Atlanta Tourist

Will is home! We are all very excited. Yesterday afternoon was the last day of the conference, and he made the very wise decision to skip out and do some sight-seeing instead. He visited the CNN World Headquarters, World of Coca-Cola, and the Atlanta Aquarium. No pictures of CNN but Will got some great images of the rest of the attractions.

Atlanta Aquarium - this attraction is world famous and just from looking at the pictures I can see why. There is an incredible quantity and variety of marine animals!! My national meeting will be held in Atlanta in August 2014 and I am already excited about going with the kids to the aquarium.

Cartoon Network - Will also was able to swing by here and get some awesome T-Shirts for the kids, which they LOVED. Annika's is from The Big Bang Theory (a hilarious cat song) and Daniel's is a GLOW IN THE DARK Ninjago one.

World of Coca Cola - this looks like a lot of fun! There are over 100 varieties of different Coke products which you can sample. I must check this place out, too. Will even got to try TAB, the original diet soda, and his reaction to it confirmed that it was just as awful as he remembered from 1987. :)

Dinner - Will grabbed a famous Hotlanta burger for dinner. As part of their marketing ploy to get your email address and contact information, they even make you fill out and sign a waiver to purchase it.

We are glad that Will had a chance to do some fun things in Atlanta, but boy are we sure happy to have him back home!

More Conference Fun

The kids and I have been busy on the home front with VBS - which is awesome timing since that means it takes care of planning for the evening AND dinner. :) Will's second conference started yesterday and he presented his poster session in the morning. He even got mentioned in the K-State First Lady's twitter feed! And in addition to doing an excellent job standing next to the poster, Will also made the poster, did the research for it, and presented it. :)

Here is the twitter post:

https://twitter.com/kstate_1stlady/status/349207488375160834/photo/1

Will also had the chance to attend a veteran's panel yesterday afternoon, which sounds like it was really insightful (getting a chance to hear from veterans about what they need). I had just finished a book that talked about veterans, too, and how we expect so much of them without providing any assistance for helping to assimilate back into society. This is something that really speaks to both Will and me and we are going to try to think about ways that our family could help veterans on an individual level.

Saturday Shenanigans

Yesterday was noteworthy for being a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Daniel. At one point he even declared out of the blue, "My day is worse than Alexander's!!!!!" I think it was a combination of missing Will plus being seriously behind on sleep the last several nights - we are laying low this afternoon between church and VBS kicking off tonight in the hopes of curing at least one of these causes. 

Other than Daniel, the rest of us had a wonderful day yesterday. 

Morning Run - Awesome Aunt Julie came over in the morning to watch the kids so that I could go on a run with my friend Christine! She also made homemade pancakes for the kids (using the completely "scratch" way with white flour, rather than the much-maligned "mix" with whole wheat flour that she tried before). Daniel demonstrates below the correct way to enjoy syrup.  

Further Proof that Will does 90%+ of Our Domestic Work Around Here - I discovered that the washing machine was spilling out water all of the floor in the laundry room. I found out later from Will that the machine always does this unless you run a load every 1 to 2 days (which runs the spin cycle). Um. Yeah. I totally knew that.

National Festival of Breads - in the afternoon, some friends came over (all three of us had husbands who were temporarily missing in action) and we headed over to the new convention center in town for the National Festival of Breads. We were originally going to go to a family event at a dairy farm outside of Junction City, but decided that we weren't up for driving that far and then standing around in the heat with the kids. This event was mainly geared toward adult bakers but there were also kids' activities, including making dough, pretzels, tortillas, and learning about the glories of wheat.

IHOP Dinner - Annika's best friend Rachael came over in the afternoon for a sleepover, which made Daniel OH SO VERY DRAMATIC AND UPSET BECAUSE HE WILL NEVER EVER GET TO HAVE A FRIEND WHO SPENDS THE NIGHT! We all headed to IHOP for an early dinner to take advantage of their free kids' meals (although you need a paying adult for each free meal). You can tell by the pictures the differences in moods among our party members.

City Park Pool - we capped off the day with a visit to the fabulous City Park Pool to take advantage of their Twilight Hours special, where it is only $1/person admission between 6 and 8 p.m. This is the primary city pool and it is really more like a water park or resort than a pool. The pictures below don't do it justice and only capture about 1/4 of it, but it includes a lazy river, whirpool, giant bubble to jump off of, a surfing place, multiple giant slides, a baby pool, a children's playground area in the water, more slides, more diving boards, oh, and a 50-meter Olympic sized swimming pool, too. The only problem is that it is so nice that the city needs a boatload of people to operate it and it tends to have reduced seasonal and daily hours. This was probably all of our family's favorite part of the day (you can kind of see Daniel in the two pictures below with his yellow Batman trunks). 

In Atlanta, Will is having a great time at his conference -  the workshop he went to was really helpful and he got to meet some really neat people. Our family is all really enjoying the fact that we can FaceTime with each other! 

Hotlanta

Will is having a nice conference in Atlanta! The first three days (Thursday-Saturday) are an engineering teaching workshop that is full of lots of helpful information. It is geared toward newer faculty and has a lot of practical information. One thing they suggested is having a set time each day to write, even if it is only 30 minutes and even if you feel like you are only writing crap. We are going to be each other's accountability partners for that. (And see, by putting it on the blog I am making us even more accountable....)

So here are some of the pictures that Will sent me, complete with my commentary, which are recollections of what Will told me two days ago and might not be right. 

Hotel room! Will is on the 53rd floor of a 70 story building. Crazy! 

Olympic Park outside.

CNN Headquarters.

Omni Hotel, where Will's workshop is taking place (right next to CNN HQ).

Eating dinner on the patio at night.

8 Days

So anyone that has heard me whine recently has heard me say that Will is going out of town for a conference for 8 days - he left this morning and will return next week on Thursday. I have racked my brain and I honestly think that is the longest time that either of us has been apart from each other, in like, ever, since we very first met. I think even the summer where we were engaged and I was living in Wichita and Will was in Manhattan we still saw each other every week (?). And if my memory is faulty, then this is DEFINITELY the longest we have been apart since we were married.

Racking my brain further for about 0.5 seconds, I can see that I would be an absolutely TERRIBLE military spouse. Seriously. All the mad respect in the world to you all.

What is the longest that you have ever been apart from your spouse? And is this measured in days? Weeks? Months? Years?

Super Readers

The Manhattan library has a summer reading program that runs from June 1st to July 26th to encourage kids to read over the summer, and kids can earn prizes once they have reached 250, 500, and 1,000 minutes. As of last night, Daniel has reached the 500 minute mark (he can count minutes where someone is reading to him) and Annika has passed 1,000 minutes! Will took Daniel by the library this afternoon to claim his prizes, and Daniel was able to choose the book Dinosaur Roar! to help satisfy his ever-growing love of dinosaurs. Annika has declared that she wants to stay at camp longer so that she can draw more, so we will need to take her another time to pick up her next prizes. ;)

One thing that is a little different to me is that summer reading is by time (minutes) instead of a number of books. I volunteered for four summers in a row in the children's department at our local library when I was a teenager and it never even  occurred to anyone to run the program using anything other than books. Obviously, there are lots of ways to game that system and time is probably a better metric, but I am horrible at keeping track of time and probably underestimate the time that we spend reading since I don't naturally time the activity. So thankful that both kids love books and love reading! Daniel last night declared that it was the best night of his childhood because "we got to read lots of books."

The other big "academic" activity we are doing this summer is 20 minutes of math every day as soon as the kids get home from camp. We have never done this before because I like the idea of summer being a time to relax, but have decided that 20 minutes a day still gives more than 23.5 remaining hours to relax. ;) Annika has been working on a website that the district uses during the school year so that she can stay integrated with what they are doing in school. Clearly anything Annika does IS AWESOME in Daniel's eyes and it is SO UNFAIR if he cannot do it also. To appease Daniel, we bought him a "Summer Before Kindergarten" workbook and he LOVES it. We usually have to pry it away from him when math time is up - "Daniel, stop working on math! Don't you want to go to the pool with the rest of the family?!" Needless to say, I am a little shocked by his interest but I will definitely take it!

Rocky Ford

I'm trying to get back into the habit of daily blog entries. The big excitement in our family today was that after Will picked up Daniel from camp, the two of them headed over to Rocky Ford for Daniel's first time ever there! This is a fishing area just outside of town that is right next to Tuttle Creek. This is where Will's dad spent many happy hours while he was in school here, so Will was finally getting around to fulfilling his parental obligation by introducing Daniel to the spot.

Originally, the big draw was going went fossil hunting - Daniel has been obsessed with trying to a dinosaur fossil, but Will has convinced him that the area we live in was underwater during that area and that finding fossils of sea creatures is much more likely. However, I think that the highlight of Daniel's trip was (1) seeing the big waterfall and (2) watching the gar jumping around in the water. Well, I take that back - I think that the REAL highlight was finding a dead (but not rotting) gar in the grass (as well as a dead, rotting catfish WITH MAGGOTS, but alas, no photographic evidence exists).

Definitely a successful trip for the boys and I know that Annika wants to come visit, too. I have convinced the children that they will need to make this trip with their father, as there is no part of fishing OR maggot-covered rotting animals that appeals to me. ;)