The Addie and Ivy Adventures

Monday was our first day of Astronaut Training, and it went pretty good!  We started our day with a small snack and some water before doing some Cosmic Kids Yoga for our Astronaut Exercise.  It was a bit of a rough start, with both of us wishing we could nap through it instead, but we finished strong!  Ivy started learning Russian on the Duolingo app, since we discovered that NASA requires all astronauts to learn it before going into space.  Our Astronaut Academics was to work on a science kit which just happened to be about astronomy!  We read cards with planet data (the numbers were difficult for us to comprehend, and the measurement labels were not easy to read when they were written at all) and popped together a mini solar system model - THAT GLOWS IN THE DARK! Tuesday was aerobics for our Astronaut Exercise, and we decided to jump rope.  She struggles getting the rope into a complete swing, but she kept trying!  After school she did some more Russ...

Ivy has been on an astronomy kick for more than a year, and I've been encouraging her little by little, honestly waiting for her to "move on".  She got a telescope with her birthday money last year, and we've been camping a few times with the goal of stargazing.  We've been watching "How the Universe Works"  with a good degree of regularly, and she has a few books on astronomy that she enjoys reading. So, it's safe to say that she has not moved on.  In fact, yesterday she was very emphatic in her desire to be an astronaut.  We were watching an episode of  "Family Matters", where Eddie is talking about his future as a rock star or model - and his father is quite adamant that he become a cop, to Eddie's dismay.  Ivy worried that grown-up Ivy would not want to be an astronaut, and I told her that it's okay to change your mind!  But she was worried because right now she so wants to become an astronaut.  I told her that she can start pre...

This week has gone by in a blur.  This week I made "Special Spaghetti" (homemade sauce) on my own, instead of using Ivy and Addie's cafe.  While I made dinner, Ivy played "vacation at the beach" in the living room with a sunhat and blanket.  We had our Monday Reading Party, featuring Ivy reading a graphic-novel chapter book based on the game Minecraft.  I really do not care for that book, but on our reading parties we take turns reading books, so I picked a Beatrix Potter book that I like. Our biggest activity was on Friday:  Crystal Digging.  We visited the Salt Plains in Jet, Oklahoma to try our luck...  the only lucky ones were the teens, but everyone had a good time overall.  I felt lucky finding exactly 4 shovels at $8 a piece at the Dollar General near my office - they didn't have any hand shovels, but as they say, "You win some, you lose some."  I made sure to pack the essentials the night before, knowing I would come up with more...

We've had a bit of a "hankering" for pancakes lately, so we decided that today was a nice day for it.  After we pulled out all of the ingredients, I sat by the coffee machine with the recipe book while Ivy got to do the dirt work.  I did get distracted by getting a head start on the dishes, so we forgot to mix the egg with the oil and milk, but we remembered just as Ivy poured in the egg into the dry ingredients, so we just dumped in the oil and milk and stirred it all up.  We used the Better Homes & Gardens "New Cookbook" original pancake recipe.  It was really easy and uses only normal baking ingredients, so it is not much more difficult than making pancakes from a box.  We only made seven small pancakes, but three plus two sausages were enough to fill me up (without feeling stuffed).  Ivy had four pancakes, and we still had at least one more batch's worth of batter left - we ended up freezing it to use another day. Several years ago, I ...