Catching Up on the Week

 




















On Monday we enjoyed a sweet Valentines Day with a heart shaped pizza from Papa Murphy's and some cupcakes and chocolate chip cheesecake that I made while the girls were at school. And if it looks like I burned our take n' bake pizza a little ~ I did. It was a little more brown than the girls would have liked but it tasted perfect, they ate it all up.


 On Wednesday the girls cracked me up when I looked over at them to see all three crunched up on one tiny little cushion of the couch. It's a sectional so they had a few feet to work with in either direction, yet they insisted on sharing the same space. I loved it!!


 




















Thursday I went on a field trip to see a First Steps performance of The Little Engine That Could with Rebekah's class. Here she is sitting on the bus with her friend Giselle, and then at the start of the show. She and all her classmates loved the cute play!


Today rolled around and school was called off. To make a long story short...over 600 teachers in our district called in sick as a protest to positions being eliminated and benefits being cut. Although I have an opinion, I prefer not to go into a drawn out explanation, so I will just leave it at our girls LOVE their school! As parents, Dave and I could not be more happy with the unique educational opportunity they have. They speak and read a language they've never learned at home because of the great teachers there. We are both active parent volunteers at the girls' school because we believe strongly in the amazing quality of the program there. We hope to be back in school very soon!
 Today at school was supposed to be an event called Fasching. It's a traditional German festival meant to "scare the Winter away." The kids dress up as bugs or animals that return in the Spring and parade around the school being loud and signing songs in the hope that all the snow will melt and Spring will be ushered in. We made our own Fasching at home.


 I posted about previous Faschings here and here . I hope they will re-schedule the one at school because the 5th graders have an important role, as I mentioned in one of the fasching post that I linked to above, it's almost like a right of passage for them. Alyssa would be so disappointed to miss out on it, but the girls had the idea to have our own and they enjoyed dressing up as a peacock, a butterfly, and a lady bug!


 Emma stayed out for one extra lap around the cul de sac singing her heart out about schmetterling(butterflies).

Tonight we are heading to the opening night performance of "U BUG ME!" at First Stage Children's Theater. I think it will be funny.

The Wright Brothers

 After visiting EAA last weekend, I went back and looked at our pictures from when we were in Dayton last summer. I was excited to show the girls. Even though it was only seven months ago, it was like re-discovering our vacation.


 At the Wright Cycle Company we saw how the Wright brothers had many areas of interest that extended beyond flight. They had this bicycle sales and repair shop along with a printing press company where they printed the local newspaper.


 The visitor center here was very cool with lots to see and do. It was neat how this unit of the National Park Service is nestled right in the heart of a residential section of Dayton. It could be easily missed if you didn't know what you were looking for. Kind of a hidden treasure in plain sight.


 Inside a replicated Hales Grocery Store, which was the store below the Wright Brother's printing company. Emma loved this statue and one other that was in the store.


Learning about the Wright B Flyer...
 One of my favorite parts of this site was walking through the visitor center and reading the walls. They were filled with quotes from the Wright Brothers and magnifications of pages from their notebooks. There were pictures and diagrams, mathematical equations, even expressions of frustration as their efforts were met with failure. It was like walking through their journal, it was neat.


Then probably the girls favorite part...
 When they were able to look at the lookalike of the flyer. A neat lesson in and of itself was the difference between replicas and lookalikes. In order to be considered a replica, the recreation would need to be made of the exact same materials as the original. Because this one that the girls are playing on in these photos is fully functioning, and actually used in air shows and for other flying it was not practical to make it out of wood and the other materials, as the original Wright B Flyer was made. This one has wings made of fiberglass and other more modern materials and thus is a lookalike.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 Finishing their Jr. Ranger Books right outside the visitor center. I explain at the bottom of this post why we enjoy doing the Jr. Ranger programs at the National Parks we visit. Most of the parks we have been to are Historical Sites.


 

Flying High at EAA Airventure

Over the weekend we took the girls to Airventure Museum. It's a really neat place that teaches about the history of aviation.



The first thing Alyssa noticed when we walked in the front doors was the The Wright B Flyer, she went running up to it so excited that she knew what it was. Last summer we had the chance on the way home from vacation to drive through Dayton, Ohio where we saw the birthplace of aviation, and learned about the accomplishments of Orville and Wilbur Wright in the area of flying. Speaking about the possibility of air travel for humans, Orville Wright said, "We could not understand that there was anything about a bird that would enable it to fly that could not be built on a larger scale and used by man."

Visiting the Aviation Trail and reading about their struggles and failures in creating what they called their Flying Machine, was amazing. The people who lived near them and watched them in the experimental phases of their project called them crazy and even thought they had a death wish. But for the Wright brothers, they couldn't fathom the possibility that their dream to fly was impossible...and now modern air travel owes it beginnings to their discoveries. I was glad that our day in Dayton had left an impression on Alyssa! It was neat to see her excitement that she recognized the flyer and also to see her interest to learn what EAA had to say about the Wright brother's contributions to flying.


There was a section on the science behind flying.


There was also lots of hands on stuff for the kids to explore.


There was an entire hanger devoted to aircraft from World War II.





















There are two soldiers in the back of this photo leaning over a jeep to repair it. Alyssa convinced Rebekah that these men were spies and the girls proceeded to duck down low in front of the display to hide from them, listen to their conversation (I'm sure it yielded a lot of wartime secrets) and devise a strategic plan to outsmart them. Oh, their imaginations!


Emma holding up a newspaper article reproduction that announced the end of the war.























The museum was also full of simulators of all kinds. Hot air balloons, gliders, F-22 fighter jets, etc. The girls loved trying them out.























Alyssa was a very intense pilot. And she was over the moon when her name showed up on the EAA Young Eagles Log Book.


It was also very cool to learn about the S.C. Johnson family. In the late 1990s Sam Johnson made an exact replica of his father, H.F.'s Johnson's S-38 Sikorksy. A look-a-like of which, is behind the girls in this photo. In 1935, H.F. Johnson traveled to Brazil in his S-38 that eventually sunk. Being greatly moved by the poverty he saw there, he had several herds of livestock sent to the struggling villages upon his return home.

After his father's death, his son Sam made the replica of his father's plane and took a trip to Brazil as a means of accomplishing the dream his father had for him. Sam Johnson and his sons flew down the Amazon River to Brazil where they were shown fields in which they could see the descendants of the livestock their father and grandfather had given so many years earlier. In the video we watched about this, he said of his trip that he had never felt so connected to his father's work and legacy than he did when he was able to visit Brazil and see the impact of what his father had done for the people there.


Taking a few moments to be silly and model by the model :-)

Winter Poems by Alyssa

After sleeping in last Wednesday morning, I woke up at 6:47 to find Alyssa already awake and busy writing Winter poetry. She said she was inspired by the blizzard. These are all slides of a powerpoint presentation she put together.
 


 


 


 


 


 She was just trying to rhyme the word house :-)


 She has never played hockey before so that part of this poem seemed rather random. When I asked her about it, she told me she was thinking of her friend, Lauren who plays hockey when she wrote it.


 This one with the busy background is a little hard to read. It's a tiny bit better if you click on it.

We (heart) Snow Days!!

One of my earliest memories is being snowed in at my Aunt June's farm. I remember waking up, I think in a pull out bed, and looking out the window to see a wall of snow in front of me. We spent the day sitting by the fireplace until our backs burned (not literally, the fire was just very warm and cozy). I was very young at the time and can't be sure that what I recall is actually my own memory of how it happened, or if I have just heard the story so many times that it feels like a part of my memory. But either way there is something about huge snowstorms that is so memorable.

The great blizzard of 2011 arrived, and on Wednesday morning we woke up to this:
 A huge snow drift covering the front of the garage...


 




















More snow drifted from the ground up to the level of our windows. Typically I can walk through this area of our side yard, and not even get close to being able to see in the window because I'm just not tall enough. It was so strange to see the ground at window level! Our front windows were all the same too, and our front door was blocked in with at least a foot of snow as well.


 We made some pancakes ~ the really healthy kind, of course, to prepare us for the physical demands of a long morning of shoveling. M&Ms for Alyssa and Emma, and babycakes for Rebekah. Yes, unfortunately that's a pile of M&Ms on Rebekah's breakfast plate. She only likes plain pancakes, but still wanted the same treat she saw her sisters having.


 We headed outside and it took quite a while to clear the front of the garage doors, just so they could open and close again.


 There were also giant snow drifts on the other side of the garage, the girls loved it!!


 This is looking down our driveway at about the point when I felt like I might as well be out there with a teaspoon moving the snow. The snow was actually really beautiful looking, very sparkly and glittery. Everything seemed so peaceful covered in the huge blanket of white.


 Still loving the snow, and even eager to help shovel. Tiny shovel-full by tiny shovel-full Rebekah kept putting the snow in the small areas we managed to clear.


 Alyssa and Rebekah had enough of the cold so they went inside, but Emma trudged off through the backyards to our next door neighbor's house to find her friend, Jaydon. As she turned to walk away here, she said, "This snow is Awesome!" A girl on a mission.


 




















She found Jaydon and his little brother Mitchell, which kept all three of them busy.


 Did I mention yet that our driveway is massive? We would have been out there the entire day if our neighbor hadn't kindly offered to help. After he arrived with his snow blower, I politely threw about five more shovels full of snow, I didn't want to make it seem like I was passing my work off to him. It soon became apparent though, that I was mostly in the way of Dave and our neighbor so I excused myself to go make lunch.


 Alyssa had an assignment to create an underwater scene over the snow day, so the girls also had a lot of fun painting.


 




















We also tried to make some sponge paint snowflake art. It turned out bright and colorful although none of them turned out exactly like the example we were following.


About four o'clock on Wednesday is when the snow went from being beautiful and overwhelming to being just plain fun. MPS decided to cancel school for Thursday as well, due to some roads, school parking lots and bus stops still being buried in snow, but on our end, all the hard work was completely done. The plows had been through our cul de sac leaving us with this beauty...
 Our very own sled hill right in the middle of our street!!


It was perfect...
 


 


 


 I'm not sure why, but I loved this picture of the girls climbing up the hill until...


 One fell down and sent the rest tumbling after.


 Rebekah crawling out of the igloo our neighbor's kids made.


 Click on this photo to see happy faces :-)


 The girls were back in school today, and there is something nice about routine. But there is something really, really nice about the routine being interrupted and making new snow day memories!