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Covering Up
We started off the week with the solar eclipse! We were quite worried about it when we awoke to total cloud cover. We watched the skies throughout the morning, barely able to tell where the sun was behind the nebulous vaporized water. As the critical moment neared, we had all but given up hope of seeing anything interesting, cursing ourselves for having spent time to make shadow boxes. We quickly changed our tunes, however, when the clouds proved quite useful to view the eclipse – blocking enough of the celestial body’s beautiful but dangerous rays, while also allowing enough for us to actually see the moon’s shape. We could almost go without protective glasses, it was so cloudy, but we caught very nice glimpses of it as the clouds thinned out from time to time. Here is one of the pictures we got, using just a normal camera with no filter:
When it was all over, we blinked a few times and headed back inside, having enjoyed it much more than we expected. It’s always fun to be reminded of how small and insignificant one is compared to the unimaginable vastness of the universe. Thanks a lot, Hubble Telescope.
The other once-in-a-lifetime event of the week was Avey’s first day in the Fourth Grade! She was resigned, but excited, and came home with good reports. It seems like she will ease back into the routine pretty well, and should be impressing her teachers and putting her classmates to shame as she always does.
Carver went in with Kira to meet his teacher this week also, but does not officially go to class until tomorrow. He’s pretty excited about it, so I’ll be sure to have a report for next week.
I start teaching again on Tuesday, so I’m sure my students are terrified (as they should be). I’ll try to ease them in with a few stories about serial killers and such (I teach forensic psychology).
The other bit of covering up (besides the eclipse) I want to mention this week is Hakan’s lack thereof. He’s been doing this for a very long time now – he’ll finish bathing and then get out, briefly dry off, and say, “I wanna be a superhero.” Naturally, that means that he wants to don a diaper and his hippopotamus bath towel, and run around the house pretending to chase or be chased by imaginary bad guys. This ought to make good embarrassing material when he’s older. He was quite insistent that he wear his “superhero” garb outside yesterday, so I made sure to document it before the neighbors called in to have us cited.
Merritt has exploded with his verbalization. He clearly says, “Uh oh,” and “No.” We can also hear the undertones of phrases like, “I did it!” and “There he is!” (from playing hide-and-seek). He blabs constantly, so we expect that he’ll be saying more words soon.
Stay tuned for all of that excitement.