. I grew up fishing and I remember being bored a lot- waiting is a fine art. None of them needed reprimanding, only guiding. I didn't get a single complaint the entire time. They all worked together beautifully. It was like I was in a novel written about a woman and her perfect life as a mom. This kind of family harmony is something I strive for, so if it means we go fishing once a week, then fishing we go. Camping also gets the same results except it's harder to camp without a husband.

    
      A few other highlights from this week:

1) I finally bit the bullet and got my haircut. I barely paid for my awesome haircuts in MN. Tim and Cindy (my stylist) are great friends of ours and we spent many weekends getting together for dinner and cards and haircuts. Cindy hooked me up... we cut my hair sometimes twice in a month. This allowed for some super short cuts- ones that need trimming often. Her and I came up with a plan before we moved out to AZ... a cut that would grow out nicely (tear). My faux hawk days are over for now.

2) Ellie is completely potty trained. I hesitate even writing this because I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow with an accident on my hands. We haven't used a diaper at night in over 2 weeks and she seems to have it down. Using the public restrooms for "stinky" is another issue, but hey, I know a lot of grown women who won't even do that anywhere other than their homes.

3) We got some pets! A goldfish that I've already managed to kill, and a snail. We'd love a dog, but it's just not practical right now.

4) We finally figured out our healthcare stuff. In Roch we went to Mayo for everything. The only out-of-network stuff we did was dental. Everyone we knew had the same, or similar, healthcare so we had lots of resources. Our insurance is much different from what we've used in the past so figuring it all out was boring and very grown up, so naturally I had my husband do it. He's a good man.