Weekend fun!

The past couple of weekends have been fun and super full.

Last weekend, Juanito went to "Knobcon" - a synthesizer convention, which is probably exactly as geeky as it sounds. He was all excited, because the got to be one of the presenters, since his style is significantly different than pretty much anyone else's. Meanwhile, i had a leader's retreat for church Saturday until Sunday, and then we had our first gathering of "Echo" (the new name for the 6th-8th graders) in the afternoon on Sunday. Since Juanito and i were both gone, the kids got to go to my parents' house for the night, which they loved.

And then this past weekend, we got to go camping with my parents. We had an absolutely perfect weekend for it - the weather was sunny and warm and just lovely. Our only complaint was the mosquitoes. After an entire summer with not a single mosquito in sight, every single mosquito ever came out this weekend and started attacking viciously. We all had on LAYERS of bug spray, and still all got bitten up. But besides the mosquitoes? It was awesome. We watched the sunset over the lake, ate ice cream, tried to swim in the lake (It was freezing.), played games, read, and generally had a great time.

The down side of all of this fun and excitement is that it means that there's not a lot of time for doing homework. And seriously? Katrina spends So. Much. Time. doing homework. Today, for example, she came home from school and started working, and with the exception of dinner, she pretty much worked all afternoon and evening until about 9:30...and could have done more if she'd had time, but it's not due tomorrow, so it'll have to get done tomorrow. And this is not a completely unusual day.

Part of it is that they get a lot of homework. Part of it is that she is extremely conscientious about making sure she's doing the homework well. And part of it is that she is just kind of a slow worker with schoolwork. I'm truly, deeply hoping that she'll get into the flow and learn how to do the work more quickly so that she doesn't start to absolutely hate school.