Fair to Middlin'

GONZO: This morning after Annabelle finished a nectarine for breakfast, she said she thought her really loose tooth was even looser. I asked if I could take a look and it was hanging in there by one or part of one root, max, and I could already see the new tooth coming in behind it.

"We're getting that out here and now," I told her. And so, we did.

This made Annabelle very happy because weeks ago, she had sent the Tooth Fairy an email requesting a busy bee Pillow Pet upon losing her next tooth. Let's just hope the Tooth Fairy delivers.

MAIL MERGE: I believe I mentioned before that I'm (barely) a member of Seattle Homeschool Group. We've gone to one SHG park play day in the last year (we always have a schedule conflict preventing us from going back), and we took those six great science classes that another SHG organized last spring. But other than that, I read their Yahoo! email list (and get lots of good ideas there), and receive the monthly newsletter.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, there was an email asking if anyone was willing to be in charge of procuring the group tickets to the Puyallup Fair in September through the Fair's educational ticket program. I read the program guidelines, and thought, "Well that's a way I can help with little trauma and drama" and volunteered.

And then the trauma and drama started. AFTER getting orders for nearly 70 tickets and submitting them to the Fair per their guidelines/deadline, I learned from the Fair that they may not offer the tickets to the SHG after all, as they were thinking about revamping the program.

And so I had to call the Fair, and email the Fair and worry. And call. And email. And worry. Finally, yesterday, by some miracle, the tickets I'd ordered arrived in our mailbox.

So, this morning, the kids and I went about fulfilling orders. I stuffed the self addressed stamped envelopes ticket requesters had sent, and then it was the kids' job to make sure each envelope had a "to" address, a stamp, a return address, and the envelope had to be sealed. They did a good job on their task - they stayed focused, were thorough and paid attention to detail.

There were a few bleeechs when it came to licking envelopes (frankly, I was surprised CJ did it at all). Annabelle reports one of the envelopes tasted like a fortune cookie.
After we processed the 60 some orders, we took some time to look at the different stamps on the envelopes. I suggested we sort the envelopes by stamps. The categories we came up with were bells, flags, military, people, holidays, Simpsons, pets and art.

We counted envelopes in each category and developed a bar chart (or bar cahrt, as Annabelle spelled it) to illustrate our data. (Clearly, the boring old bell stamp was the favorite.)

Man, I was so happy to get those tickets in the SASEs and in the mail.

The Fair starts Sept. 10 and runs through. We're really looking forward to going and I really feel like we earned it!

SUN RUN:

Midday we set out for Magnolia Village for a run-ride. It was surprisingly hot out!

But before we could go anywhere, we had to inflate the bikes' tires. They were pretty flat (no doubt, in part, due to all the curb hopping we have to do). Annabelle was eager to get a chance to help with the inflating. Afterward, the kids played at the park next to the community center.

At one point, CJ was pretending he was creating "blooper reels." In this photo, he was sitting on the track of the little trolley, asking Christian to make it run into him. What Fun! ;)

FAIR FRIENDS: This afternoon, the kids decided to check in on Club Penguin and imagine their glee when they discovered that it's fair time in Club Penguin land, too.

They had fun playing games of skill and chance, winning tickets and using the tickets to redeem virtual prizes, including ridiculous getups. CJ was a clown earlier today, but it appears he went for a more sophisticated look later in the day. ;)

This afternoon, the kids also played a "Magic School Bus Inside the Earth" game. Annabelle says from it she learned that "sometimes you can actually clean minerals to know what they are."

TONIGHT: After dinner, it felt like the kids had spent too much time inside on such a nice day, so I suggested we walk up to Bayview Park (the one right by our house). It looked like we weren't the only ones with that idea - there were at least a dozen other kids there (which is a rarity for that place).

The kids clambered around on the play equipment and then ran around on the soccer fields. Before we returned home, I snapped this photo of them. This park has a Little League field with a heckuva view. The white arches over Annabelle's left shoulder are at Qwest stadium. A bit off CJ's right shoulder, you can see a white light that's the top part of the Space Needle peeking over Queen Anne hill.