A day at the park

Matthiessen State Park in Utica, IL that is. It's just past Starved Rock, which seems to be more popular. Matthiessen is much smaller, but just beautiful. It also has a lot less man-made areas than Starved Rock. There's much hiking to be done, not to mention water to get across by jumping on rocks. Justin, Kyle and I had been there last year with our neighbors. The boys really wanted to go back there with Jason so he could see it. We decided that autumn would be a perfect time.
It was a sunny day and about 60 degrees. We had planned to eat a picnic lunch. Due to a swarm of bees, we ate our lunch in the car. Not how we wanted to start the day, but after that everything was fine.
At the end of our day, prior to leaving Utica, we stopped at a gas station to fill up. Gas was only $2.97 a gallon down that way!
Feel free to click on the pictures to enjoy the fall scenery or see Justin and Kyle jumping across the rocks. Kyle took the picture of Jason and me. Not bad, huh?

A busy day

Well, here's Justin hard at work on a new Lego set. It's from the Lego Agents line, the Swamp Raid. This set has 231 pieces. I asked him if he wanted help and he declined. He really enjoys the building part of it.

The Chicago Marathon took place this morning. Of course, Tony was a participant. (Tony is my obsessed with running brother.) This was the 3rd marathon he ran this year alone! It was a little warm to be running a marathon this morning, but he ran it in 3 hours and 30 minutes. That's an awesome time, unless you're from Kenya, which Tony is not!

The powder room project

As I said before, I usually paint something in our house about every six months or so. I just get the urge to change something. It came about 2 weeks ago. I was about due since I painted the living and dining rooms back in February. This time it was a smaller room. I happened to be at Menards looking at wallpaper border with my mom and found a really cute one that was on clearance. At $5 a roll, I couldn't resist! I had to decide where I could use it at home so I could buy it. I didn't even have to buy paint because I had a color that worked at home in my paint collection.

Winter projects: our master bedroom, Justin's room (it'll be going from solar system to camouflage!)

Facial hair

Most of the time Justin and Kyle take showers, but every once in awhile they'll take a bath together. When they do, I put bubble bath in the water. The result: facial hair.
Goofballs!

Halloween crafts

A couple weeks ago my mom purchased a couple foam crafts for the boys to do for Halloween. Some of the pieces fit into certain places, but there were others that they were able to choose the locations. They had fun and they both turned out really cute. I'll have to put them away carefully so we can display them again in the future. Justin's is the graveyard and Kyle did the spooky tree house.

ISAT results

I knew it wouldn't be long before I was bragging again! In the mail today, we received the results of Justin's 3rd grade ISAT (Illinois Standards Achievement Test). He took these tests in spring 2008. This picture is of the first page, which shows that he exceeds the states standards in reading and math performance. How awesome is that? They provided a detailed explanation of the graph and also provided national comparisons. Justin's national percentile rank in reading is 95% and in math it is 97%!!!!! He's barely even on the percentile chart for his weight, so it's nice to see how high he is on these charts!

Back to bragging

The boys are about 5 weeks into the new school year, so it's time I started bragging again. This is a picture of Justin's first science test of the year. As you can see, he really knows his Living Things. He was really interested in cells and their make-up. Everyday after school he would talk about it on the way home. The other picture is a little certificate he brought home from school today. (You can click on the picture to enlarge it and read what it says.) Miss G. isn't Justin's teacher, but a student teacher that is in their classroom for twelve weeks. She just turned 22 a few weeks ago, now she's the same age as me! Ha, ha.
Kyle is currently the "Friend of the Week" in his class. He had to write a paper about himself to read aloud to his classmates, complete a poster with pictures of him and his family (and pets), and on Friday, Jason will be spending some time in his classroom.
Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll have more to brag about soon!