How many times can I drive on Locust Street? - Summer Vacation Week 5

This is going to be a real quick mini-post. We are starting our Fourth of July Weekend Celebrations this afternoon and so I want to get the blog caught up before that. 

This post will cover Monday June 26th through Thursday June 29th. 

That's a small amount of time, but it's still been rather busy. I've actually already made a goal for next summer. That goal is to have NO THERAPY. So we are doing lots of therapies this summer with the hope that we won't need any therapies next summer. 

I'm glad I've been able to connect the kids to the resources they need. But oh my goodness I'm sick of driving them everywhere. Locust street is one of the major streets out of our neighborhood that connects us to the pool, Veronica's tutoring, Veronica's vision therapy, the music store, Winco, and a handful of other places. I drive on this street MULTIPLE times a day. I'm at the point where I get on Locust Street and then have to think really hard about where I'm actually going. 

So we are going to be recapping /counting how many times I drove on Locust street in a day

Monday:

Drove on Locust Street to take everyone to the pool. 

Actually this day was pretty low on the Locust Street count. I took everyone to the pool at 1:00 and then Charlotte and Lydia were already there when Jr Life Guard started at 1:30. 

I ran into my friends PTO Liz and Amanda. It was fun catching up with them. 

Brandon came to the pool around 2:00 so he could stay with Derrick and Veronica while I took Charlotte and Lydia to the orthodontist at 2:30. 

The orthodontist is also on Locust Street, but I saved myself a trip by just driving from the pool to the office. The girls and I changed into our regular clothes at the pool. 

And let's look at the pictures from Monday. 

Here's my pool pass math tracking chart. I made this back in 2020 and print it off every year. This was the 9th visit which is when we "break even" on the cost of the pool pass vs just paying for day passes. And actually we probably broke even earlier because this math doesn't factor in Brandon's visits. And it doesn't track that we got a discount on the Jr Life Guard class because we have the pass. 

In the evening I went down to our neighbors and picked Cherries. They were so perfectly ripe. Veronica came down and helped me for a little bit. 

I filled the sink with Cherries.  (And filled the next two days with pitting cherries.)

I stayed up pitting cherries that night. Lydia had taken a nap that day so she was up too. She made flag earing's out of palmers clay. 

Tuesday 

Tuesday started out with taking Derrick to OT which is not accessible from Locust Street - shocker!

Then I spent the morning trying to make a huge batch of cherry pie filling. It never really turned out. It was more like cherry syrup. But I canned it anyway just to be done with it. 

Then Veronica and I drove on Locust Street to get to Tutoring. 

Then I drove on Locust Street to take Charlotte and Lydia to Jr Life Guard. 

After Jr Life Guard Charlotte and I stopped at the music store to look at a violin. I'll talk about that more later. 

And later that afternoon I drove on Locust street for a bit to get to Veronica's therapy. 

So that's a Locust street score of 3.5 I think. 

Let's look at pictures:

My front flower garden is looking very festive for the 4th. 

I never planned this, but it looks so good. 

Look how tall the peas are. They are taller than me. 

And look at this peach. 

I don't know what these flowers are, but they are pretty. 

Veronica went outside and picked a whole bunch of peas. I was snacking on them while I updated my blog that evening. 

Brandon spent the evening pitting cherries and making a cherry pie. 

Wednesday

I drove on Locust Street twice - Once to take the girls to Jr Life Guard and later that evening to go to the store. 

I didn't want to drive back and forth from Jr Life Guard, but I was in the middle of cherries so I ended up bringing my cherry things with me to the pool. While the class was going on I sat in the car and pitted cherries for 40 minutes. Yes, this was getting to be a problem. 

I finished canning the cherries that afternoon. I'm SOOOO SICK OF CHERRIES.  But I'm excited about having cherries available this winter. 

That evening we went to Winco to buy things for our trip this weekend. I told the kids this was the closest thing they'd ever get to a yes day. They'd be like, "Can we get these cookies?"  and I was like, "Yeah, toss them in the cart."

When we got home we put things away and then had cherry pie. 

Thursday 

This was the day we were on Locust street the most. 

Derrick had OT in the morning. That wasn't on Locust Street, but everything else was and it was INSANE. 

First there was Veronica's tutoring. Then we went home and got the rest of the kids. 

We went to the music store to pick up Charlotte's violin. (I promise I'll talk more about that in a second.)

Then we went to Walmart to buy some last minute stuff for our camping trip. 

Then we rushed back to the pool for Jr Life Guard. (It was the last class.)

I dropped the stuff off at home and then took Veronica to vision therapy. 

So that's a Locust Street score of 5 or something. I kind of lost track there. 

There was also a lot of other stuff going on on Thursday. 

Derrick showed me his lost tooth that morning. It had been barely loose when he went to bed, but that has NEVER stopped Derrick. He had that tooth out by morning. (The dentist has assured me that it would be really hard for Derrick to pull an adult tooth, but I still worry.)

We spent most of the day prepping for our trip. It's a camping trip which should be easy for us except for one little thing - we haven't been camping as a family in almost two years. WHAT? Yeah, our last family camping trip was to Yellowstone in the fall of 2021. 

Last year we went to Nevada as our big trip and just stayed in hotels. And all our other trips were to Lagoon where we stayed with family. 

So this was a big deal. It took a lot of work to track everything down and get it organized. But we did it. By 9:00 PM the car was packed.  Oh and packing the car was actually kind of tricky because this is our first camping trip with the Shonda. We had plenty of room because the Shonda has more storage space than the Rhonda. But it was hard to know where to put things. We got it figured out on the 3rd try though. 

And now we can FINALLY talk about Charlotte's violin.  Really this is a big deal and shouldn't be tacked on like this, but there's been a lot going on. 

Sometime last year I applied for the Empowered Parent's Grant. It's made up of Covid money to help kids with school stuff to make up for falling behind during the covid years. Or something like that. I've been really fuzzy on this grant. I honestly don't even remember applying for it. I think Derrick's case worker sent me a link and told me it was a good idea to apply and so I just applied while laying in bed one morning.  I didn't put much thought into it. 

Anyway, applying for that grant has been one of the best things I did. We were approved $1000 per kid up to 3 kids - which is a fancy way of saying $3000. 

I use the money to pay for Veronica's tutoring, (She also has some sort of scholarship to help with the cost as well.) A few months ago, when I was approving an invoice for Veronica's tutoring I noticed that the local music store was now an approved vendor in the grant system. It specifically said that we could by musical instruments with the grant money. 

So I started to think about getting Charlotte a violin. She used my sister Emily's violin last year because I wanted to see how interested Charlotte was in the violin before we put any money into this hobby. She'd really enjoyed her first year of orchestra so it seemed like a good idea to buy a violin. 

So a few weeks ago I filled out the request form. And the music store got back to me right away. Then it was just a matter of finding a time to look at violins. We finally made it over there last week and looked at 2 violins. But there was another violin at another store that we were interested in.  So the store staff arranged to have it brought over. 

That violin came in, and we looked at in on Tuesday. Charlotte really liked that violin. We had to wait for the paperwork to go through. 

And finally on Thursday we could pick it up. Here's Charlotte with the violin. It's a Scherl & Roth. It will be a good violin all through high school and into college. It's beautiful. 

And that gets us caught up to today. 

Today's Locust Street Score is 1. Because I have to drive on Locust Street to take the kids to the dentist.  

But the next few days are going to have Locust Street Scores of ZERO. I'm so looking forward to this vacation. 

I'll tell you all about it when we get back. 

Thanks for reading.