Developing Hobbies & Cub-Anapolis

This year I made a resolution to develop some hobbies since my life has pretty much been oriented around my kids during the day, and in my spare time, binge watching TV shows. So when I got a card from a friend with fancy writing I thought to myself, "Hey, I used to do fun handwriting when I scrapbooked, maybe I could take that up again." So with some hard earned work money, I bought myself some fancy brush pens and instead of merely rotting out my brains with TV at night, I have been working on writing fancy. I found some fun, pretty quotes on Pinterest that I did my best to copy and here are those results:

I do much better with the non-calligraphy writing. Calligraphy writing with brush pens is super tricky so I have found some practice worksheets and been spending time on those as well. I find that I am really enjoying trying to develop this new talent and I also find that I am staying up a bit too late with it but it's fun to have something new to do.

I also joined a free trial of a piano sheet music club so that I could buy some fun new piano music on the cheap. Best decision ever! I got some songs from the movie Moana, a couple of Lucy's favorite pop songs, and some 21 Pilot songs (which is Tyler's current favorite band). It's been fun learning to play songs that the kids (and Tyler) like so instead of them trying to come and bang some keys too, they tend to sing and dance along instead. I have enjoyed redeveloping this talent of mine! Now I just need to bite the bullet and get the piano tuned so it sounds prettier too, ha ha!

Onto other things, on Tuesday night Steven had his "Cub-Anapolis." With (a lot) of help from Tyler he made a Minecart with attached golden armor. They forgot the wheels and Tyler jimmy rigged it a little weird so that it didn't stay on perfectly but it still turned out pretty cool. (I failed to bring goggles and a helmet so he had to borrow some swim googles and his dad's beanie):

The event in itself was a lot of fun. The boys had a pit stop after every two laps. The pit stops went as follows: 1st- clean windshield (spray and wipe down goggles) 2nd- switch tires (take off shoes and switch socks- this was a horrible pit stop. His feet were SO sweaty and it was SO hard to get his socks on and off and he couldn't help because of the box, ugh.) 3rd- fuel up (drink a whole cup of water with a straw). 4th- photo op (comb hair 5 times and take picture). He didn't finish in first place but he had fun and his siblings got to borrow boxes and take turns running the track too so they had fun as well.

Thursday I did a crazy thing and took a half day sub job for a Kindergarten class at Kurtz. Seriously not sure what I was thinking. There were about 6 kids in that Kinder class that were just packed full of issues. There was one who thought the world was out to get her, another one who was at the constant edge of exploding, another one who seemed completely incapable of sitting, let alone working and who was constantly antagonizing the one who was about to explode... To make it even more fun the teacher was just doing testing next door so she would pop in sometimes to yell at the class and make me feel totally inadequate. Thankfully, when it was time for me to go, she came in and told me how great she thought I handled her difficult class. I was shocked because I was sure she was going to tell me to never come back. Instead she made me feel much better about it all and she even asked for my card. Flattery is bad for me because it caused me to give her my card when I would really rather never stop foot in that classroom again. I mean seriously, it was a ROUGH day.

Anyways, Tyler left Thursday for his first week of work up North. The kids did really well Thursday and Friday but then Saturday hit and now they are making me crazy. To add to it all, it's a 3 day weekend so I get 2 more days of all of them home and no husband. I hope I can survive!