Caveman, words provided by Betty and Rick.

Here are a couple pieces that Jack learned during his orchestra camp session.

Here is "A Recipe for Ice Cubes" with words provided by mom via email.

If you want Sam to do your submission, email or comment your words to me. You can do the Caveman, previous posted, or The Blob:

Jack has been working on many different pieces this summer. Here is the theme from Ocarina of Time, a Legend of Zelda game. (He says the song fades out, that why he trails off at the end).

Sam would like to share two funny MadLibs we recently did.

Pirate Makeover, words provided by me.

Love Letter, words provided by Jack.

If you would like to do a MadLibs with Sam, comment your words for one of these pages below, or email them to me. Sam will fill them in and do another reading!

Today we celebrate 19 years of marriage. 🎊

Being a Monday, a pandemic, and the unremarkable number nineteen, we kept it simple.

Ben brought me a mass of sunset colored roses.

We had dinner at a local Japanese restaurant with nice outdoor seating. Ben loved his ramen and I had delicious beef curry, shumai, and veggie tempura.

Not wanting to rush home, we gazed into each other’s eyes and said

“Target?”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Ok, lame I know. But immediately after our ceremony at the temple we went to Target in full wedding attire. We wanted to pick up a cold drink on our way to the ring ceremony!

So really, the first thing we did in our marriage was go to Target. It’s sentimental!

Yeah, Ben is laughing in the pic because I treated it like a thing. But it IS a thing to me!

We are still so in love and so happy we followed our young foolish hearts 19 years ago. 💕

I love you, Ben.

Earlier this month we all enjoyed another summer "Gramp Camp." The kids packed up for 10 days in Grand Junction, sharing time between both grandparents. It looks like they had a great time! Lots of swimming and lots of video games. Lots of spoiling by doting family with late bedtimes and many sweets. A very good week for kids by any standard.

After delivery the kids, Ben and I eagerly planned out a relaxing week of quiet at home. Ben took time off work to make it true vacation. We went to two movies at the Alamo - In the Heights and Black Widow. I took a fun daytime hip hop dance class that I usually can't attend. We made many day trips to parts of the Front Range to see friends and eat good food. I also ate ice cream almost every day!

Thank you to all my family for taking care of the kids and driving them back. We had an amazing, relaxing week to explore locally and rejuvenate our minds.

Jack is a big fan of Mark Rober, the youtuber. He eagerly clicks and laughs through every new upload. For his birthday we enrolled him in Mark Rober's Engineering camp for June. In the class he learned how to brainstorm solutions to problems and use real tools to build his inventions.

The first task was to build something mechanical to solve a food problem. Jack has struggled to cut apples, because the apple slips around he and he doesn't think he has the strength. His solution was the Apple Annihilator.

The next project was fairly open-ended, to learn how to build and code using an Arduino kit. They just had to make something related to art. He struggled with this, partly because the task was so vague, and because his ideas were bigger than his tools and skills. We had to coach him back down to using the tools in the kit already, and aim for something simple. He ended up making a little music player. I think it turned out great! Some kids didn't even finish a project in the allotted time.

The final build assignment was to use all these skills to build something that will help with habits. Jack already had in mind that he wanted to made a cat guard, to keep Nimbus from waking him in the early morning. We encouraged him, saying it was the cat's "habit" that he was trying to fix :-)

I didn't get a chance to take pictures, but Ben filmed his final video submission here.

Overall I think it was a great experience for him. It was a lot of work, and less instruction than I had hoped for. But he came out of it with three actual inventions, all made with his own hands! He has said that he is interested in robotics for a long time, and this was another step in the direction, to see if it is something he really wants to pursue.

Right now Jack is doing a two-week camp at his new middle school. He has Strings Orchestra camp first, where is he playing with other enthusiastic musicians and getting to know the great teacher he will have next year. After that he goes across the school campus to Vex IQ Robotics camp. This teacher also seems great. She is a lot of fun and very enthusiastic. She runs the Robotics club that Jack hopes to join next year. It's limited in size and competes with other schools. I think the engineering camp, and his other experience with programming at home, are giving him great background knowledge on the subject.