Matthew: He happily told Suzanne, on the way out of school today, that he was happy to be a first grader. Happy with Mrs. Dudley, just received his new backpack today, life is good. Of course, school start means soccer start, and Matthew is very excited by that. He was very upset on Wednesday on being left behind at home while Kevin and I went to Christopher's practice (I'm coaching both teams again). Matthew (Heckyl) and Christopher (Jeckyl) are still figuring out multiple ways to get in trouble.....they finally fessed up that the head wound at the football game wasn't from Matthew falling on a rock, it was from the rock that Christopher had thrown at him! Grrrrrrr.
Christopher: The Bennett Woods Open House / Ice Cream Social was tonight...noticed on the wall of Christopher's room that each of the students had drawn a picture of themselves and put their future occupation....Christopher was a "Future Zoo Keeper". Christopher also is excited about the start of soccer season....we realized that this year was also the first year that Christopher can sign up for basketball. Again, he wasn't too thrilled about this, but, pointed out to him that there were some, uh, natural advantages that he would have, and he was willing to try it. Was driving by the school today and saw that the 2nd graders were lining up to go in....I always smile when I see his blond-topped head poking out in line.
Kevin: 7th grade brings all kinds of new opportunities for Kevin; he'll be able to participate in solo and ensemble festivals in Orchestra; he'll be able to try out for All-State Orchestra, the musical is coming (don't know what it is yet...auditions are in 2 weeks though!). Kevin's started cross-country...he had his first timed practice today, finished 2 miles in 14:37, so, that's a heck of an improvement on the pace he'd been running for the 5k he's been doing. 7th grade is the first time he can choose electives (other than Orchestra), he has Movie Fans, Computer Programming, and German (he did request French...we can only assume that there were a ton of 8th graders who wanted the most popular of languages, since Kevin didn't get it. C'est la vie).
Kitchen: Remodeling is slowly moving along, and I probably haven't given this topic as much attention as it deserves. If you'll recall, we ended up demolishing the soffet above the part of the kitchen we've finished and really like the result of having full-height 39" wall cabinets. So, we started to plan on doing that on the other side.Turns out that's not going to work. And it's a major bummer. While the old soffet only had the central vacuum pipe that was an obstruction, and that was easily moved. We had made some holes in the soffet, above the sink, and knew that there was the waste pipe from the bathrooms upstairs that ran through it, but, it looked, from the holes, that the pipe was pretty high and we might still be able to go full height. Finally completed the destruction of the soffet and realized what we couldn't see before, that there were more connections that we had thought and the home builder had started the bend down towards the basement away from the far wall sooner than we might have thought...thus, the pipe at the one end was at least 5-6" lower than at the one end we could see. In the end, we had to pay to rebuild most of the soffet that we didn't have to take out.
But, we're going to try and go full-height on one wall, and are trying to figure out how to handle that over the rest of the kitchen (put 39" door on 30" cabinets is one option we're considering).
