Hyperscheduled

A quiet moment to update...

After all the excitement we went out and had a comparatively boring time at the kid's museum. They took down the construction exhibit and instead they have a car repair exhibit. It's kinda cute, but I'm slightly bothered by the fact that it's completely bilingual. There's a kind of cultural expectation there which I'm not sure is warranted. 

David got to spent the next night over at a friend's house...one who has CABLE TV. He was therefore able to watch Clone Wars (I guess the Cartoon Network has the animated series on), which was terribly thrilling. Lauren thought it was less so, seeing as SHE didn't get to have a sleep-over. She gets downright cranky about that kind of thing, and has been harassing me endlessly for the past week about having one. Trouble is, she's ONLY FOUR. None of her "friends" are of an age where their parents will allow it yet! 

The next night we went to Fright Fest for the Scouts. This time it wasn't nearly as good; looks like the left all the planning and decorating up to the teenagers, who basically thought that loud thrash metal and weird Batman makeup was the way to go. 

Ew. 

I went to a Health Fair for ICD on behalf of LLL. Made a few contacts, but I was mostly surprised at the number of people who came by and said, "Oh, I did that." By the feedback I got, you'd think that 90% of the Catholic moms in the area were breastfeeding. I was shocked. 

Monday we had to skip a homeschool social event because it conflicted with Lauren's gymnastics class. A couple of boys did show up, however, having to suffer with staying there while their sister took a class, so David was in good company. He's taken to bringing a backpack full of Star Wars characters with him, and he pounces on any boys he sees with, "Hi, I'm David! Wanna play Star Wars characters?" 

Lauren's having a great time; she adores "The Pit," which is full of foam blocks and meant as a place to land without injury. They have the kids jump in there for fun so they're not scared by it later on. I still haven't unloaded the video of her first lesson...this time they had her doing more controlled jumps on a trampoline and using a springboard. She got "all 4's and 5's, but needs a little work on the bars." I told Doug this involves walking up to a chest-level bar and grabbing it with your hands, then lifting one foot and resting it next to one hand, and then lifting the other foot, and while you're rotating downward (since you have no more feet on the ground), you put your other foot by your other hand. So it's a row of foot-hand-hand-foot. Doug has no words for this, other than "(expletive) ow." She's doing well at getting up on the bars, too. And I get asked about three times a week, "Is it gymnastics tomorrow?"

We had a Pack meeting for Scouts that night. (I was surprised; David got beltloops *and pins* for BB gun shooting and archery, and just beltloops for soccer, frisbee, bicycling (despite the fact he can't ride??) and fishing.) Lauren has made friends with one of the girls who is a sister of another Cub Scout; so those two like to run around and shriek and giggle and scream and made a general commotion, so I think next month we'll take a page from David's playbook and bring a backpack full of My Little Ponies. Let's see if we can get them entertained that way! 

The next day was a Den meeting -- and our turn to bring snacks. We've traditionally had very bad luck when it comes to snacks at Den Meetings; last year it was the graham cracker and frosting debacle, this year it's mostly been Cheez-Its and Goldfish Crackers (which he won't eat. They're "too cute.") So, it being mid-October, I brought in a Crock-Pot full of hot, melted carmel and had the boys make their own carmel apples to take home, and sliced up several apples there and passed those out with little cups full of caramel for dipping. Other than the disaster of clean-up, it worked out pretty well. Two or three of the boys turned inside-out over them. I figure they'll be bugging their parents for caramel apples for the next couple of weeks. I also brought along grapes in case anyone didn't like apples; by the time they were done, all the caramel was gone, all the grapes were gone and there were only two apples left.

The overstuffed week ended with an LLL Meeting I was obligated to run, a complete redesign of one of the newsletters that I do for a client, (x2, I might add), and the homeschool bowling league. We had to pick team names; I'm deeply hoping to get our first choice, which is based on the bowling / throwing style of our young players: The Loose Cannons. (You really need to witness them shot-put the bowling ball to appreciate the all-out appropriate nature of this name.) Our second choice is a far-distant "Banana Splits." I thought of going with the cannon theme and moving to "Brass Monkeys," but the kids wouldn't get it and the adults may not appreciate it, so I was good and quiet. 

Tomorrow is roller skating, the next day we're invited out to a big to-do at a friend's farm where the kids will all get tractor rides, pick their own pumpkins, roast hot dogs...

This has been a full week, to say the least. 

The black helicopters finally came...

...and hovered over my house the other morning. It was further complicated by the strong presence of men wearing fatigues and carrying very long guns (automatic? simple shotguns? too quick to tell) speeding through the neighborhood, hanging off the sides of SUVs, and being notified that we were under lockdown. Oh, what a morning!

I should start at the beginning.

I was in bed, and the persistent sound of helicopters buzzing around overhead woke me up. This being rather strange behavior for this neighborhood, I hopped up and looked out the back sliding glass doors, only to see a huge black and white chopper over the house, simply hovering there. He was so close I could read "POLICE" along the top.

Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?

It buzzed off a block or so away, and then came back to hover. By this time the kids were up, too. We had plans to meet with some friends to go to the kid's museum at 10 a.m., but this was an interesting little wrinkle. Were they going to try to bust me for drugs or something? (Yeah, good luck. If there were ever two people less likely to yield anything in a drug bust, it's us!) I made sure all the doors were locked, pointed the 'copter out to the kids (kinda hard to miss, you know?) and told them it was a police helicopter.
"Why is it over our house?" asks the astute seven year-old.
"I have no idea. Kinda wondering that myself. Just stay inside," I said, and went back to the bedroom to let Doug know what was happening and to get dressed. He looked at me kind of blearily and said, "Sweet," and collapsed back onto the pillows. I told him if I was going to get arrested, I had probably better get dressed. He mumbled something into the covers about Gitmo.

I came back out and still, there's the chopper. "Nobody will believe this," I thought, and I grabbed my iPhone, went out on the deck and started taking photos of this thing. I went back in and turned on the radio. Nothing unusual being broadcast. I turned it back off. Police scanner? Don't have one. Surely that's on the net by now? I flipped open the laptop and had just found a page claiming to stream the local scanner frequencies when suddenly there was a pounding on my front door.

I have never wished so fervently that my door had a peephole before now. The kids look at me with large eyes. 

I set the laptop aside and headed for the door.
"Kelly, open up, it's me!" Ah, my neighbor! Good!
I swung open the door, and there she stood, in a far greater state of panic than I. "Can I come in, I just don't want to be by myself at home right now! There are cops running down the street with guns drawn...they went that way...did you see it? These are huge, they look like machine guns! There were cop cars going that way, and FOX 2 News was following them!"

This had the absolute opposite effect on me than it had on her. My blood pressure went down about 20 points, and I thought:
(A) Oh, good, they don't want ME if they're busy passing up my house with drawn guns.
(B) Lots of cop cars, lots of guns, and some helicopters. Man, somebody fucked up. I'm putting my money on a hostage situation, probably some guy holed up in his house with an ex-girlfriend/wife/whatever.
(C) Well, son of a....let's turn on Fox 2 News!

Turns out they were looking for some guy who had apparently shot a 12 year-old little boy the night before closer to the East St Louis area. I guess he was angry about a domestic situation, so he drove over to his girlfriend's house and sprayed the place with bullets, hoping to hit the boyfriend inside. Instead, he struck the girlfriend's 12 year-old son who was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework.

So the guy drives off and I guess wrecks his car nearby and takes off on foot, and now there's this giant manhunt for him. Schools in the area are under lockdown, police swarm down into our neighborhood, and put US under lockdown, too. To wit: 

So that's not good enough, and we have to to bring in the commandos hanging off SUVs like it's some kind of militia-run African nation-state:



We put the subdivision on lockdown and post checkpoints throughout the area...traffic is hideously snarled...



...while police rifle through everyone's car, truck or SUV.



In the meantime we have lots of calls from neighbors coming in on cell phones; people who won't come home because they're scared of this guy, neighbors who have fled with half-naked children because this fugitive might be in the area. In the meantime, we have the running commentary on TV and the live helicopter shots.  The kids were sitting there watching this on TV and listening to the helicopters outside the doors.  (Ever driven into our complex? You go between two retention ponds with fountains...you can see them on this video.)

The neighbor at the end of the block calls and says the cops are using their poolhouse as a hideout to look for this guy as he might be coming down the greenbelt.

Finally they catch up with him...about a mile away in a shed or in someone's backyard...I'm amazed by how many officers they put on this case.

Once the helicopters moved off a bit, the neighbor felt better and headed home; I told Doug I was leaving, and he opted to work from home in order to keep an eye on the house. So by the time I left, the checkpoints were gone (at least in the direction I went) and life was a bit more normal. 

See what you missed?

Over the moon

Lauren, bless her little heart, is sound asleep amongst her Pinkie Pie sheets, clad in a pink/orange/purple/etc. leotard and so excited she might burst. 

We visited GymQuarters today, and after many months of debate we're signing her up. It's gymnastics, you see.

And as you really CAN see, it's quite the facility. Here she is slated to engage in weekly lessons. We went there this afternoon and got information; took DH there this evening to get a good look at it and I decided to buy her a leotard there as well. We were allowed to try them on for sizing purposes. I took her into the bathroom and put her in the sparkly gold one. "Want to see in the mirror?" I asked. She shrieked and ran full-tilt for the mirror over the sink. She's so short I had to stand her on the counter to see. She whispered, "Wow!" and ran her fingers over the sparklies, and beamed at herself. As I lifted her down she somehow rammed into me.

"What the heck was THAT?" I asked her.

"I'm doing a back flip!" she replies happily.

"NOT off the bathroom counter, you're not! You haven't had one lesson yet, you'll break your neck!"

"Not myself," she says in the partly-exasperated kid voice. "Wiff you standing there!"

She runs at warp speed for dressing room, I help her into the pink leotard and she comes shooting back out with a huge grin, leaping in front of the mirror over and over like a Jack Russell Terrier. I lift her up again and she marvels over this new outfit. After much internal debate she settles on choosing the "pinkie" one, and then is crushed when she can't dash right out onto the floor and start swinging on the uneven parallel bars. (In Lauren's world, gymnastics just isn't gymnastics if there's no equipment, floor routines be damned.) She has a promise of a lesson on Monday, however, and I'm allowing her to sleep in the new gymnastics wear.

She. Is. Ecstatic.