Tag Archives: Bunnicula

Settling Into Fall

I’m in bit of shock that it’s not just the second half of October, it’s the last third of October.

We’ve ended up with pretty minimalist external demands—Orff music for Flora once a week, Tang Soo Do for Cinder twice a week, and they both have just started drama for 8 weeks at Evergreen. And it’s been my deadline lax time of year—about to turn into deadline hell, but I have another week of grace, I think—and still, I don’t think I’ve ever felt time pass so quickly.

Perhaps it’s the gorgeous weather? We’ve been able to be outside so much of September and October.

Our Learning Plan, in which I for the first time ever dared to make some more solid predictions, was out the window
the day I sent it off to the School Board. We briefly left Ancient Greece for Venice with The Thief Lord, but are now back into the realm of the Greek gods—as they morph into Roman ones—courtesy of Rick Riordan’s The Lost Hero. Bunnicula‘s made a brief reappearance, primarily in early reader form—if there are other fans of the vampire bunny out there, there’s a new series of mini-chapter books James Howe has been writing called Tales from the House of Bunnicula. They’re both fun read alouds and manageable read alones for a Flora (not a Cinder), so we’ve been enjoying those. And back to the Horrible Science mags. Another new thing: Life of Fred the elementary series—this very oddball approach to math through story. Flora loves it; she devoured the first volume, Apples, in a handful of days, and now we’re more slowly reading through Butterflies. (Cinder’s a passive participant; the math is way easy for him, but I think he enjoys some of the silliness.)

I’ve mostly been focusing on creating good morning and meal routines—with various levels of success. We’ve been getting out to walk the dog en mass first thing in the morning (our definition of first thing in the morning: at the crack of anywhere between 9:30 and 11 a.m.), and I’ve been doing the Taco Tuesday/Pizza Friday meal schedule thing pretty consistently. I think I need to do the same thing to lunch. 🙂 Them kids, they just won’t stop eating!

What’s your fall looking like so far? [originally a yahoo group post]

September 2010 Post-Mortem

“Any establishment that has a dead mouse hanging on a string as part of its decor is a loony bin.”

Chester the Cat, in James Howe’s Howliday Inn, a follow up to Bunnicula

Austen and Flora were obsessed with the Bunnicula books throughout the summer. It seems a fitting beginning to September, the month during which we went mad. Well, the madness occurred earlier, when we planned what we were going to do in September. Which was: 1) finish all for the month work by September 9th (ha!), 2) drive to Manitoba for Sean’s cousin wedding for September 11, 3) continue on to the grandparents’ Otter Falls cabin in Whiteshell Provincial Park and spend a week there, 4) deposit me and Ender at the Winnipeg airport on September 18 for a flight to Calgary while Austen, Flora and Sean returned to the cabin for a few days, 5) while Ender, Dziadzia and and I fly out to Poland on September 19 for my cousin Agnieszka’s wedding (not to be confused with my sister-in-law Agnieszka’s wedding, which took place in Poland in June of 2009—Sean’s right, there might only be five female Polish names…), not to return until September 29, while 6) Sean, Austen and Flora would drive back to Calgary by themselves, just in time for Sean to do some video shoots on September 24.

We did it all, and most of it was fun. At some point, when most of my family is senile or dead, I’ll turn my various trips to Poland into novels or scripts. In the meantime, all I can say: there was a wedding. Fun was had. We came back in one piece. Well, three pieces, I suppose, as there were three of us. Ender learned to walk on his mother’s native soil, and danced at his first wedding aged 11 months and 10 days. And Austen and Flora had their first ever stretch of time without mom.

Not that Sean didn’t appreciate me before—but man, oh, man, was I ever appreciated and adulated all of October.