I woke up queasy again today. It’s weird I tell you. But anyhoo, a couple of weeks ago we went on a tour of mosquito and vector control with our homeschool group. One of the kids asked what vector meant. And the answer? I have no idea at all because Alan joked around later about vector.

Vector, committing crime with both direction and magnitude. OH YEAH!!! That’s a line from Megamind. So, whenever I think of vector now, that’s what pops into my head. Yep. Thanks honey.

So, the tour. It was pretty interesting.

Who knew mosquito and vector control could be a good tour. Not me.

But it was a really good tour. We learned about how mosquitos grow.

We learned about how they are caught and studied. We learned a bunch of stuff in a greenhouse with fish tanks. Don’t ask me what. Nathan was fussing. I think he was hungry.

I think the most fascinating fact was about 100 years ago mosquitos were so bad that schools were closed down occasionally. Is that crazy? Not a snow day, a mosquito day! Can you imagine what a swarm of mosquitos that must have been, to close down schools?

Ok enough talk about bugs. It’s bugging me out. I’m all scratchy now.

Last week, with our homeschool group, we were at a nature park. Isabelle was collecting things. I don’t know what these are called but I took a picture of her holding her small collection.

When I gave the camera to her, she climbed down into the creek area. I asked, “would you like to take something close up or far away?”. She replied, “close up” so I put on the close up lens attachment. But the climb down was precarious and she slipped and knocked into the camera and knocked the attachment off so I told her, “go ahead and take it without the attachment.”

I like the blurriness.

And some more pictures from the day, not instanx.

I’m popping in super quick to share some pictures from last week. We went to an exhibit, Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey, with our homeschool group. And I’m not going to write much because Nathan is super grumpy. His tummy has been upset for days.

I wish I could have taken pictures of their work. It was lovely. I particularly liked seeing some of their handmade greeting cards. But since we couldn’t take pictures this was the only shot I got of the exhibit, around the corner and outside. Can you see the house in there?

If you are interested, you can find out more about the Reys in this little interactive doodad. I can’t think of the word to call it. They had it at the museum.

And that was basically it at the museum. Really, when you can’t take pictures there are no pictures to share. So, here we are outside the museum.

And then at a playground by the museum.

And riding a carousel also in the general vicinity of the museum.

It was Nathan’s first time!

Yesterday, there was a Valentine’s celebration with our homeschool group. So, on Monday, I thought I’d attempt cake pops for a second time. My first attempt did not turn out so great. The cake part was fine. The dipping part was an abysmal failure.

This second attempt was even worse though. Why? I didn’t have all the proper equipment, namely the lollipop sticks. I didn’t buy more because we had some or so I thought. Turns out we only had eight left.

So, I thought I’d made cake balls and cake hearts instead. Not too big of a change. Except the dipping part did not work, again. I used Wilton’s candy melts and they are just too thick. I thought I’d retry with what I scrounged around for in my refrigerator, which was half of a Ghirardelli dark chocolate bar. It melted a little better but half a candy bar is not enough to cover twenty five little cake hearts and I don’t know how many cake balls.

Oh well. One of these days I’ll make cake balls work. Isabelle liked them though. She enthusiastically ate one when suddenly she said, there’s something hard in this one mommy. Just great, I thought. What else could go wrong?

I was having a devil of the time in the kitchen that day. My food processor, which I’ve mentioned before is on it’s last legs, would not grate my carrots for the carrot cupcakes I planned to make. After multiple tries I finally clicked the cracked bowl on just right and it worked. And when I was cleaning it out, I freaked out for a moment. I noticed a metal piece was missing. I was worried that maybe it had fallen into the carrots, which had gone into the batter, which would mean I would have to dump all 24+ cupcakes. Happily I found it.

But something hard in the cake balls? I didn’t use the food processor for that. There shouldn’t have been anything hard in it. I went over to Isabelle and told her to spit the thing out into a bowl. And the thing turned out to be HER TOOTH, her front bottom tooth, that has been loose for a couple of weeks. My baby’s first tooth, that fell out on it’s own and not being pulled by a dentist.

I set it aside on the counter in the bowl so that we could do something special on the weekend. I should have just had her put it under her pillow that night. Because on Tuesday, Alan accidentally threw it away.

I didn’t realize until right as I was putting the kids down for the night. It was later than usual and I was tired. Then the dreadful thought creeps into my head that I don’t know where Isabelle’s tooth is. I am so upset and the emotion fills me up completely that I cannot think. I shoo the kids into the other room and call Alan on the phone and rage at him.

After I hang up I am still mad and upset. I call Olinda crying about how Isabelle’s tooth is gone. Gone! Gone down the sink. I don’t feel better but I hang up because the kids should be asleep. After the kids fall asleep, I lay there and the anger bleeds away. Isabelle has a mouth full of teeth. We’ll save the next one.

Ok how about something happy now. I told Isabelle to draw a monster for the Valentine cards for the homeschool group. Maybe because she had just lost a tooth she drew such a toothy little monster.

I took her drawing and scanned it into photoshop, changed up the color a little for purple and green and light blue monsters, and removed the eyes so we could add googly eyes.

Last week, with our homeschool group, we went on a tour of a yogurt shop, Uphoria Yogurt.

It was yummy and a learning experience.

For example, did you know it takes the yogurt machines 2-3 minutes to freeze the yogurt? Wow!

I think people’s stories are fascinating so I asked the owner, Joseph, what made him open up a yogurt store. Well, frozen yogurt is popular at Joseph’s grocery store, in San Francisco, so he decided to open a yogurt shop close to home.

He wanted it to be geared towards kids and I think he did a great job with that. This is Captain Uphoria.

How awesome is he? The kids all got Captain Uphoria coloring books. And Joseph talked about Captain Uphoria being in a comic book soon!

We really liked the yogurt. It was good. They use fresh ingredients and they’ve created some delicious flavors. I had some cable car chocolate, which I am wanting right now as I type this. I wish they were closer and a drive over there didn’t mean fighting traffic. Sigh.

After the tour, I bought a little bowl, silly me. I should have bought TWO bowls.

I could not get it in Nathan’s mouth fast enough in between Isabelle’s bites.