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.

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.