The games are coming in the mail that I ordered for the school.

I already mentioned Duck, Duck, Bruce, of course.

Next month I intend to get playground equipment.

Now, the way I do this is as follows: I make a big list of everything I'd buy if I had lots and lots of cash, and then I whittle it down to reflect the fact that, in fact, I have no cash. I do most of my non-essential shopping like this, and it's about the only way I know to do that sort of budget. This sort of sudden death elimination helps me keep my priorities in order. If I *don't* do that I end up with a lot of regret after the fact, wondering if I forgot something.

(Tangent for a second, Ana and I have been playing jacks lately (must rescue my jacks from upstairs first thing in the morning!) I never actually played jacks as a child. I had jacks, certainly, and I played with them and had a vague understanding of how the game went, but I was too uncoordinated (and certainly saw myself as uncoordinated, which was a combination of reality and a self-fulfilling prophecy) to play the game itself so instead I just sorted my jacks by color and spun them around a lot. (And a lot and a lot and a lot. Evangeline came across me absentmindedly twirling a hanger on my finger the other day. "WOW. That's AWEsome. It's AMAZING, Connie! How do you DO that!") Ana's not very good at it lately and, every time she makes a mistake, says "I'll never get it!", with such pitch perfect inflection that I start to wonder if she's repeating something she heard elsewhere. Interesting fact, this backfires if she's in a serious snit, but if she's just a little peeved mimicking her is a great way to get her to be less melodramatic. She's a good little actress, really, and when you copy her and then ask her to do some other face she will often comply so fast she gets whiplash, as well as a bad case of the giggles. BACK ON TOPIC NOW RAR!)

Anyway, playground and gym equipment. I'm told they have nothing.

Now, I asked for help earlier and you all responded admirably, except those of you who didn't respond at all, of course, but you know what I mean. I have a tentative list, but it's very important that I get stuff as high quality as I can afford - it has to survive not just children, but little children. Ye gods!

Firstly, if anybody has any further suggestions, please make them.

Second, my list! Advice on the best, the cheapest, more resources?

( Read more... )

The school yard has a playground on street level, and then down a flight of stairs is the general playspace. It has two basketball hoops. Given that the oldest child in that school is 7, that's a bit WTF?, but there you go. The local teens have taken to sneaking in the yard at night to play basketball. Everybody knows about it and brings the subject up like they're worried, but then say in the same breath that it *must* be all right because they're not littering or being loud. Well, duh, I should hope it's all right! Nobody else is using them! And we're so bereft of sport areas (or playgrounds) in this area it's a travesty. It really is. Silver Lake is nice, but it's a hike up several hills and it's all greenery. I like greenery, but it'd be nice to have something else as well.

What they could really do with that space is set it up properly for handball. The way the school is, built into the hill like everything around us is, the wall around the yard goes up well above an adult's head, and then the backyard above it has a fence around it as well. Plenty of space on that blank concrete wall for a handball court, and if not there then on any of the *other* blank concrete walls. (I'm tempted to go there with some chalk one day and cover it with color, anything other than gray gray gray.)

When I was a kid I read a pretty forgettable book (I read a lot of those) that mentioned tetherball, which was the first I'd ever heard of it. I've never seen it in real life, which is strange. You'd think NYC would be all over this, as it sounds like it doesn't take much in the way of equipment or space to set up. I wonder if that would fly past the PTA and could get set up. Just to have something that the kids could do that's not basketball :) (Well, they'll grow, I guess. But the basketball hoops - and surely we didn't really need two of them for a full game, just one would suffice for pick-up games! - are smack in the middle of everything. Anybody's playing there and the rest of the yard will pretty much be useless to play in.)

Lookit what I just did!

All my entries have been imported over! Now I need to pick a few icons to have over there (don't want to import all of them if I can't *keep* all of them, right?), and fiddle with the style... learn how to fiddle with the style, I mean. Can I do that yet? Gotta find out. (That means both "is that possible" and "is that possible for ME, who hasn't fiddled with a style in, like, ever", you understand.)

I have an invite code. They want more people to strain the servers to see how it works. First person to comment gets it - comments are screened, so feel free to add your email directly in the comment.

Edit: Done. And good thing you edited your comment - I was about to post asking who the heck you were!

Dyed eggs today.

Ana made me nearly die laughing as she played hide and seek. Looking RIGHT AT Evangeline sitting at the table and declaring "I wonder where Eva is! I wish I could find her!", and, when I ran to pick her up, screaming "AH, it must be a crazy robot thing!"

Jenn wants to use natural dyes next year. Which is *awesome* if she gets it all together.

Paas makes more Easter egg kits than I would ever have imagined possible. Wow. Of course, for all that I buy special kits every year the fact is that they never are as good as just dying the eggs plain. The glitter makes them hard to crack, the foil stuck all over my fingers, the stickers fall off, the speckles run, the tie-dye ends up muddy...!

Deniz and Su have gone home with their dozen eggs, and we have four dozen eggs to hide... whenever. Kidlets are going to see their grandma for Easter, which really is the sort of thing one ought to know before making plans.

This is my first official crosspost!

We dyed eggs with Deniz and Su today, who have both shot up since the last time I measured them against the wall.

Ana made me nearly die laughing as she played hide and seek. Looking RIGHT AT Evangeline sitting at the table and declaring "I wonder where Eva is! I wish I could find her!", and, when I ran to pick her up, screaming "AH, it must be a crazy robot thing!"

Jenn wants to use natural dyes next year. Which is *awesome* if she gets it all together.

Paas makes more Easter egg kits than I would ever have imagined possible. Wow. Of course, for all that I buy special kits every year the fact is that they never are as good as just dying the eggs plain. The glitter makes them hard to crack, the foil stuck all over my fingers, the stickers fall off, the speckles run, the tie-dye ends up muddy...!

Deniz and Su have gone home with their dozen eggs, and we have four dozen eggs to hide... whenever. Kidlets are going to see their grandma for Easter, which really is the sort of thing one ought to know before making plans.

We just finished Pippi Longstocking.

Monday we're starting The Worst Witch - apparently there are six books in that series, not just four, did you know? - but what should we read after that? Decisions, decisions - go ahead and suggest something!

Off and on we're talking about literary technique. Kinda. As in "Did you see how they say that? They repeated it three times. I wonder why. What do you think?" or (since we do still read a lot of picture books) "Look at that, why did they do these letters really small, and these letters really big and curly?" Which Ana is soaking up right now.