April 13th

Happy Birthday to my wonderful sister in law, Ku'ulei! We hope you had a beautiful birthday!!

April 13th was a busy day...we had the German Immersion Foundation Dinner and Auction, so our day began with running to the Italian Community Center to set up.

Photo 100 of 365, taken April 13th:

All the goodie bags of cookies being set up for the guests.

This was the invite for the auction. Our theme celebrated the 200th anniversary of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales. My friend Barb designed them and I thought she did a great job, the silhouettes were just beautiful! They fold out and there is a whole section not seen here. It was a fun auction.

After helping with set up, we came home for a while to relax before having to get ready for the event. Emma got to open presents and have birthday cake. She loved this football stuff she picked out back in March...I think she wore it the rest of the day.

Photo 101 of 365, taken April 13th:

Dad's little football player.

This photo made me wonder if she knows what football players do though. Dancing with ribbons in one hand, and balloons in the other, outfit complete with helmet. She's something else :-)

We Finished It!

Yesterday, before we headed down to my parent's house for the rest of Spring vacation, Rebekah and I finished gluing and framing her classroom project for the German Immersion Foundation auction and dinner that is coming up.

Photo 90 of 365, taken April 3rd:

We ended up having 4 collages like this one. This one is my favorite. The kids worked so hard on them, they are each roughly the size of a poster board. I really wanted to matte each piece, but in the end decided against it because of framing costs. I thought they came out super bright, colorful and happy looking!

WaterStone Bank Contest and Kinderfest

Last Friday was a really special day at school. During April I had posted about WaterStone Bank hosting a 90th Anniversary giveaway to local non-profits. Well, we didn't win the first place prize of $30,000, but HOORAY, we ended up 5th place in the overall voting and were awarded $15,000! That is huge for us and our Foundation!

Since early May, we knew we were one of the recipients, but I didn't want to blog about it until it was official. The press release is here. On Friday WaterStone Bank arrived at school, gigantic check in hand, just in time to see one of the funnest end of the school year events, Kinderfest. The check presentation was done in the gym with all the kids present, and there was wild cheering and tons of excitement. It was great!
 The bank representatives were very impressed to be completely immersed in a German speaking environment and see how the kids responded with such natural ease. They even got to hear the kids sing some favorite German songs.

The German Immersion Foundation will use the money to help fund and expand the Amity Intern Program at our school. Every year we have between 4 and 5 German college students come to our school to complete their teaching internship. I cannot say enough about how valuable the interns are in our classrooms. Beyond the native German language skills they add, they lend an entirely unique and authentic German culture experience to each classroom they help out in. We are so thankful for the Amity Interns and for the funds to be able to continue this excellent program!

As a side note, now when you click on the German Immersion Foundation logo in my sidebar, it no longer brings you to the voting page, but instead directs you to the Foundation's website. Just in case you are ever curious about what GIF is up to.


 After the awards and singing in the gym, the kids all headed outside for Kinderfest, a school carnival day. Here, Alyssa is jumping rope with Frau Petri, one of the awesome interns spoken of above. Its so cool how the intern program not only brings great benefits to our school, but also that it benefits the German students who come here as well. They seem to love the experience of teaching in the US. There is a current 2nd grade teacher who was hired full time as a result of her internship, she had the opportunity to go back to Germany to teach, but felt strongly enough about the program that she chose to stay here. Recently one of the interns was amazed at the banana muffins I brought into Rebekah's class {I'll be honest, they were from a box :-)} and it's just small things like that where a huge cultural difference is seen, and I appreciate so much that we can introduce them to things, and our students learn so much from them.


 Emma and her sweet classmate, Dara waiting to play some Kinderfest games.


 This picture of Rebekah with her hand in a popcorn bag just about sums up her entire Kinderfest afternoon. She ate treats, and more treats, then more treats. All week long we had talked about how this was her very first Kinderfest, and she was so excited.

I was supposed to be working one of the games when I saw her sitting in the grass on the edge of the playground. She was all alone, just snacking and staring at the older kids playing tug of war out in the field. I was worried that she lost her friends and was sad, so I walked over to see her. When I asked her what she was doing she told me very contently, "I'm watching them tug the war." Then she added in an almost nostalgic way and like she was very much trying to ingrain the thoughts in her memory, "I can't believe this is my first day of daycare." See, we have this conversation at least twice a week when we walk past the after school daycare in their school's gymnasium about how much Rebekah loves daycare. I always have to remind her that she has never once been to daycare. So somewhere along the way she has gotten the impression that daycare is carnival games, tug of war, tricycle races, magnetic fishing pole games, dunk tanks, and snacks. And she was very proud to finally spend her first afternoon there!


 In the picture above where A and R are smiling, this is what they are looking at ~ Ka'iulani's teacher in the dunk tank, and she did get wet. Thank you, Frau O'Connor for being such a good sport! There's not a whole lot that kids enjoy seeing more than their teacher sitting in a dunk tank.

It was a good day to be a MGIS Ladybug! Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to vote for us in the contest!!

Your Vote Counts!!! {and could help us greatly}

This year, WaterStone Bank in Wauwatosa is celebrating 90 years of service to its communities. In celebration of it's 90th anniversary, they are hosting a give away in which local charities have the opportunity to compete for a substantial prize. The local charity that receives the most votes from the community will be awarded $30,000. This would be a huge help to our school's budget.

I would love for you to take a few moments and vote for the German Immersion Foundation. We got a little bit of a late start, and we've got some ground to gain, but already our votes are increasing and I know our school can reach the top of the list!

To Vote, click on the link here and follow the instructions (it takes less than 30 seconds). Voting will continue until April 30th, and there is no limit on the number of votes you can cast, so please feel free to vote more than once :-). I plan to put a logo up in my sidebar that you can click on to get to the voting homepage. Thank you so much!!!

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.