BUSY, BUSY, BUSY...

Seems like we're always so very busy around here, and the past few months have been more of the same.

I am keeping very busy with my volunteering at M's school. At the beginning of March I was a chaperone for the 4th Grade "Pioneer Days" field trip. Of course, M couldn't possibly attend Pioneer Days without dressing accordingly, so I made her a pioneer dress, pinafore, and bonnet. Dave helped out by constructing her lunch box out of a metal coffee can (unfortunately "good" coffee doesn't come in a can, so we've been struggling through trying to not be wasteful in the coffee department, but I digress...)

My little pioneer:

That same week, I also went on the 5th grade field trip to "JA Biz Town" in Portland. The 5th grade teachers were having a hard time securing parent volunteers, so they asked me, and of course I said yes! What a wonderful time that was! JA Biz Town is a model town in the Junior Achievement building and the kids get to run the town with (hopefully) minimal adult assistance. The kids had been going through the curriculum for a couple months prior to the trip which included checkbook keeping, job applications, interviews, etc. Each student was assigned a job and on the day of they got to do their job.

I was the parent volunteer for "AllState Insurance" and had 3 employees - a CEO, CFO, and Insurance Agent. My job was to say "what does your handbook say" when asked a question. Well, easier said than done...my agent could barely read and worked slower than molasses in January! I ended up holding his hand most of the day and either doing some of his work for him or farming it out to my CEO who was very efficient and ended up with some spare time. All in all, though, it was a great experience and I can't wait for M to get to attend next school year as a 5th grader - and of course, I'll be a parent volunteer again!

More recently we have been working on M's science fair project...This is her first EVER Science Fair project and let me tell you, it has been an experience for all of us! It is way easier said than done to let her do it all by herself. I'm really trying to let her make mistakes and not say, "NO, you have to do it this way" and D has been awesome staying out of the way while we've been working on it. Her experiment? She wanted to see how food coloring would react in a variety of liquids. When she was deciding this was her topic, we used water, tea, milk, vodka, wine, and juice to see if it would work. For the actual experiment, she used several types of milk (skim, 1%, 2%, whole, half and half, heavy whipping cream and soy) as well as juices (apple, orange and white grape), soda (7up) and water as the control (OK, so maybe I helped her determine what a control was...I'm not perfect at staying out of it!).

The table during experiment day:

I will have to post the final product when it's done...

The extra fun part of this is that M doesn't have a ton of word processor experience, so it's as if we're doing Science Fair Project 101 AND Microsoft Word 101 at the same time. She's had some freak out moments when her font/size/word art changed (or disappeared all together), but is discovering the "do over" arrow, as well as getting acquainted with the proofreading function. We still have some typing to do, but I'm confident we will get it all done with time to spare for the Monday deadline :)

On top of my Mommy duties, I have begun to tutor a former student of mine whose parents pulled out of his charter school. That keeps me busy, along with the occasional sub day. Heck, I even worked on my birthday! Probably should have said no to that one - no excuses on that since I knew the kids and what I was getting into...oh well! 2 referrals isn't a bad day...and next time I'm there, the kids will know I mean business!

I think that's about all I'll bore you with for right now. I can't believe it's already April - soon I'll be posting summer fun stories...not soon enough, though!