Car shoes and horseshoes

My van decided it needed new shoes. We noticed that it started...er...riding a little rough. Actually, as I explained to the mechanic, "It feels like someone glued a tennis ball to one of the wheels."

So we took it in and they said that the tread on the back tires was now shot and the steel belt was trying to separate from the tire. That's the same thing that happened to the front tires, and all of those were strange Chinese brands I'd never heard of. Goody. So in addition to the two new front tires the van got in July, it now has two new back tires. (And I, of course, have substantially less cash in my business account.)

Since the van was getting new shoes, I didn't have a mode of transportation for the day, so we were quite stuck. That's not so bad...yesterday was so nice weather-wise (it was 70 degrees!) that I really didn't have the heart to coop David up in the house and make him learn anything, so I released both kids into the backyard. (It's been cold and they were getting stir-crazy, so I didn't even have to shove them out the door...it was definitely more of a catch and release program.) They had a great time. So did the weather last night...it got downright nasty, and we were right on the edge of a vicious storm system. We had high winds, a ton of lightening, absolute sheets of rain, and a little hail. We had the weather up on the TV and the computer for most of the evening; we were under everything from severe thunderstorm warnings to tornado watches until dawn. 

While there were tornadoes outside, I had a couple of tornadoes inside. Lauren decided to get all cute and act hyper and she broke...BROKE!...our desk in the living room. I said something about the fact that I was going to make lunch and she swung off the chair and tried to hang off the keyboard tray and busted it. She didn't just pull it off the track, the actually sheared the plastic brackets off the tray, leaving the screw behind in the wood. Both of us were absolutely livid, and Doug wanted to take the computer away entirely. The compromise is that they can't use anything in the house AT ALL before earning it back. (David has culpability in this since I've caught him leaning on the keyboard tray; I think he probably cracked it at some point and weakened it enough that Lauren was able to break it.) They earn things back by taking care of their own stuff, let alone the big stuff like furniture. They have to pick up after themselves. We took their little chairs away, and they have to sit on the floor for awhile. There's no TV, no computer. We also took away their seats at the table...they got to eat on the floor with the cats (much to the cats' delight) and wash their own plates and put them away when they were done, not to mention sweep up the crumbs. I let them back at the table this morning, mostly for schoolwork. (We did a review on tally marks, graphing and story problems, and then I decided to skip the next several chapters and picked back up with definitions of "sum" and "difference," and working with numbers lines and multiple addends. (i.e., 2+1+4) He had a devil of a time with a story problem; turns out in the end he was confused because instead of writing out the word "dog," the publisher of the book had place a little illustration of a dog in the sentences. So it read "The first (dog) has a red collar. The next three (dog) have blue collars. How many collars in all?" Finally, David says, "Mom, I don't understand. What's a Three-Dog?" We put an "s" behind the illustration and suddenly the sun broke through and he totally got it. "Oh! DOGS! We need two more, so...four.")

You'd think someone else would have seen this before. 

Oh, and the newest from Lauren is that she would like to take piano lessons, please, though any instrument would be OK. And she'd like a horse. Preferably an appaloosa. With a pink horse blanket. "And a rope around his waist." Why? "So I can ride him," she says, with an air of someone forced to speak to a lower life form. Oh. Of course. My bad.