Marbles turns 5!

We have an awesome children's museum here called Marbles. We're there right now celebrating their 5th birthday. Here we are playing marbles at Marbles :). Ha! We've lost our marbles! Ok that's enough.

The School Board From Another Planet

Many of you have heard me go on and on about the ridiculousness our local school system (Wake County) has put this community and our children through in the last three years.  I registered Devlyn for kindergarten as a first time parent in the middle of an educational shit-storm.  Noone could tell us where our child was going to go to school and they changed the rules on us 3 times in the 6 months between registration and Devlyn's first day of kindergarten.  At that time, our school board was in the throws of an epic partisan battle, was being sued by the NAACP, our high schools were (and still are) in danger of losing accreditation and our county made national headlines repeatedly for everything from civil rights violations to outright asinine stupidity.  Luckily for us, we made some good, albeit scary, decisions at just the right time and got Devlyn into the school we wanted, an absolutely awesome school where he's thriving.  The county got a new superintendent of schools and things were looking up.  He brought about a lot of good change, made decisions to cut in places other than the classroom and took the heat like a man when some of those decisions backfired.  And THEN the board fired him in a closed session this past Tuesday for reasons unbeknownst to anyone!  I don't even know what to say at this point except what the fuck?!?  People (including me) are outraged, we're screaming about it at the supermarket, launching social media firestorms, picketing outside the school board offices, etc.  And at the end of the day, the only losers here are the kids.  Our schools will take a HUGE hit b/c of this.  A brand new year-round middle school right up the road we were hoping was to be built by the time Devlyn finishes elementary probably won't be built now along with several others...and the list goes on.  Here's an article from the News & Observer today that puts a nice dent in chronicling the complete insanity that is the Wake County School Board at this point.  Politics have no place in our public education system.  These people are CRAZY.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/09/27/2373617/wheeler-the-school-board-from.html

Morning hike with momma

He probably won't call me that for very much longer :(

Side by side desks done!

Yay :)

Speaking on a Molecular Level Of Course

Quick story here from a recent meeting I had at a large, successful, global bio-pharma company here in RTP.  We're helping them to evolve their brand imagery.  They were presenting a powerpoint deck to possible investors recently.  Their opening slide had a big, beautiful, colorful, high def photo of a cell at the molecular level.  They fielded questions as to what kind of cell it was - they had no idea - the point of it was to demonstrate their domination of the bio-pharma space.  One of the scientists in the meeting took great delight in pointing out that the image was that of a testicular cell.  Not sure I would have been able to keep a straight face through the rest of that presentation!  Ha ha!  I'll be telling this story for awhile : )

The Destroyer

Caught living up to his name...

Confidence

Tonight during bedtime I used the word confident in a sentence. Blake immediately asked me what it meant. After I was done answering, Devlyn proudly said, "That's the way I feel in the morning on the bus or in carpool. I love school.". Boy does that make me smile. Loved hearing that and it makes me feel so good about the school he goes to - Sycamore Creek Elementary. They're obviously doing something right :)

Office Space

Lately, I'd been noticing that Devlyn needs a little bit of his own space.  Poor guy has schoolwork, shares a room with Blake (God help him) and until this weekend did not have a one square foot of our home, other than his mattress, to call his own.  So with some paint and wood we picked up at Lowes, we transformed one of the closets into his room into a nice sized desk area for him.  Next weekend we'll get around to adding some shelving, lighting and sprucing it up a bit but right now he is one happy camper with his new space.  Mission accomplished.