Ummm...that's not my Emma

We have had a few really busy weeks around here, and I have been neglecting the blog. Dave and I volunteer for The German Immersion Foundation, a non-profit foundation that supports our girls' school and we host an event each March. It's an awesome event that I'm privileged to be a part of, but I got a little over-committed {despite not really wanting to admit that to Dave and not even being able to spell the word ~ my spell check caught it three times before I got it right}. Now that the planning for that is behind us, I should be able to string together more than one or two coherent thoughts at a time.

Everything went really well with the auction. Incredibly, it appears that this tenth anniversary event will be the most successful yet, so we are beyond pleased with the outcome, and very thankful! I would post pics, but after months of preparations, I forgot to bring a camera. It's a good thing that documenting the event was not my responsibility. Anyway, I have lots to catch up on and hope to do that in the next several days.

The event was last Saturday, and with a super busy weekend ahead of us, I took Alyssa, her friend, Martina, and Rebekah to opening night of the First Stage performance of The Hundred Dresses last Friday night. It was a great play, probably one of our favorites! Emma was at a friend's birthday sleepover party.

First Stage does this really cool thing on opening night of all their mainstage shows. They have an after-party where you can meet the cast and eat cake, it's so much fun, and if you ever have the chance to get opening night tickets to one of their shows, I highly recommend sticking around for the party!


Saturday morning rolls around, and it's time for me to pick up Emma, bring Martina home, get Rebekah to a birthday party she begged to go to earlier in the week, and prepare for the auction taking place that evening. Dave was already helping to set up the event.

First Stop: Pick Up Emma. Emma was at a party for her friend, Alyssa, whose mom, Tanya, I teach with at our church. Alyssa has been to our house for a few playdates, but this was Emma's first time at their house. I arrived at the party to be greeted by a woman that I didn't know. I wasn't alarmed by this, Dave had dropped Emma off the night before and said a good friend of Tanya's decided to stay and help with the party. She was organizing a pile of sleeping bags lined up by the door, and I had no reason to believe I could possibly be in the wrong place. I introduced myself as Emma's mom, and the lady smiled and called for Emma to come to the door.
First Problem: The child who happily ran to meet me at the door was not my daughter. "Ummm...that's not my Emma," I said trying to hold back panic. The nice lady replied, "Oh, you're looking for Tanya's house on the next corner, they're having a slumber party over there too." In extremely embarrassed fashion, I apologized and told her it was nice having met her and I quickly skedaddled one block over. We were on a row of numbered streets, I needed ___th Place and I was on that same numbered Street. In my defense, my GPS told me I had arrived at my destination ~ How humiliating! At least Tanya and I got a good laugh out of it.

I collected my beloved Emma and we were off and running again.

Second Stop: Drop Off Martina. I'm proud to say that I safely returned Martina to her actual home with her grateful parents :-) No problem here.

Next Stop: Bring Rebekah to Michael's Birthday.

Next Problem: We arrived at the party {which was about 20 minutes farther away than I thought it was going to be, seriously I need to take a class of WI geography! I had no business even trying to be all the different places I planned to be on this day} 10 minutes late and with a sleeping Rebekah. It was a Tae Kwon Do party and we came in at just the point that all of Rebekah's classmates are flailing feet and fists through the air and screaming about as loud as you can expect a group of four and five year olds to scream. It was awful, her just woken up eyes struggled to take it all in and she clung to my neck. After about ten minutes of trying to reason with her, and her sweet friend Gladys trying to take her by the hand to the karate mats, she refused to stay at the party. I had to leave for the auction in an hour, I wasn't dressed, and I was closer to the event than I was to my house.

Final Problem:After returning home from a happy and successful auction, Rebekah got sick overnight. She's much better now, and who knows, maybe that was why she refused to stay at the party that she had been looking forward to?

The amazing blessing about it all: despite my challenged geography skills and being so busy I can hardly remember my own name, it feels great to be a part of something that improves the quality of education for the students at our girls' school. The school is an amazing and unique place. Like public schools across the country, it is faced with serious budget issues and while there are many ways I could choose to invest in their school, this is our current commitment. Along with the other parents (we have an amazing school community!), I know Dave and I are involved in something wonderful that has a true impact on the school and the three little girls who we love so much, and I am so thankful to be able to help.

Class President

Alyssa is all about rules. She loves them. She told me so when I posted a list of "guidelines" on our arts and crafts cabinet. They were simple things like: share the supplies, ask before you take out paint, clean up when you are finished, don't use the scissors on your hair etc...I didn't call them "rules" on purpose because I didn't want to stifle the girls' creativity by putting a up a list of regulations in a place where I hoped they would want to create art.

They were definitely interpreted as rules. This was made evident by Alyssa writing on the list I had so painstakingly created with cute little clip art images, "Follow the rules. It's Fun! I love rules!" Anyway, she appreciates order which leads us to an assignment she had at school a couple of weeks ago...
 She had to write a speech and design a campaign poster to run for Class President. It was just an assignment, and there will not actually be a president elected, but she gave it a lot of thought nonetheless.


She presented her speech to us and I was impressed, it was so "Alyssa" with her high regard for rules and structure in the classroom (you can read her little notecards below).
 When she gave her presentation in class, she got laughed at. It made me question if I should have said something beforehand. While I loved her little speech and thought it was sweet, I could have predicted a less than favorable reaction from her classmates based upon her platform of minimal distractions in the classroom, a reasonable amount of homework, and appreciation for the education they were receiving being that it would prepare them for their future careers.

Thankfully, the more we talked about it, I realized she didn't take their laughter personally and she wasn't hurt by it as much as she was irritated. She said that she and one other girl were the only ones who took the assignment seriously and that the kids were making campaign promises about bringing in big screen TVs and video games and having (2) two hour long recesses each day. She was appalled by those ideas, and asked me why she always has to be the serious one in her class. I told her she didn't have to be...she chose to be, and I was very proud of her ideas of what would make a good class president and the hard work she put into the assignment.

The fun of navigating through the fifth grade world ~ and I'm sure it doesn't get any less complicated from here. :-)

Alyssa Loves Music

During 4th and 5th grade, the students at our school are introduced to music lessons on a variety of different instruments. At about this time last year, Alyssa surprised me very much when she brought a trumpet home from school. She was so excited to tell us how much she loved playing it, and how she was promoted to the 5th grade music lessons. She is very dainty and princess-like in a lot of ways, and the trumpet did not seem to fit her ultra feminine attributes. She played the trumpet all Spring last year and enjoyed it a lot!

After my surprise with her choice of trumpet last year, you can imagine my even greater surprise when she brought home yet a larger wind instrument to play this semester...
 The French Horn, or just plain Horn. It's so huge it hardly fits on her lap. But once again, she has found an instrument that she loves to play.

We've been told by her music teacher and one of Dave's friend's who played the horn in the Iowa marching band that it can be a difficult instrument to play. She seems to be picking it up nicely. She practiced some exercises from her music booklet over the weekend and came home from school on Monday telling me that her teacher explained she was working on the wrong pages..."I am much more advanced than that, and I can move onto the yellow pages now, " she told me matter-of-factly. She makes me laugh ~ she considers herself an expert at just about anything she's participated in for two weeks or longer. Give her 14 days and a challenge, and she'll master it (or at least convince you that she has!)


The little girls are very amused with the horn as well!

She Can Fly

A few weeks ago, Rebekah found a new use for our hepa filter air purifier...
 As it removes allergens and germs it also throws off a surprisingly strong blast of air. It has proved to be the funnest small appliance at our house.


 She was laughing and singing her own version of the song from Peter Pan,
"I can fly, I can fly, I can fly!"

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

I may have very well forgotten that today is Dr. Suess' birthday if Rebekah's school calendar didn't remind me with the week revolving around all things Seuss. For his birthday we had a breakfast of...Green Eggs and Salami (??)! Oooops, this wasn't a very well thought out breakfast menu and we didn't have any ham :-)


"Eat them! Eat them! Here they are!"
We had one unhappy little camper who refused to eat the green eggs, she does not like her food to be messed around with in any way. In all fairness to Emma, my expectations were a bit unrealistic. She's not really a "morning girl" to begin with, added to the fact that she has only about five foods that she actually likes to eat (and green eggs are not on the list) so I really had about zero chance that she was going to eat this. She is so sweet ~ but she sure can pull off a good pout, especially when food related conflict comes up!



Rebekah, being the good little Sam I am that she is, was pretty impressed, and tried to convince Emma (who called the eggs "scary") that they tasted just like regular eggs.


Alyssa was also amused and she too had words of encouragement for Emma. It wasn't quite a quote from the book, but if it was, I would like to think it went something like, "You don't like them? So you say...try them! Try them! And you may! Try them and you may, I say!" In actuality it was more like, "Mom, Emma's not eating her eggs! They're getting cold, then they'll really be gross!" Thanks for your help, sweet Alyssa. And on second thought, I may have been the one that suggested that cold eggs are gross.

So we didn't have an epiphanal moment where Emma shouted a victorious, "I do so like Green Eggs and Ham, I do so like them, Sam I am!" But I'm happy to report that I packed some dry cereal in a ziploc bag for her to eat on the bus ride to school. Oh, the compromises I'm willing to make in order to get that child to eat, it was either the cereal or some girl scout cookies...she'll thank me someday.