So, remember when I said I was going to start posting more often and I totally lied?  Sorry about that!  It seems that making the transition to working outside of the home has been a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. That, and when the people at the school told me “You’ll get paid for 19 hours, but you’ll wind up ‘volunteering’ for more than that” — they weren’t kidding.  I totally love my job, though, and I’ve even been able to geek it up a little.

I was horrified by the massive amounts of paper that went out in our first day of school packet and my tiny contribution was to make our family directory submission form an online Google form.  Not only did this save more than a ream of paper it totally eliminated the step of having to data-enter all of the parent information by hand.  It was all dumped into a spreadsheet. That became a bit stressful as I looked at  the crazy spreadsheet full of messy data and realized I was going to have to make sense of it. Super-Dad saved the day and geeked it up even further by writing a PERL  perl (SD has informed me that it should be all lower-case) script to parse the data so that I could pretty it up quickly.  My hope is to convince the parents that we can host the directory online next year (something many of them are wary of) to save even more paper.

Nate gets to go skiing as part of school’s Winter Enrichment Program. The school schleps 250+ kids up to a ski resort once a week for six weeks. You guys, skiing is expensive! Between the ski lessons, the charter bus, paying our share of chaperone tickets, a season lift pass and new gloves, a coat, goggles and renting equipment for a season we are probably close to having dropped $800.  I’m super glad that he gets the opportunity but the first line of the welcome packet should say “Welcome to Middle School, give us all your money!”.

Kit turns six (six!!! What happened to my tiny baby?) in a few weeks.  After a lively pirate unit in Kindergarten that culminated in watching a performance of “Treasure Island”, she’s decided that she would like a pirate party.  I’m pretty excited to plan this one.  I have found some sweet printables for decor, and I’m thinking we’ll have a Decorate Your Eye Patch Station and some sort of treasure hunt.  I think I may be more excited than she is.

Nate did a little modeling for Zulily.com.  He really enjoys it, and I enjoy making Zoolander jokes.

Next up for Nate: “The Nate Feliciano School for Kids who Don’t  Read Good and Want to do Other Stuff Good  Too”

What have you guys been up to?