November chills

My Indian Summer has definitely turned to winter this week. Time for a new flag.

Skittles

Skittles from Reid Armstrong on Vimeo.

Justin leaves Monday after seven wonderful weeks. It was pure summer for him this year. I had intended to enroll him in camp, but after a week hanging out at the skate park across the street from Scott's office in Winter Park, he was hooked. He was at that park from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. almost every single day. He would come home at night, take the dog on a long bike ride, eat a refrigerator full of food, help put the kids to bed, soak his wounds in the bathtub and pass out on the couch by 9 p.m. And ... repeat.

As Scott describes it, the whole Hideaway Park skate scene reminds him a lot of his own surfing days. Justin made buddies with a bunch of other kids at the skate park and several times a day they would walk over to the skate shop to play with the tools, tweak their boards and pick up some stickers. Scott said the guys at the shop took Justin under their wing, like he was a little sponsored gromit or something. They gave him pro deals on gear, stenciled his skateboard and all shouted his nickname whenever he walked in. The culture at the skate park was also interesting, Scott said. It was a super athletic, positive group of kids. Everyone supported each other, and a lot of the older skaters gave Justin tips along the way. I witnessed this when I took this video today — the support, the positive vibes, and the tips from more experienced skaters.

So, Justin went from barely being able to ride his board down the street to what you see here in this video. A huge accomplishment in seven weeks. It took him the better part of that time for him to get up the nerve to drop into the pool, (he's always been one to watch and listen quietly and to take only carefully calculated risks when he's good and ready) but once he made the plunge — he advanced quickly. We're both super proud of him (Understatement — Scott is beaming), and Justin's rightfully proud of himself too. We can't wait to see how much this helps his snowboarding.

In Like a Lion

This video is messed up. Will repair and repost.

If there haven't been enough obstacles to Scott's westward move to date, a huge winter storm — with lightening — swept through the area at the precise moment he was crossing the 11.315 foot Berthoud Pass with a fully loaded truck and trailer. It had yet to snow in Granby proper, but today we had sun, rain, sleet, snow, pea-sized hail, wind, lightening and thunder in the course of an hour. And on Thursday the Middle Park Times predicted: "mostly sunny, warmer with highs in the 50s." It was a weather anomaly for the record books. What a way to arrive!

What happens when it's too quiet

Lately my kids have found a knack for getting "into stuff" so quickly and so completely that it makes my head spin. A lot of it has to do with the move. When I was packing up the old house, Sawyer got into a stack of board games in Justin's room that hadn't quite found their way into a box yet. In a matter of minutes he had Justin's entire floor carpeted with a mismatch of Trivial Pursuit, Taboo and Pictionary game cards. It took three adults an hour to sort the mess back into proper piles. On this end of the move, in the time it took me to go upstairs to grab my hat and scarf, the kids tore apart an old 3-inch floppy disk they found in an open box and Sawyer came screaming and crying to me with a small metal spring from the disk somehow punctured into his finger. I didn't even know those things had springs. The other day, as I was coming down with the stomach bug and everyone else was recovering, I needed like five minutes of alone time. While the kids were engrossed in a movie, I crept upstairs to my room to lie down on the bed, and things were actually quiet downstairs for about three minutes. All the sudden, Arden, who I had overheard saying something about needing milk, appeared next to me with an entire 3/4-full gallon jug in her hands that she had somehow heaved up a flight of 15 stairs. I got up and headed downstairs to find her a cup and discovered this in the kitchen:



It makes me laugh how people baby-proof for 3-month-olds. It should be called kid-proofing. The apple was in the fridge in the vegetable drawer and the straws were up on the counter (not near the edge mind you), It was the first thing the kid had eaten in two days, so I had to cut him a break. Besides, his preschool teachers would be very proud. This puts potato clocks to shame.

Swindled

We all bounced back quickly from the weekend's stomach bug, but now I'm in a total tizzy over the Swine Flu situation. I've NEVER bought into hype, but after covering this story, I'm pretty freaked. Maybe not so much that my kids are going to die, which — let's face it — they could, but that if somebody caught it tomorrow I could be home with sick kids and my sick self and still paying for daycare for THREE weeks! I mean, let's get practical people. I can't afford Swine Flu. So, I'm seriously considering getting the shots when they are "released" next week. They are being carefully "released" by the state government, which makes me highly suspect . . . again, I'm not a big conspiracy theorist, but why dole the stuff out like trick-or-treat candy when 60 kids in a 200 kid school are out with the flu this week alone? By the time they finish distributing the stuff mid-January, most of us will either have already survived it or died of it.