And handsome too?
He had his party this year at a bouncy house party place called "Just Jump," and even though I felt a tiny bit lame not creating a magical-birthday-at-home, those intimations of lameness were overcome by 1. my sheer relief at not having to host a birthday party with 15 (!!) little boys running around my house and 2. Wyatt's excitement and the good time had by all. For the low low price of only about $50 more than I would have spent trying to pull this baby off at home.
Here are some pics of Wyatt's big day:
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| They had a "chamber full of blowing money" thingy (really, what are those called?) that only the birthday boy could participate in. It was filled with fake money that he could then cash in for a prize. However, Wyatt seemed mildly traumatized by the chamber full of blowing money; I think he was relieved when it was over. The capper is that we left without cashing in his fake money for prizes. |
Below, please see my three attempts at taking a photo of all the boys at the party at once. You can blow them up to get the full measure of their hilariousness.
Here he is, blowing out his candles. Yeah, yeah, I also didn't make the cake (hello, Sam's Club!), but that one wasn't my fault. The Just Jump people wouldn't let me bring in homemade food. Really! But the Sam's Club cake was a big hit at any rate.
Jonas came along with Forrest and me to help. We were glad to have him there. Doesn't he look glad to be there? Seriously, though, a cool 11-year-old brother accentuates any 6-year-old's birthday party.
Speaking of Jonas, that poor guy suffered with a terrible bout of the flu that lasted almost three weeks. He lost seven pounds. I hustled everybody else in to get the flu shot after that--nothing like seeing what the real flu can do to make you stick a needle in your arm. But he's over it now and back to his old self, tromping around the house, randomly hugging people and whistling. Gotta love Joe.
And what about the other two kids, you ask? Ethan's been deeply involved in East Ridge's One Act Play Festival. Each school puts on a 35 minute show (they edit down a play), and Ethan's been doing a play called The Big Meal. Ethan plays "Man #3"--essentially every teenager in the show--and it's been so cool to watch him play more subtle, realistic parts. He even gets to have an angry, ranting monologue, which he pulled off brilliantly, considering how rarely he angrily rants in his real life. They competed in semi-finals last week in a group of 10 schools and were among the 4 schools that advanced to finals, which will be tomorrow night. As a matter of fact, Ethan just got home from school (at 8:00 p.m.) after one final rehearsal and waiting and waiting for the trailer to arrive so they could load the set inside it. Poor kid has two hours of homework to do too. He's loved being in all these plays, but I don't think he's come home directly from school more than a handful of times since mid-October. He's a little tired.
Elise and Ethan are also both involved in speech; the season just got underway. Look at the two of them, all speechified up at 5:45 a.m. on the morning of their first meet!
Last weekend Elise got to go to an overnight meet, which was really fun (Ethan couldn't go because of the One Act). She and her good friend had a ball riding the bus for hours and rooming together in the hotel. She's doing prose, which is basically memorizing and performing a work of fiction. Elise is doing a version of a short story by Donna Tartt, and I really like it, although it's not as dramatic as some of her other competitors' pieces. (So many prose pieces are about child soldiers in Africa, suicide, murder, alcoholism etc. etc. There's a lot of wailing and chest clutching in Prose.) I told her that the piece's subtlety will work in her favor once she has it sharp and memorized. She's come a long way already and I know she'll continue to do great. Ethan's doing creative expression again (a piece he writes himself) and has only performed it once so far, but it has a lot of potential.
And then there's Forrest and me. Forrest is really liking the new job. Busy, but good busy. And me? Well, I've had an employment saga of my own. Long story short: right before Christmas I learned that Inver Hills had a dramatic reduction in expected enrollment for Spring semester. Because of that, they had to cancel a bunch of classes. When they cancel a full-time professor's class, that professor then chooses an adjunct's class that fits in his/her schedule in order to get the required full-time contract hours, and the upshot was that I lost the classes I'd been assigned. I was definitely bummed, but after a week or so decided that it might be a good thing. We might be a little shorter on cash than I'd thought, but hey! I'll have all day with the kids in school! Maybe I'll get some writing done! Etc., etc.!
But THEN . . . last week I got a call from the English dept. chair at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. I'd applied there back when I was looking for work and they'd contacted me for Fall, but I'd already committed to Inver. Turns out they had two professors who had to reduce their class loads at the last minute due to illness and were scrambling to get professors inside the classroom. UWRF has a "J-term" (a one month term from Dec-Jan), so Spring doesn't start until the last week of Jan. So I interviewed on Friday, after which they loaded me up with books, showed me my office and said, "See you Monday!" (I probably could have shown up dressed like a homeless woman and they still would have offered me the job, desperate as they were.) So as of yesterday, and today, I'm now teaching at UWRF. The campus is only about 25 minutes away--we're that close to the border--and although it doesn't pay as well as Inver, I really like the atmosphere. I'm not sure what will happen in the Fall, since Inver says they want me back and I don't really want to teach at two schools, But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, as they say. As of now, I'm teaching one MWF class and one T/Th class, both in the afternoon. And I'm glad I am. As much as it's nice to have the quiet house all to myself, I do better when I have to get my tushie out the door for one reason or another.
And that's life at our house for now. Whew! Onward to February.
