Famille Du Pentium

OK a little background info is in order.  Two factors are affecting our Channukah this year:

1.  The house is literally over-run with toys.  The kids never throw (or give) away anything, and they don’t put them away either.  Yeah, I know, I’m whining, but the point is – they’ve all three been given an ultimatum: throw (or give) away 80% of your toys, and put away the rest, or they don’t get to open any.

2.  The crazy, cyclical financial services market conditions mean that this is a "down" year for Mike.   We’re not going broke, or anything that rash, but we’ll certainly be taking things a bit more "low key" this year. 

That means that we don’t have our usual pile of gifts for the kids, and the small pile that has arrived from relatives will wait until they can do something besides sit and watch T.V. or play computer games.  

That said, we’re still celebrating Channukah.  There’s still the lights, the gelt, the dreidles, and the latkes.  We’ll also be having our famous family get-together this Saturday.  

So here’s what’s happened so far: Evening 1 (first candle lighting), we didn’t light.  Mainly because we cleaned up the living room for the event, then the kids tore it apart again (literally).  

Day 1 / Second candle lighting: We lit candles, and Aaron got enough of his room cleaned up to earn a present.  Since we haven’t purchased them any yet, Aaron opened Nana’s.  Pictures will be posted shortly and I’ll post the link here.

Mike and Marla, who of course keep their room clean :), also opened a present from Nana.  Thanks, Nana!

Today is Day 2 (candle lighting 3), I’ll post about it (and maybe get the pictures up) later tonight. 

Happy Thanksgiving from the Humphries-Dolnicks.

This last week, Aaron had his 5th Grade class 3-day trip to White Pines Ranch in Oregon, Illinois.  This is sort of a semi-working farm / ranch / outdoor education center that includes dorms, horseback riding, hiking, games, food, and other activities.

Aaron had a blast of course, and he took pictures… which have been uploaded here.

Enjoy! 

Ah, the dog days of summer.  Now summer is over, and it’s time to think about school and soccer and ice skating and going to curriculum nights, parent-teacher conferences, etc etc.

All our pictures from this summer are HERE.  You can see everything from Disney in June to the last pictures I just posted, from the first day of AYSO Soccer for Ethan and Aaron. 

Speaking of those AYSO pictures, I’m having a little server-side trouble uploading, and was only able to upload a few.  More will come later this week, so if you want to see them keep an eye open HERE.

The next big picture & blog event will be Hannukah 2007, although I’ll post here (and at the family Picture Gallery) whenever something interesting comes up. 

First of, before we get to business… what’s with all the Llamas around here?  🙂

OK I knew someday this day would come.  My son, Aaron, is now in fifth grade and must be able to recite the Preamble of the US Constitution in order to move on to sixth grade.  When I was a kid, this was a requirement of 8th grade.  But in my day, we weren’t learning algebra in fourth grade.  Whatever.

Anyway, so I knew this day would come.  My son wants to know how *I* memorized the constitution, or at least the preamble.  And what is the response of everyone who passed through Junior High School in the 1970’s?  School House Rock, of course! To this day, I can recite the Preamble from memory, thanks to that famous video.  I’m sure thousands of people my age are the same boat. 

But what to do? the problem is, School House Rock is no longer on T.V. every Saturday morning between every cartoon, anymore.  So what’s an over forty victim of fate to do?   Sing the song to my kids?  HAH!  Fat chance.  Now, it’s YOUTUBE to the rescue!

In the next post, (one article up from this) you will find the actual youtube video of the School House Rock video that teaches the preamble.  I can’t post it inline here because of a quirk with moveable type weblogs.  Those of you who remember, can sing along.  It brought a tear to my eye. 

We went to watch the September 3rd Cubs game at the Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field.  Unfortunately, the Cubs got blown out 11-3, mostly due to Carlos Zambrano giving up eight runs in three innings when the Cubs had been up 2-0.  On the positive side, we had dream seats: row one in Section 19, basically directly behind the plate three rows back from the brick.  We will probably never sit this clloase to the game again, but hopefully we will see a better game someday!

Pictures are HERE. 

Yay, one last post before I leave for Europe – A Day Out with Thomas.  They’re uploading, so if you look at it around 11AM Central you won’t see it.  Wait an hour.  See you in a couple of weeks!

Tomorrow (Friday) we’re going to Union, Illinois to see the annual "A Day Out with Thomas" event.  This is at the Illinois Railway Museum, which features a huge number of running an non-running trains that you can tour, climb on, and ride on.  The highlight of the day is a ride on a train pulled by Thomas the Tank Engine.

We’ll take pictures, as always, however Mike leaves for Zurich on Saturday so it might be late August before the pictures are posted.  I know you will be simply salivating for pictures, so here are some from last year, this year’s will look almost exactly the same :).

BTW this will be my last post until I return from Zurich on August 29. 

Find the pictures of Ethan and Aaron in soccer camp HERE.  Justin was signed up for soccer camp, but he didn’t want to play.  We took pictures of him not playng, anyway.