Chalk and Cheese Chronicles

How Do You Tell Them Apart?

Hop on over to Mad About Multiples and let us know what works for you!

Safari West: Best for Older Kids

This past weekend, we joined our good friends Donn and Nora and their 4-year-old twin boys for a 20 hour visit to the Sonoma Serengeti, better known as Safari West. We'd been planning this trip (about a 2.5 hour drive from Silicon Valley) for about a year, initially deciding upon an October stay until a rainstorm panicked us into pushing out our reservation to the warmer month of May. Can you imagine four boys sloshing about a muddy campsite? Can you imagine said muddy boys then holed up in a cold tent, muddy feet jumping atop plush bedding? Neither could we.

It was quite a bit more expensive to push out our reservation. It was several hundred recession dollars more expensive to do so.

Still, we thought pushing out the reservation by 6 months would not only give us a warmer climate but also, give our 4 boys ample time to mature into well behaved 4-year-olds. Turns out, we'd exchanged a rain storm for a heat wave. Temperatures rose above 100 degrees last weekend and I very nearly succumbed to heat stroke. We didn't exactly get the well behaved 4-year-old boys we'd hoped for either. But I blame that one on the spray bottles of water distributed by Safari West to their hot and sweaty guests. And the bunk beds. 4-year-old boys and bunk beds = monkey time!

Book Club Read: 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny

I gave my boys' preschool teacher the book, 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny, as a gift for the holidays. Although taking charge of a bunch of preschoolers at first seems vastly different from a class of third graders, it's really not. Teacher moments happen every day, at every grade level, at every school. Author Philip Done devotes a chapter (an essay)  to "Garage Sales" in which he describes how a little browsing about a garage sale can quickly escalate into a heated competition over a game of Chutes and Ladders the moment another teacher arrives on the scene. Fortunately for Mr. Done, he hasn't bumped into our Ms. R, preschool teacher and garage saler extraordinaire. You should see the garage sale finds which fill her classroom! Last week, the kids played happily with a big red wooden barn, a garage sale treasure, of course. Ms. R would give Mr. Done a run for his garage sale money, for sure. So I gave Ms. R a copy of 32 Third Graders (and no, I didn't find it at a garage sale) and she loved it through and through.

I, too, had laughed my way through the book. I read it via the eyes of my former third grade self. I read it via the perspective of a mom to future third graders. I read it as a wannabe teacher and I read it as someone who just enjoys a good laugh. What a fun read! I wanted to turn back the clocks and have Mr. Done be my third grade teacher. I wanted to race ahead and pre-register my 4-year-olds for Mr. Done's third grade class. I wanted to clear my schedule and head to teacher school. I wanted to laugh.