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Happy Mother's Day - New Orleans Trip - Greetings from Post-Katrina "The Big Easy"! I feel a bit guilty and sort of wish we were here to do something constructive to help with the hurricane recovery instead of just tagging along sight-seeing while Ben is at a work conference...Well, Ben tells me we are helping, at least helping the economy a bit. 
Lately, we've been spoiled by military hotels which usually have full kitchens. We'll go out to eat occasionally or when we have to or grab something for a picnic, but we generally like the option of cooking in, especially with 4 kids, long waits, higher costs, etc. This plush hotel only has a coffeemaker and a refrigerator full of very overpriced snacks/drinks for sale (i.e. No microwave). This time I ended up bringing our rice cooker and lots of canned and dry food items, paper plates, etc. It's amazing all that one can cook in a rice cooker other than just rice. Here are a few links...Last night, we had a dish with brown rice, canned corn, canned tuna, some TVP, and furikake, which J12ds liked. I was getting concerned because he hasn't been eating much lately because of discomfort from his new orthodonic expanders. One tip to make hotel room dishwashing and clean up easier was to line the pot with oil so it wouldn't stick.
Today we walked and visited the National WWII Museum. That is a wonderful museum...It was a little heavy/overwhelming for J9dd...She is sometimes very sensitive to scary, violent, graphic scenes which is hard to avoid when dealing with D-Day. Similar feelings were felt when we visited Dachau concentration camp in Germany. I really appreciated these multimedia timeline maps that graphically showed for example when and where the Nazis on the European side and Japan on the Pacific side were trying to expand. They showed how the US used "dummy" paratroopers and fake tanks before and during the Normandy invasion. It was clearly laid out, so the kids could put pieces of what they already knew together, such as when the London bombings occured as in the beginning of the Narnia movie/story and also about Pearl Harbor and how Grandma and Grandpa (Vicki's parents) were forced to go to the Japanese American Internment Camp, Manzanar. You can get a better sense of why things happened and what was going through each leader's mind at the time. It reminds me of when we visited the Hiroshima Memorial while we were stationed in Iwakuni, Japan.
In the afternoon, we stopped for a "coffee and beignets" break at Café du Monde (thanks for the travel tips, Rebecca!) and also walked around the French Market.
Funny Kid Quotes: Last night we were in the hotel pool and the kids were playing a game where all four of them were stuck on Ben and he tried to get them off. I mentioned that the kids look like barnacles. J4ds said, "Yeah, we're bionicles"!
This morning at the WWII Museum, we were watching a film. I realized that we really need to move quicker through our history studies someday after Ancients/Medieval...J7ds leans over and asks me, "Mom, is this about the Civil War??"
Near the French Market, we stopped to see a statue of Joan of Arc on her horse. J4ds says, "Her name sounds like my name!" It does, sort of, when you say her name quickly...
Other Funnies: Here are some funny T-shirts we saw today in shops: "Make Levees, Not War" and "I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone".
Tonight, I tried the rice cooker spaghetti with whole wheat spaghetti, canned spag. sauce, corn, beans, and TVP.
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Water Safety PatrolWater Safety Patrol - This morning the 2 middle Js headed to the pool at 8am for Water Safety Patrol tryouts. It's too bad J12ds will have to miss Junior Lifeguards here (the program for his age group) since we'll be in CA in June...I also checked out if he could catch the program in So Cal, but their program WASN'T in June...oh well, maybe next year...I had to chuckle inside when the lifeguard told us that in Water Safety Patrol, one of the sessions includes how to treat injuries like jellyfish stings...Poor J9dd has already had 2 such stings in her lifetime, one right on her forehead... |
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Free Hurricane Unit StudyFree Hurricane Unit Study - I think we Florida newbies ought to study this over the summer...and eventually put together our emergency kit and plan...I need to stop procrastinating... |
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Elizabeth George Speare's Witch of Blackbird PondElizabeth George Speare's Witch of Blackbird Pond - Our current library audiobook in the van is the Witch of Blackbird Pond. J9dd selected it...She loves to read with quite a passion, which is so exciting...I'm still waiting (and waiting...) for the reading bug to hit the boys... I found a couple of links which have free literature study guides, including ones for Blackbird Pond:
Speaking of books, in the evenings Ben has been trying to read to the kids from this series about famous missionaries and later on, the kids get to listen to a usually fun, lighthearted (not-scary-before-bedtime) audiobook in bed after the lights are out...usually the likes of Junie B. Jones or Magic Tree House. I wish it were War and Peace, but I suppose beggars can't be too choosy...
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(Is it a girl thing?) She probably would rather read than almost anything and often carries her current book around with her. These days she likes to either read books by the same author or in a series. We both enjoyed Elizabeth G. Speare's other book which we read for history, 
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Ben has been reading to the kids from this series in the evenings.
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