Our weekend.

What are you all doing for the Memorial Day weekend? Anything exciting? We don't have any grand plans here. Yesterday, Noah mowed the yard for the first time...

Nathan was pretty excited. ;) The younger two boys were, um, not. They don't think it's fair that Noah will get paid for mowing the yard. (They're desperately trying to think up ways to make more money, lol.) For the record, we decided awhile ago that indoor chores like kitchen duties and bathrooms and vacuuming are all included in general household upkeep...which is the responsibility of everyone in the house. So, those are covered and not compensated (unless someone's going to start paying *me* lol). Outdoor things like shoveling snow and mowing the yard...things that we might actually consider hiring a neighborhood kid to do for us...are opportunities to earn some extra money. Unfortunately for the younger two, our mower is simply too much for them to handle. It's not self-propelled and this is the first time Noah's been able to successfully push it (yeah, we tried last summer). As I explained to them, though, sometimes them's the breaks. Sorry. ;) 

Beyond the excitement of mowing the yard (lol), our week's science lesson carried over to the weekend (so as to have Nathan available to help). In reviewing the physics that we covered earlier this year, we're now building model toothpick bridges. It's a bit more involved than I anticipated, but Noah's loving it:

Noah, as you can see, went all out. He made a sketch. He then re-drew it to scale. He's got the foam board and wax paper and sketch (which is sandwiched in between and hard to see here) and is using T-pins to secure the toothpicks before gluing the joints. For simplicity's sake, we limited the boys to under 12 inches long, though Noah's talking about building another just for fun. 

In any case, we finished the two sides for all three bridges (Asher and Micah also had sketches (not drawn to scale, though) and also helped with the same process...but Nathan and I had to step in a bit to help with actually getting them finished). We'll let those dry/cure and see about adding roadbeds and such tomorrow. Noah's talking about testing their load capacity later next week. Don't worry. We'll take pictures of the finished projects before we destroy them. ;) 

And that's pretty much it for our Memorial Day weekend plans. :) Hope yours is going well!