Back to shool again

It's the boys first FULL week of school. Started off not too bad. Kids have gotten back into the hang of things right away. Kaden had his first homework assignment today. It's an easy math worksheet and they have until Friday to bring it back. He did it today after school so he wouldn't have to worry about it later. Smart kid! I'm surprised at how little homework the kids have. Even Salem last year only had 2 sheets a week and they could do it during free time in school. Maybe his will change this year, not sure. Salem did get his first group of spelling words this week. It's 25 words and he is in the Level 2 group. Level one is the hardest group and it's out of six. So he's doing pretty well! Some of the words are proceedings, inhabitant, democratic, accounting and entitle. Seems like we might have to study each week on these although he says he knows them already. Kaden is starting to grow beans in his class. Last year the 3rd graders grew them towards the end of the year, guess they thought it didn't go too well so close to the end. They both have assignment books in which at the end of each day they list what they covered in class. It's nice having that and not having to drag out of them what they did, or them saying "they forgot".

We went out geocaching yesterday. Did 5 of them, nothing too hard. The last one was a did not find, growl! Searched all over the woods, lots of hiding spots, but none of them hiding the cache. I got sick of all the spider webs so we decided to quit. Ran into fellow cachers at a cache. They ended up finding it before us, but it wasn't a hard one. This cache was at the parking lot at the Sac and Fox bike trail which has been closed since the floods. We walked the trail a little bit and it wasn't too bad. Lots of trees down and branches all over, but alot had been cleared off the trails. We didn't go too far though, I'm sure it's bad in other spots! There is a house across the parking lot and they were working on it. Keith said the house was up to the roof in water! It's really hard to imagine THAT much water! I've seen stuff like that first hand and still it's hard to believe!

Down on Hwy 13 is a guy who has a farm on both sides of the highway. His property was under 8+ feet of water! We know it was 8 feet covering the road, so very well might have been more in the farm lands. In a previous blog I had posted a picture of Salem pointing to a snake in the road while he was biking. That pic was taken on that road by the farms. Anyway...the farmer has already gotten his fields back to normal and he is growing stuff!! Drove by it the other day and saw little green rows. I'll be interested to see what he ends up growing so late in the season. It gives me little goosebumps to see them recovering so quickly and well from such horror! But yet, going to Iowa City all the time and seeing the Taco Bell and Hardees and a few other places that have not had anything done with the buildings strikes me as weird. The hotel on the strip is back up and running as well as a few other smaller places. A few restaurants look very close to opening. I haven't driven down and around Cedar Rapids to see what progress...or lack of is taking place.

This bridge was covered in water! Sorry for the sun spots, quite bright out!

We headed down to FMI tonight for the kids to play. Saw a couple cops cars driving slowly around. Figured they were looking for someone, or thing. While we were playing one cop pulled in a talked to the janitor who was outside. The janitor then came over to talk to me. He said the cops were looking for a 9 year old boy and to keep an eye out. Ah man, that's not good! Little while later a cop pulls into the playground and pulls up to us. He asks if I know Chris (last name can't say), and sure enough I know him! He used to be in cub scouts and I knew him from working at Starry. He's the missing kid! Hits home a bit more. We hadn't seen him around, but told the cops we would keep an eye out. Not sure if they ever found him, I'm assuming so since the cop presence died down. Just another reason to stress to our kids to let us know where they are at, at all times!