Ella's Hair! (And a Rennaisance Faire)

So today we went to the Northern California Rennaisance Faire.  Every time we go to one of these Ella begs to have her hair done by the braid artists.  So to head that off, this time I did her hair before we went.  I asked her what she wanted, and she said a flower braid.  So that's what I did.

I am insanely proud of this.  I made it up all by myself.  It has petals, a stem, leaves, even roots!!

And butterflies nesting in the flower.  I kept looking at her hair all day long because I couldn't believe I had managed something so cool!

Plus she's just pretty darn cute!

After that major accomplishment on my part, the Rennaisance Faire seemed like a footnote.  :)  But we did have fun.

Ella was so excited to see a princess, and all the people in costume did not disappoint.  She didn't care whether they were dressed as a wench or a queen, they were all princesses to her.  (Though I have to say, Ren Fairs seem to be just the excuse all the trashy women are looking for to bare all.  Sheesh!)

We watched the horseman skills competition thing.

Where Ella was super excited to get to see the Queen.

We thought was going to be jousting.

We were bummed that that's not what it was.  (And Alex is bummed because he wanted to go to a local carnival and ride the rides, not a silly Ren Fair.)

But he's got to put up with his nerdy family that loves this stuff!!

We did try and go see the real jousting later, but even with the kids up on Anton's shoulders, none of us could see a thing.  Oh well.

We went to a bunch of different shows, comedy, magic, etc., and wandered around looking at all the different stalls and booths.

The kids played with toys.

And Alex let these nasty meal worms(?) crawl all over him.  He's not afraid of anything. (Though his face would say otherwise.)

We've come to the conclusion that unless you have lots of money to blow, you just can't have as much fun at a fair.  We had to tell the kids "no" a million times to all the fun stuff we really wanted to let them do.  Maybe after the next pay raise.

And since Anton is a huge sucker to our kids' pouting, after we got home and had dinner, he took them over to the local carnival so Alex could ride the roller coaster.

I stayed home.  I was all faired out.

But the kids loved it, and was the perfect end of the day for them.  Hooray for fairs!!

This Week: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

This week has been quite the roller coaster.  I spent last weekend in Utah with my family for my littlest sister's wedding.  I didn't take Anton or the kids, and I was there for less than 2 days.  It was a whirlwind.  I also didn't even take my camera out of my bag, so no pictures.  It was a fun wedding with lots of quirky elements, like the bridal party wearing Converse and Vans and the bride's maids wearing their hair tied up in bandannas, etc.  It was fun.

I came back and jumped right into our second week of school.  I reactivated my membership to 24 Hour Fitness and was able to go swimming for the first time in forever.  The kids always made it too hard to go, but with them both in school, I actually have time to exercise!  It's so nice.

Then I got bad news.  The schools here have no idea how to balance their student loads, so two weeks after my kids have been in school, they now have to move to a new school.  I am so miffed about this whole thing, and there's nothing I can do about it.  They're getting sent to a school that gets terrible ratings and I hear really bad things about, but I have not choice about where to send my kids in this district with "open enrollment."  It's so messed up and backwards.  I'm tempted to just pull them out and homeschool them until their spot opens back up in the school they've been at, but I'm loathe to give up my all alone exercise/housework/grocery shopping time.  We'll give this new school a try, but I didn't get a whole lot of positive vibes when we visited on Friday.  Definitely a different demographic from our current school.  And now instead of walking to school everyday I'm going to have to drive back and forth 3 times a day.  Blah.  It's just a big mess.

So this week had it's highs, and it definitely had a super low.  Hopefully this next week can just level out and be "normal."