Second picture we have of Matthew with no feet on the ground. You'll note Christopher with the big smile on his face. 
The end of the Kids Mile.....
Sigh....hopefully he's learned his lesson about hydrating before a race......
Saturday afternoon was taken up with Matthew's birthday party. First time having a party at Zap Zone and it went pretty well; the laser tag takes up at least half of the time and the breaks work out well for eating the pizza and opening the presents. The boys had a blast playing laser tag, Dad had a blast playing laser tag, and all's well that ends well.
Sunday is pretty quiet; rainy day, went to the movies and saw Monsters -vs- Aliens, which was good, but, not great. 6 weeks until Star Trek!
This week marks the return of parent teacher conferences; Monday was the younger boys, Kevin's was Tuesday.
Matthew: Doing well, some strange letter formation at times, not much else to report....it's 1st grade!
The letters here are all fine; I didn't scan in the pages with weird 'd's and stuff
Christopher: Doing Ok. Math seems to be a strength, reading and writing look to be improving (and we've learned our lesson on this, he'll be working hard on this over the summer...weren't really pushing it last summer and Christopher lost some momentum). Spelling is a total disaster to the point that the teacher commented "at least there's spell check".
Christopher asked to weigh in on math...his answers about reading were about the same; 20 questions, ranked 1, 2, and 3, Christopher is all 2's.....didn't like it, didn't hate it. His writing always says he likes math, but, you can see there's some issue for him with it here...
Kevin: Doing well. Couldn't have much of a discussion of improvement in science, his grade was 100%. Needs to do better on math tests....he's getting A+'s on his homework but B's on the tests...this is part of the being responsible kick that Mom and Dad are pounding on him for (lost his computer again for too much playing and not enough homework). Will be going to the high school for math next year, and that's another step up and he needs to start learning to study soon. But going to the high school will be a pretty cool thing......
Part of Kevin's last math quiz, his score was a 26 out of 28. He missed the one on this page; Mom and Dad can live with that.
Last in a three-part series. :)
Sports sports sports sports sports sports sports sports sports sports
That's it. We're done.
Okay, but, you get the picture. I think my favorite moment of the last week with Matthew was watching him grab his baseball bat and glove and head up the street to Ashton's to play baseball with the 'big' kids. Asked Ashton about it later that week when I was picking the kids up from school to make sure Matthew was doing OK; guess I shouldn't have been worried, Ashton reports Matthew drove one ball over Kevin's head in the outfield. Desperately wants to be the big kid and do the big kids things.....the meltdown this week was Mom and Dad's refusal to allow him to ride his bike in the street while the 'big kids' were going in and out and all over the street.
Way into NCAA basketball right now. Way into his birthday right now. Wants more Nerf-destruction gear....the better to reign foam death on his friends and enemies. Doing well in school, spelling comes much easier to him than Christopher (was throwing around 'sightseeing' last night pretty freely). Very down with the slang "Take that, sucka" and very prone to punching Dad at almost any affront. Doesn't seem to have the length and breadth of friends at school that Christopher and Kevin have..... I don't know if we would have had a party if we would have confined it to Bennett Woods kids, there just weren't enough of them that Matthew wanted to invite. Happily, he has his soccer buddies as well, so, there should be a whole bunch of 7-year olds for laser tag next week.
Even though he would like to be turning 12, not 7, this week, he still can act like a little little boy and soak up the snuggling.
2nd in a continuing series.
Still, far and away, the biggest kid in 2nd grade. Was curious yesterday and did some online research on height predictions....the average prediction would be 6' , but that's a generic prediction based on my height and Suzanne's height; Matthew and Kevin would have the same prediction. Another prediction, still taking Suzanne and my height into account but also somehow factoring in Christopher's current size has him at 6' 2". The high-end prediction would be to double the 3-year height, that would be 6' 8". I don't think the big guy's going to end up there, but, have a hard time thinking he'll only be 2" taller than Kevin at the end of it as well. Had a little concern about his weight as soccer ended and the weather was bad and Christopher continued to pack away the calories, but, it's warmed up, and he's running and bouncing and I don't think that's going to end up being a big deal.
Christopher continues to say 'no' to just about every mention of a sporting event.....Christopher's going to find himself pushed into every one of them, since, always, the end result is a Christopher running up at the end of the event and saying "I had fun!". The latest and greatest addition to this category was the baseball camp last weekend. Christopher and Matthew will be on the same team this summer (woo hoo!) and we figured it was good to attend the one hour camp to get the boys back in the groove. Realized Christopher had grown out of his glove, so, had to get a new one. And of course, Christopher didn't want to go blah blah blah. Get there, the clinic is run by the varsity baseball team, and the boys go through 9 different little stations. The highlight for me was the hitting; they did it off tees in a room with foam balls and Christopher (and Matthew) were just crushing the ball, off the high windows, off the TV monitors, huge smiles all around.
Homework continues to be a challenge. Spelling has gotten a lot better, again, had everything right on a test but FORGOT TO WRITE DOWN A WORD IN A SENTENCE (aaaaagh!). Slowly, slowly, is getting the hang of carrying the one and borrowing the one from the tens column. He's just finishing the Iowa tests and the COGAT tests at school....will be very interested in these results. Will be reviewing his speech progress next week at parent/teacher conferences; looks like next year will be the last year for Christopher in speech therapy. While he might be a little behind in some sounds right now, if they would re-evaluate him right now he wouldn't qualify, he's not a year behind in those sounds. So, next year, when they do re-evaluate, he won't qualify. For the curious, we seem to have decided to hold off on further testing until we get those results and evaluate how the rest of the school year has gone.
Life revolves around Clone Wars and the Disney comedies (Zach, Cody, Hannah, Sonny, etc). He's so excited by the Hawaii trip it's impossible to express in words......went to Bennett Woods for the annual build-a-book event and he was already thinking ahead to next year's event...he'll be building-a-book about Hawaii! This year's book, "Christopher does DC", while nice, is going to be chump change compared to that!
As I've mentioned previously, I've been slowly assimilating Melanie's music collection into my own. I think I've finally finished....in terms of size, Itunes tells me I went from about 72 Gigs to a touch under 87 Gigs, so, a 20% increase.
A few raves and rants are in order.
Filing - As I've discussed with Melanie, I file my music, both in Itunes and in directories on my hard drive, much like you'd find them in a music store (ok, so those are going out of business...). So, Beatles are under B...."Beatles, The" where, Melanie's aren't, you'll find a whole host of directories that start with "The". I realize Itunes is smart enough to skip that word now, but, once upon a time, it wasn't, and neither was Real Player, which is where I started all of my 'ripping'.
The Album Concept - If I don't think enough of a band to own the album, they aren't going to appear in my collection (unless they are in a compilation...more on that later). And, for the most part, if I own one album, I'll try and be completist and own more of them, as long as I like them. Which is why, much to my embarrassment, I have three (3!) Ace of Base albums. Melanie has been merciless in only keeping the songs she likes off of albums, and hitting the delete button for the rest. So, there's a lot of artists that Melanie has, that I like, but didn't copy, because she doesn't have the whole album.
Chicks with Guitars - Way too much of this.
French Movie Soundtracks - Not enough of this. Might have to watch the movies with Suzanne just to listen to the music......
Various Artists - Another frustrating experience with Melanie's filing system. Melanie has imported these types of albums so that the songs fall under the artist names; Scott has them all under the album names and, sometimes manually, puts the artist names in the song title. Again, if I'm looking for "Billboards Hits of the Eighties" in the store, I'm looking in the various artists category, not under each artists names. I guess Itunes makes sense of it, but, finding the Abba albums under the Compilations directory made no sense to me....
Figure it might be worth a few paragraphs to write down some thoughts on each boy.
Getting very tall very quickly; he's about 4-5 inches short of Mom and Dad and that could disappear at any time. Orthodontics are almost over; he wears the retainer only at night now...hopefully, that will be the end of it. Still skinny and doesn't eat very much at all at times (although there are times where he just packs it away....when he does that and Christopher is on his game, the food disappears pretty quick around here!).
School goes well; it certainly feels like he can get A's without even trying (and the 2nd trimester report card was exactly that). Had a close call in math....he's not doing as well on the tests and quizzes and the homework grades pull his scores up, and Mom and Dad have made it clear that the tests and quiz scores are going to come up or there will be repercussions (this is long-winded for...."you need to study before tests"....). Will have to ask what he wants to be when he grows up....not sure if geography-meteorologist is still up there. If he had to name colleges, it would be Northwestern and the University of Washington.
Viola is still there, and Kevin hasn't been as diligent about practicing at home recently, and, again, Mom and Dad have been harping on him about that. Part of it has to be the return of nice weather, but, part of it is just a general disposition to be a teenager and sit around and do nothing for long periods of time. We finally received the DVD from the All-State Orchestra performance, and the video of the six pieces is below.
Kevin is still running twice a week, and track starts next week at school. The first 5K of the year is March 28, so, Mom and Dad are curious to see how Kevin does here......we have to think that he'll do much better than the disastrous run on Super Bowl Sunday and have some concerns (ok, I have some concerns...) that, as much as Kevin's been training, he's been half-assing it, and won't have much to show for it. We'll see....
Kevin's been reading more lately...he's reading "The Rising Tide", historical fiction by Michael Shaara about World War II. Reading two or three months was like viola now....Kevin wasn't doing much of it and was just taking forever to finish a book (it took him about 6 weeks to finish "To Kill a Mockingbird"...he just wasn't trying very hard at it). I think Mom and Dad have pushed the message home here.....we expect him to keep reading and the school minimum (70 minutes a week, 10 minutes a day) isn't enough.
Socially? Mom and Dad think that Kevin has a wide and diverse group of friends, but, don't think that he has one best friend or two to five great friends. We've asked Kevin if he wants to have some friends over for a NCAA-party, or, a movie party, or a bowling event or something and he has no interest in hosting an event. The flip side of this is that he hasn't been invited to an event in a long time, and, the one this year that he was invited to he just assumed Mom and Dad would say 'no' (we were going out that night for something) and didn't tell us about it until too late (and he was surprised to find out that Mom and Dad would have changed our plans so that he could have gone). His lunch time crowd has changed three times this year; went from all boys to all girls to a mix of both with not a lot of crossover between the groups. Girlfriend? ....we don't think he's there yet.....we could be wrong!
The looming bad times? I've explained to Kevin that he's totally mangled his firstborn duties of supporting the Steelers, and while his recent acceptance of the Black and Gold is good, this Seahawk nonsense is tough to deal with. His only other firstborn duty is to faithfully attend the new Trek movie with me, and the little turkey is waffling on it! He's been told, if he's not there on opening night, he's going to Lansing Community College!
As always, the great thaw returns to Michigan. This weekend was bright sun, blue skies, and highs in the high 50's. This meant a return of every kid under in the neighborhood to the great outdoors, and a lot of spring cleaning.
Trampoline: Still love that the Hutsell trampoline is the center point for a great deal of the hijinks in the neighborhood. It's Kevin and Ashton's primary hangout, and they play some kind of game there with Christopher and Matthew that I couldn't explain. Saturday found Christopher holding court inside the mesh with six or seven of his friends playing, again, some game that I couldn't explain.
Christmas lights: Yes, they finally came down this weekend.
Garage: Most families use the garage as a storage area for their cars; the Hutsell's have been utilizing it as storage for kitchen and basement items during remodeling. Of course, once remodeling ended in December it was way too cold to get into the garage and unpack, so, that had to wait for the thaw. Got a lot of it done today...returned 520 cans and bottles to Meijer for our deposit back.
Bikes: Finally had the time (and the room) to take Christopher's ben piece off of his bike and put the piece I got from the manufacturer onto his bike. The fit isn't quite right, but, close enough. I think both boys have the helmets-or-else lesson down...turns out right now they are the only kids their age wearing them.
Matthew with a lego-Clone in Orlando
in the midst of the fever and the puke, the big guy catches some zzz's
Christopher getting ready to sing 'Dr. Seuss we love you!" at Dr. Seuss day.
It was very nice of Christopher's coach to get trophies for the boys. He delivered this to Bennett Woods since Christopher was too busy puking to play the last game; Christopher had a huge smile when he showed it to us after school.
Iphone doesn't take good night pictures; this is Christopher during our Wiley-walk Saturday night; the only light is the orange-sodium parking lot light.
Matthew was asleep on the couch when Suzanne and I arrived home Saturday night after going out to Casino Night. He had a friend.
As mentioned before, my last flights with Northwest weren't the smoothest. And, as may seem to be becoming the norm, I had to offer my opinion to Northwest about the day's events. There's a lot of airline problems that I could complain about, but, I typically only write to my favorite airline when it's 'stupid human tricks'. Weather happens, mechanical delays happen....it's when the human element creates a situation, or, makes it worse, that I feel compelled to let NW know about it. For example, I never would have written to complain to NW about the crazy woman last year...that's not their fault, it's the crazy woman's fault.
And I might not write at all if NW wasn't responsive to my complaints; I might just move on and fly some other airline as I can. But, NW is responsive; always there will be a letter saying sorry, and often enough they'll be frequent flyer miles added as an apology. The crazy woman incident earned me 4,000 miles; I didn't ask for them, Northwest just gave them to everyone.....
So, let's delve into last Thursday night's events. I was trying to get home from work in Dayton...I was booked on the last flight to Detroit out of Dayton, leaving at 6:40 pm. This was going to leave me a three hour layover in Detroit, before leaving at 10:30 for Lansing. And nothing went right from the very beginning. I guess the other background is to point out that it snowed like crazy in Minneapolis that day and there were all kinds of delays and cancellations in Northwest's system.
But, the flights from Minneapolis and Detroit to Dayton were running on time.....and Northwest had already made the decision to delay the flight returning to Minneapolis. So, the decision to delay the flight to Detroit by 90 minutes...when they had a plane and crew on the ground waiting to go made little sense...and then finally NW came to their senses and made the decision to send the plane they hand on hand to Detroit. Sadly, those 90 minutes would be important later......
Boarded the plane at 9 pm.....get everyone on board, and they go to close the door, and well, no closey-the-doory. Turns out the flight crew knew this when they left Minneapolis....the door wasn't working quite right, and they needed to close it manually. And to do that, you need a mechanic to fill out the paperwork that allows you to deactivate the motor for the door and close it manually. And of course, in a small airport, they don't have a dedicated mechanic and the contract one had just left the airport to go home for dinner. So, there's 45 minutes waiting for him to return to the airport THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IF NW HAD HANDLED THE PREVIOUS 90 MINUTES PROPERLY.
So, everyone's on the plane now, and it's always worse to be sitting in the plane delayed as opposed to be sitting in the airport delayed (the airport personnel prefer you on the plane, under control, the flight crew prefers you, if delayed, in the airport). As people started realizing they weren't going to make their connections, they wanted off. The airport personnel weren't going to go through deplaning and reboarding everyone and made it clear, you came off, you weren't flying out tonight. And about 1/3 of the people took that option. I would have considered it, but, knew, even with a big delay, I still was going to make my last-to-leave-Detroit-airport Lansing connection.
I've been sitting there waiting for that last Lansing flight often enough to know....Northwest frequently will delay that flight if they have people coming in so that they can make the connection. I figure weather's bad and causing havoc in the system, really, my chances are good of making the Lansing flight even with all the delays.
Mechanic finally gets back, NW finally gets approval, off we go. Leave Dayton at 10 pm, scheduled to land at 11 pm.
And of course, unbelievably, the Lansing flight left on-time at 10:30.
Talk with Suzanne, she 'suggests' that I drive home (I'm on the fence, but leaning towards taking the hotel voucher). Suzanne did reconsider and try to call back and tell me just to stay but it was too late, I had left the terminal and was going down to rent a car. 11:30 I get the car (and because I have to rent under the company plan), it's $150 for the one-way-drop-in-Lansing deal. Get dinner(!) drive home. Run into the WORST thunderstorms I've been in a long time (think Vaughn!) at about 1 am, finally get home at 1:20 am.
And Saturday, I take a deep breath, and write Northwest and question the 90 minute delay that caused an additional hour delay and the decision not to hold a flight that I've seen held for others frequently in the past (and hey, I'm Gold Elite now. what the hell!). Also spend a paragraph praising the flight attendant who was a saint during the delay (but added some not so kind words for the pilot, who very obviously blamed the ground ops in Dayton for the problems...I don't care who the problem is, NW is stamped on all of your paychecks)
NW emailed back yesterday. Apologized up and down. Asked me to fax my rental receipt to them. Did that today. Within 20 minutes of sending the fax today, NW emailed back again. They will be sending a check for the $150 for the car. They'll be refunding the cost of the Detroit-Lansing flight I never got on. They'll be giving me 7500 miles as an apology.
Which is why, if you're unhappy, you should make your voice heard.
I get to share Monday and Wednesday night with my good friends at Delta/Northwest next week.......
The most amusing part of the trip, when I think about it? When I was flying to Dayton, I had the big layover in Detroit. And for the first time ever, I could go to the WorldPerks club; I'm Gold Elite man, I've made it.
Completely forgot about it. Walked right by it; just a part of the airport that meant nothing to me.......Won't make that mistake next week! Have to at least check it out!!
Finally achieved access to Kevin's scores online. Here's a handy chart for you to consider....
(based on ACT-tested high school graduates from 2006, 2007, and 2008 and reported on score reports during 2008–2009)
Find one of your subject area test scores or Composite score in the far left or right column. Read across to the column for that subject area to locate the national rank for that score. For example, the national rank for a Composite score of 22 is 62. This means 62 percent of recent high school graduates who took the ACT achieved a Composite score of 22 or below.
| Score | English | Mathematics | Reading | Science | Composite | Score |
| 36 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 36 |
| 35 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 35 |
| 34 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 99 | 34 |
| 33 | 98 | 98 | 97 | 99 | 99 | 33 |
| 32 | 97 | 98 | 95 | 98 | 99 | 32 |
| 31 | 95 | 97 | 94 | 97 | 98 | 31 |
| 30 | 94 | 95 | 91 | 97 | 96 | 30 |
| 29 | 92 | 94 | 88 | 96 | 94 | 29 |
| 28 | 89 | 91 | 85 | 94 | 92 | 28 |
| 27 | 86 | 88 | 82 | 92 | 89 | 27 |
| 26 | 83 | 84 | 78 | 89 | 85 | 26 |
| 25 | 79 | 79 | 74 | 85 | 80 | 25 |
| 24 | 74 | 74 | 70 | 79 | 75 | 24 |
| 23 | 69 | 68 | 64 | 72 | 69 | 23 |
| 22 | 64 | 63 | 58 | 65 | 62 | 22 |
| 21 | 57 | 58 | 53 | 56 | 55 | 21 |
| 20 | 50 | 52 | 47 | 48 | 48 | 20 |
Kevin's scores? English 25, Math 23, Reading 29, Science 25, Composite 26.
Looking at the comparisons for the 7th graders in the talent search that took the ACT last year, the percentages are English 91, Math 90, Reading 97, Science 96, Composite 97......
....I can't even begin to describe the flight home from Dayton Thursday night....let's just leave it that Northwest only got me part of the way home and I arrived here at 1:15 am. This could be the subject of a longer post....if I ever feel like reliving those events. Maybe when Northwest responds to my 'rant' at them.....
Friday, I'm at home, with the beginnings of a cold, and the school calls, Christopher is complaining of stomach pains. We talk, he agrees to try and tough it out, I do some more work, and an hour later I get another call...he's requesting evac. Send in the black helicopters.....
This event began the lost weekend. Christopher throws up all day Friday and all-day Saturday (with one very odd 4 hour break of normalcy Saturday morning). Dad's cold coalesces into a whopper of a head cold the likes of which I haven't seen in a while and I do my level best to sleep the weekend away. Christopher does his level best to sleep Sunday away. Only tonight, around 8:30 pm, does Christopher finally show signs of life that make us think he'll be able to go to school tomorrow.
And, for all of that, it was still an interesting weekend. Kevin and I attended the Okemos spaghetti dinner, the annual fundraiser for the music program. Suzanne and I, even with the big guy down for the count, went to our previously scheduled Wharton Center outing and saw "Spring Awakening" (quick review: Suzanne liked it a lot more than Scott did). And we found out that our long-discussed-but-can't-really-believe-it-will-happen plans for Hawaii in Christmas 2009 became a lot closer to reality with the news that we were able to trade our timeshare for a week in Hawaii from 01/01 to 01/08/2010.
For the first part of our trip to Animal Kingdom, I surrendered my camera to Christopher. Here are the highlights of his camera work with his commentary.
"That's a lizard on a very very big rock"
"There are two parrots; they can talk!"
"I like taking picture of my family"
"This is my grandma...she's very nice."
"That is a safari truck!"
"There are two rhinos in this picture"
"There are birds and crocodiles in this photo"
"I like the mom and baby giraffes!"
"The gazelles are far far away"
"I like the big and small elephants in this picture"
"Not all flamingos are pink!"
"There are two lions; one is a boy and one is a girl"
f
