Dilly Bars, Wal-mart, and Creepers

So this school week was short and productive. We started our To Kill a Mockingbird unit, so it was obvious to introduce the concept of "bias" to the students. So of course I had to have a little coffin to coincide with the upcoming holidays (thank you sweetie for building it out of the scraps I found in our garage). We studied bias and put it to "rest" in the coffin. One of the biases we talked about was appearance bias. I had a picture of a young Bill Gates and a 20ish Ted Bundy on the intro slide for that type of bias, but no names on the pics. I had them tell me words that came to mind as they looked at each of these guys. "Nerd" was the most popular word for Bill Gates. For Mr. Bundy most of them used things liked 70ish, friendly (he was waving), and confident. One girl though said "creeper" and even retracted when she saw the picture. Now that girl has some good intuition (as they all discovered when I revealed the names)! And I learned a new labeling term... "creeper"! We also discussed how we can be bias against our own appearances. Here is an excellent video link I used for this part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuDwHMpOMe4&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL641474EA41F6FBB3

We covered a lot of other biases, including race bias, but I was surprised how many high school students didn't even know what the word meant. How do you get literature like To Kill a Mockingbird when you don't understand basic concepts like bias? Well, they do now. :)

So Thursday night was boys night. All four grandsons spent the night. So yesterday when we woke up Tucker and Bryton were excited for grandma to cook them their usual bacon, scrambled eggs, and toast. However, Aunt Mandy had purchased some "turkey" bacon for us to try and I tried it on the kids. Tucker took a bite and look puzzled (I didn't tell them anything so they were expecting "normal" bacon). He took another bite and sat it down on his plate. "Something wrong?" I asked. Then I took a bite. Okay..... not the same. Not even close. It was like eating turkey jerky that's super thin. It was just weird. I told them it was turkey bacon and they were all relieved. Apparently they thought grandma was just turning in to a bad cook! We all agreed that we would cook "normal" bacon next time! Love you Aunt Mandy!

Aunt Mandy was off to the Harvest Festival in Emmett. She has a booth there. Greg and Uncle Stacy helped her get set up so I had my hands full in the morning with four little boys running and squealing and bouncing and being boys. After I got baths finished, the kitchen cleaned, and beds made up, the papa finally returned so I could get a shower and head to my physical therapy appt. My PTist told me I was his worst patient. No really, he did. I tried to tell him my right leg is almost an inch longer than my left, but like all PTist before him, he thought he could fix it so for the last two days in a row he has been "working on my back" to get my legs the same length. Yesterday he told me I may have been born that way. Asked me if I'd had polio when I was little. I told him, "not that I know of". I don't think he understands how it was "back in the day". We didn't exactly run to the doctor all the time. Who knows what caused it, but seems like I could have been born that way? Anyway, my back is sore from all the "fixing" and I'm skeptical about why I'm doing 2X a week for the next 3 weeks if that's the problem, but we shall see because my back is definitely not getting better. I also bought shoe inserts to even out the height discrepancy.

So after my doctor visit we loaded the little boys up in papa's truck and headed to town. Of course papa has to get them ice cream so we stopped at DQ and they had their first dilly bars. Bryton slept through that whole experience so we made the mistake of giving chubby (Kayson) his Dilly Bar. When it was about to slide off onto the floor from all of his baby type wild eating, papa took it from him and he had to actually wrestle it from him, then chubby had a class 10 melt-down. The child loves dilly bars! Tucker also announced that Dilly Bars were better than the normal ice cream cones we usually get and that they were his new favorite. I told him his dad used to love them too.

Then we headed to the garden to do some clean up. It's that time of year. Last of the harvesting and time to put away the hoses in case it starts freezing. The last few days have been wet and cold. Not freezing, but so much colder than the 90 degrees we had just last week. We picked almost all the pumpkins (a few were still a little green), the rest of the watermelon, the umpteenth batch of cucumbers, all the red tomatoes and Greg pulled some cornstalks to use for decoration. The rest will be hauled off be a neighbor who has some horses. It feel so good when we harvest things. That farmer feeling never gets old...even when I'm pulling weeds. I strangely like it.

As we were harvesting, chubby and Rellie played on the patio and Tucker ran about selecting the biggest pumpkins for himself and Maddi. Then I saw the neighbor across the road pull up. The aunties told me he is nice and helps them with shoveling in the winter and stuff like that, so I had Greg ask him to come over and take some things off our hands (out of the garden). There was an older man with him and he came too. Turns out it was his dad. We got to talking and I told him that I used to live in his house when I was little (in the 60's). I showed him which room was mine. He said it was his daughter's room now and told me about the changes in the house. I also told him about my little red wagon and how I used to collect bottles then turn them in for candy at the store, but that I didn't know where that store was anymore. The dad said, "Yeah, it used to be right there on the corner, but they had torn it down." That explained it. The guy had lived in my old house 14 years now. It was a fun conversation as he explained things about the house and we shared our histories with it. It made me realize how quickly life passes and yet how long ago it has been since I was a child. It made me feel old, yet brought back some memories.

Then the Mexican lady down the street saw us and came over. I told her the corn leaves weren't fresh anymore (we gave her some last time), but that she could pick some pumpkins for her kids and take as many tomatoes and cucumbers as she wanted. We threw in a watermelon too. Then we wrapped up the hoses as the aunties came home from the doctor. Aunt Joann is having some bad headaches, so they went to her "headache" doctor. She's also in the two cane stage (one of them being the cane Bobby got her from Iraq) so Bertie said she'd taken a fall last week. I suggested maybe she should start using her walker more. She laughed. All right then. We need to get back over there and start on organizing and decluttering the house and getting the shelves up. Next week maybe. I picked six pumpkins and placed around their doorsteps. They liked that too.

After the garden we headed to Wal-mart to get stickers. When we pulled up to the Wal-mart chubby said one of his first clear words besides mama and papa..... Wal-mart! Clear as day, he said it more than once. Leave it to Mandy's kids! :) Once in there, we headed to the drive through scary alley, but they had removed the top black tarp, so it wasn't that scary anymore. Apparently it was too scary for some? Then we headed to the Halloween section. Of course papa had to split off from us with Chubby in the cart and then sneak up on us and scare us knowing Rellie would be petrified. Which he was. Yet, he's the one who wanted to go to that section. Then I found the masks. Rellie high-tailed it out of the section in a hurry. I put on the old wizard masked and met him on the other corner. He ran to papa and hid behind him. I bought the mask. A wizard mask is one to add to the collection. I also found a rapping desk witch that dances. Had to have that for my desk. They all loved that one-- even Rellie. The boys got their stickers and we left.

We delivered pumpkins to both the boys and traded Bryton and Tucker for Daisha. Maddi was not crazy about the wizard mask and wasn't even sure about the dancing witch, so I gave her my bag of animal cookies to calm her down. She also liked her pumpkin. I forgot to mention that they came over earlier before my doctor's appt. and Jas and I worked on his lesson plans. They had lunch with us and Maddi and kayson are getting so good about the whole sharing thing. They were very cute. Maddi and Abbi will be back today when their mom and and dad go out for an early anniversary celebration. It'll be Abbi's first time alone with mem and papa. Wish her luck! :)

The weekends go so fast now that summer is gone. Kind of sad. Lovin' the leaves and autumn colors though! Think we'll go see the daughter in Emmett today and check out the harvest festival.