At least he corrected the spelling.

Jack's latest long piano piece is Hedwig's Theme aka the Harry Potter song.  He's had it for two weeks.  With the snow days, he put in several extra practice sessions to polish it.

After practicing for a bit, he came up and told me how he wishes his classroom keyboard at the music school had all the same functions as ours, because he likes to use different settings for Hedwig's theme.

He said he uses "skeefy" for the first pages, then switches to dulcimer.  I asked him to spell skeefy, and he did: "sci-fi" . We had a good laugh.

I took some video of his latest performance:

They canceled school Wednesday and today. Yesterday's storm was legit awful, but I think they were crazy canceling today. Our area has power and clear roads. It must be the result of a large school district, needing to cancel all for certain areas who are worse off.

We snuck into the library yesterday morning before the storm really unleashed.  Brought home a giant bag of books to last the day.

Today's school closure felt silly for Arvada.  Oh well.  We all slept in and had a slow start to the day.  Then I mustered the kids into some house cleaning and homework, a Target run, and a quiet time play session upstairs while I worked.

An author, Todd Mitchell, came to Jack’s class and inspired him to write some poetry.  He wrote this after school and asked that I shared it. (I copy/pasted it from his own word document, the typing and style is his own).

 

Inside me

Inside me live  1000 earths that live of all the suns.

Inside me are 100,000,000,000,000 fish that eat the Earths.

Inside me are some molecules,  that rap all day long.

Inside me are these grins, they jump on any frowns that cross my face.

Inside me there’s a tiger,who takes over when i’m mad.

With all these things inside me, i get very tired. So, please excuse me while I take nap.

My "bake element" caught on fire and corroded last week. I've already replaced the circuit board on this oven, about a year after we moved in to this house. So I'm no stranger to appliance repairs. A couple YouTube videos assured me that I was capable of this job.

$70 and a half week of no baking, waiting for shipping, and I have a working oven again! It took less than a single podcast to switch them out.

I was having second thoughts about whether the element really needed resolving. But when I put them side by side, and found a crack that easily split open, I was reassured that it really needed replacing.

I'm going to make Cornish pasties to celebrate!

Here's the kids after sledding Sunday afternoon. Red cheeks and hot chocolate:

The kids are twins today for spirit week. Perhaps the only duo who wanted to match down to their socks and undies!

Ben has an infamous story about a pencil injury when he was a boy.  He told this story to Sam for the first time and Sam thought it was HILARIOUS.  He declared that he must draw the scene immediately.

I found the drawing later and, without context, was perplexed about its subject.  Ben explained the reference, and then I LOVED the picture.

So for your enjoyment, I had Sam re-tell the pencil story in his own words.  Listen to the tale, and then you can see the illustration below.

 

 

 

I realized that my snapshots summary didn't capture a major part of January and February: musical rehearsals! With Amanda working in the metro area, and rehearsals scheduled during the school day, I've been able to come a couple times a week most weeks.

Obviously I don't take photos during rehearsals, I never have. But this week I had some footage amanda took for the kids to review, and I realized I could screenshot it and remove the kids faces. So here you go, a glimpse into one of my part time jobs. This is our tenth consecutive year working together on a musical!