Category: Max

Years of Costumes We Have to Explain to Everybody

Sometimes, especially Halloween, I can’t help but think I’ve somehow ruined my children. Every year since they’ve been old enough to pick their own costumes, they’ve gone as something so obscure and webby that we end up having to explain it at every house we go to. That’s doubly true since we moved to Savannah and most of our neighbors are retired.

Here’s a quick recap of the last few Halloweens:

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]Spifftacular[/hang2column]

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]Brothers

2006: Max was both Calvin and Spaceman Spiff. Brian was Hobbes.[/hang2column]

[nohang]Crazy enough, in 2007, they were a tiger and an elephant

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]Max & Brian as Pip & Kitteh

2008: Max and Brian from Abe Koford’s awesome web comic, Laugh Out Loud Cats

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]The Dancing Duo

2009: This one wasn’t so obscure… Max was Luigi and Brian was Darth Vader. We still had to explain Max’s costume to the neighbors.[/hang2column]

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]Link and Geno, Ready for Some Treats

2010: Max as Geno from Super Mario RPG and Brian as Link from Legend of Zelda.[/hang2column]

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]My Little Peashooter

And 2011: Brian as a Peashooter from Plants vs. Zombies. Max decided not to dress up this year after failing to manufacture all the pieces he needed to be Gordon Freeman from Half-Life.[/hang2column]

[hang2column element=”div” width=”500″]I have no idea where they get it from…

Me as Walter Sobchack[/hang2column]

[nohang]Happy Halloween, everybody![/nohang]

The boys

The kids have had a fantastic couple of days.

At school on Friday, Brian was recognized for achieving High Honor Roll and perfect attendance and Max was recognized for achieving High Honor Roll, perfect attendance, and was his class’s Super Hawk, which is the best all-around student. YAY school!\
At soccer on Saturday, Brian received the Good Sportsmanship Award, his second of the season, and Max’s team won 5-0. YAY soccer!

I still think Perfect Attendance is silly, but as long as those awards are being handed out, I am going to brag that my kids got them. 😛

Bus change = more talky time

The school changed the bus pick up time. It is now 90 minutes before school starts. Isn’t that ridiculous? I offered to drive the kids to school because that extra hour in traffic is stupid. (We live 3 miles from the school!!) However, Brian wanted to still ride the bus, but Max wanted me to drive him. I went out with Brian and spent 30 minutes waiting for the bus (it was really late) and talking. When I got back home, I tried to finish up the dishes, but Max was really interested in talking to me too and he spent the whole drive and wait talking. So, not necessarily a bad change after all.

Two cute boys!

I’ve been messing with photoshop again and the results are fantastic! Never will I have to worry about one kid not smiling at the right time again! (Knock on wood.)

I started out with two pictures, where the kids were smiling in separate pics:

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and I turned it into one cute pic of the both of them!!

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Bow down to my awesomeness!!

A TV show made for me!!

I saw a commercial for the tv show, My Kid Is Smarter Than Me. This isn’t a jokey show like Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, it’s a reality show about kiddie-geniuses and how their parents try to keep up with them, keep them grounded, and well-rounded. Sounds like something Kevin and I should check out, yes? The show seems to focus on young kids. Parenting Max when he was three was relatively easy. I would make up chemical compounds so Max could compute its atomic mass and he would be in heaven. But now, wooo, boy. A couple of years ago when Kevin came home from work, Max welcomed him with, “Quantum physics is hard!” Imagine what Max’s brain is like now!!!!

Mississippi Fun Time!

I hope I don’t kill y’all’s computers. More cute pics! While visiting my parents, we went to Pep’s Point which has water slides, a river to swim in, canoeing, a couple of docks to jump from, and various other games. Since I wasn’t swimming with them, I made each kid wear a life jacket. They were good sports about it and I got some cool shots:

Brian:

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Max:

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Brian’s hair cut before the Avatar one. I really like the cut, but it’s being overshadowed by the awesomeness of the arrow!

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Brian with glasses. We don’t have many of these. Brian looks so great with them on, don’tcha think?

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The boys being silly:

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Parenting Highs, Max edition

  1. A couple of weeks ago Max participated in the State Science Olympiad competition at Kennesaw University, just north of Atlanta. Max was able to participate because he and his partner took first place in his event, Simple Machines, in the district competition (which had over 30 schools participate) and his school won the Overall First Place trophy. The Friday before the competition, Kevin took off from work, we pulled Brian out of school, and I canceled my appointment with The View (just kidding! One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to stop watching the show; one of the best decisions I’ve ever made) so we could go to the competition with the team. There were 16 members and a dozen or so adults and we were in high spirits, though most of us didn’t really know what was going on. We left Savannah early in the morning so we’d have time to visit the Atlanta Aquarium, which was right on the way. YAY for good planning. See pictures here.\
    The next morning, the competition started early and lasted all freaking day. There were 61 teams, the largest group in Georgia’s history and the largest group in the country, participating in 18 events. Max and a partner participated in two events, Simple Machines and Large Number Estimations. They didn’t place in either event, nor did any of his teammates. Not that we cared, we were just thrilled to be there. (I am not really sure how this Science Olympiad thing is supposed to work because everyone is paired up with a partner. Some of the events are projects, like Bridge Building or Water Rockets, in which it seems natural to have a partner, but some of the events are simple question-and-answer time. Max said he didn’t agree with his partner about a single thing during the Large Number Estimation event. It seems weird to have that extra, need-to-agree element.) But anyway, we were really happy to be surrounded by over a thousand kids and adults who valued education and participation.\
    A side note for my MIL, who homeschooled her two youngest kids. There was a homeschooling group that participated for the first time. I wasn’t sure if they had competed at a local level before being invited to the state competition. I didn’t want some group just jumping to the big game without earning it, you know, so I was keeping my eye on them a bit. They ended up placing in two competitions, and proved they definitely deserved to be there! 🙂

  2. Tonight was the school’s Spring band and chorus concert. (Max is in the chorus.) Both groups sounded so much better than the Winter concert from Dec. I am not sure if it was simply the extra time to practice or if it was the song selection. The audience, and principal, demanded an encore from the chorus and almost half of the audience got up to dance, with encouragement from the chorus director. It was fun and raucous, where appropriate, and the kids had a really good time and it actually made me tear up to see Max singing his heart out.

  3. The school district introduced a fun day of “hands-on learning experiences” honoring the top two performing fourth and fifth grade students on the CRCT Social Studies portion from each school. (The CRCT is a standardized test given to Georgia students in grades 1-8 each year.) Guess who was one of the kids invited? Yup, that would Max. Also, there is a fun day for the top scoring boy and girl from the fourth and fifth grade for the Science portion. And Max was invited to that too! His genius has been documented once again!

Report cards came today!

Brian is doing well in school. The kindergartners don’t get a regular letter grade. Instead, they are evaluated on 100+ skills and knowledge. He’s right where he should be for most things, with a few he excels at and a few he’s still working on. The one “area of concern” is when the routine is changed. I guess he doesn’t handle that well. The last couple of weeks, Brian has been reading to us, which has been a thrill!\
Max received all A’s in the Core Subjects (Math, English, etc), yay! Better yet, all of his grades improved, except for the subjects he got a 99 in last quarter. His actual scores were: Language Arts- 99; Reading- 99; Social Studies- 99; Health- 98; Science- 97; and Math- 95. Max was like, “No 100s?” Kevin said, “That is just to give you something to work for this quarter.” Ha! His grades for the Specials (Art, PE, Music, Spanish) were all “Exceeds Expectations.”\
I should treat my kids for a job well done. What should it be?