Karate Class and October fun

Rett had his first karate class! There are a lot of rules, and a lot of sitting still, but he loves it. We are working on the sitting still part :) Before class begins, they get their attendance card and then still in a line on the floor and wait.

Then they line up and run across the room in a line to put their attendance cards in the right spot. 

Then the instructors assign each kid a start to stand on. They have to cover it with their feet or the instructors will come and try to "steal" their star. Rett took it very seriously and would fall over a few times because he didn't want to move his feet from his star.

They played a game where they had to watch which noodle the instructor was holding up. If it was one color they were supposed to do jumping jacks, if it was another color they were supposed to do squats. Rett just watched everyone else and did what they were doing a second after they started. Short cut!

Learning a muscle block:

Getting ready for a kick:

Here a few videos from his second class. He is too stinkin' cute!!

Rett came out to find me and James getting eggs from the chicken coop. He decided to put my boots on the wrong feet and he has no pants or underwear. So typical!

I bought a pumpkin for us to carve and James was very excited and told me that he wanted to "design" it. He even got a piece of paper to show me what he wanted and he watched me carve to make sure I would do it exactly how he wanted it. Once it starts to go bad, we will go ahead and give it to the chickens. It is so nice having a natural garbage disposal!

We made another trip around the neighborhood looking for fence panels and as we were getting out of the truck, we heard Rett yell "Help!". He had unbuckled his seat belt but got caught in it trying to get out. It was so funny!!

Anthony discovered patches of sandspurs in our backyard so he did the only sensible thing and PUT GASOLINE ON THEM AND BURNED THEM. So there are patches of burned grass all over the yard now. Hopefully it at least works and we won't have sand spurs anymore.

Our funny chickens all fight to use the same nesting box to lay their eggs, sometimes at the same time:

A robotics club visited James' school and did some demonstrations with them. I thought this one was pretty cute:

They also had a tshirt cannon that they built and it actually shot tshirts! James said that the shirts were just for the big kids though (the middle schoolers I'm guessing).

The firefighters also made a visit to school for fire safety week, which was very exciting. James still insists that he is going to be firefighter some day!

It was a beautiful night to watch a rocket launch from the boat ramp. It was so neat to see it and then hear it minutes later!

James' school had their annual STEAM night with all kinds of science activities. This was the water balloon slingshot:

They had a visit from "Doug Danger" a motorcycle stuntman. He talked a little bit about safety and not doing drugs (it was very 90's) and then did some stunts for the kids. They were soooooo excited about it, I thoughr they were going to push over the chain barrier and fall into the road!

James was too nervous to try the Van de Graaf generator that you touch and it makes your hair stand straight up. Rett gave it a shot, but since we had just walked through a little bit of rain his wet hair wouldn't stand up. I love his face though!

James really liked the squishy circuits table. They used play doh and wires to make different kinds of circuits to power fans and lights:

It turns out we missed an entire room of exhibits that had the coding robots and bunch of other cool things. We will have to make sure to remember that for next year!