Weekend Update

Here is what has been keeping our life busy for the past 3 weeks: school, church, homework, housekeeping, meetings, and a 3 day battle with influenza.  Luckily the list of things that have been keeping our weekends busy is slightly more interesting.

  

 As a culmination to our Signs of Winter unit in preschool, we have a big Hibernation Party.  We wear our jammies to school and make pancakes and read bedtime stories and learn about all the animals that hibernate.  After wearing my pajamas to work for 2 days straight, I had a craving for some breakfast for dinner, so Dave took us out.

 We also had a huge, bright moon one night, so we enjoyed getting some use out of Auntie Karen and Uncle Chris' present for the girls this year, a telescope.

One Saturday we went on a spectacular outing.  A nearby art museum was featuring a children's literature exhibit that was perfect for us.  We met many of our favorite book characters in their original art form and learned all sorts of interesting things about the illustrators who created them.  (Open this picture bigger to see No David, the pigeon who drove the bus, the mouse who ate the cookie, and a dinosaur saying goodnight...)

One of the best parts of the exhibit was the little library where every book featured could be read, with the artwork we'd just seen bookmarked!  It was so neat to compare the published version to the artists' rough or finished drafts on the wall!

 This illustration was probably our favorite-- Don Wood's King Bidgood in the bathtub.  We LOVE this book and seeing this picture in all of its glorious original detail and color was a treat.

 After the art museum we made a stop at the cheese place where we learned all about cheese making, watched the workers squishing the curds into blocks, and ate ice cream at the creamery.

One Sunday after church Jetta had the girls over for an afternoon of playing...which turned into a sleepover since we did not have school the next day.  It is a combination of weird and fantastic having  a quiet, clean, kid-free home for 24 hours.  I just love how much fun the girls have in the country, climbing dirt piles, building log cabins, and running around the pastures.

  

 The girls and I are involved in a church group for young ladies ages 4th-8th grade.  One weekend we had our biggest fundraiser of the year-- a whole-church soup supper.  I was on meatball duty and got to make 12 pounds (!!!) of meatballs for the soup.  It took 2 hours and I may have turned my children into vegetarians, but it was actually a super fun family time of singing and joking around as they were all gracious enough to help with this monster cooking project.  (And the fundraiser was really successful-- we can send all the girls in our church to camp for free now!)

 My sweet friend Amy, who is many wonderful things, including a talented sewer, volunteered to come over one Saturday and help Ella figure out the sewing machine she got for Christmas.  This took a few hours, but was a great time of learning for Ella.  She has made countless pillows and skirts for her American Girl doll since!

And this weekend I embarked on a mission to dig my vaccination record out of the tubs of childhood memories in our shed.  I was unsuccessful in finding anything about my immunizations, but I did unearth some golden memories that have been delighting the girls, including a stack of old paintings I did in a watercolor class, a small dish of the hardware that was actually in my broken arm, a high school journal chronicling the start of my relationship with Dave (pictured above), and a bunch of the Braille stuff my dad, who was blind, used to read and write (pictured below).

  

Seals and Star Fish and Sea Lemons-- Oh My!

Over this break, Dave and I told our girls a lot of stories about what Christmas Vacations looked like for us growing up in the Midwest.  Things like snow, sledding, ice skating, ski equipment for Christmas presents, going back to school wearing snow pants and boots, one year not going back to school for a whole extra week because one Snow Day after the next hit, were the norm.  Then I realized what kind of stories they might be telling their kids about what breaks from school looked like: hiking, wildlife sighting, National Parks, and the Pacific ocean, being their norm.  How awesome!

The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve has been on my list of places to check out for a while and over this break, we were finally able to cross it off.  Put it on your list too, friends!  It was one of the most unique landscapes we've explored.

We arrived at this piece of the coast around noon and, though I had read that an immense stretch of tide pools was the attraction here, all we found when we strolled up was a narrow strip of beach.  We walked down it for a bit, feeling a tad disappointed.  We did perk up when a dozen curious seals swam up to check us out and a Google check revealed that it was in fact high tide.

So, we ate our picnic lunch.  We watched the Marine Reserve's movie about all the wildlife that lives here, and we took a hike around the top of the bluffs.  Delia was not loving this cliff-hugging path, but Dave and I thought the views were amazing.  As we both turn 40 this year, we thought it would be cool if we could hike 40 miles as a family.  With this scenic path, we got 1 of those miles out of the way.

After just a few hours, the tide was already receding and the piece of coastline we had first walked up to was already looking pretty different.  We got to exploring!

We found the standard anemones, hermit crabs, giant crabs, and starfish.  And though we did not find the octopuses that the movie said are also somewhat common in this tide pool system, we did find the rare sea lemon (pictured above)!  Have you ever seen or heard of this?  We had not.  It's pretty much a bright yellow sea cucumber and it's super fun to pet!

The collage below shows 3 shots of almost the same area looking drastically different over the course of just 4 hours.  As the tide went from high to low, a whole world of underwater life became visible and it all happened right under our feet.

Since we were not far from the city. we went home on a path through it and made a stop at the SF Public Library.  I had heard that you only needed to be a CA resident to obtain a library card.  And once you held a card, you had access to this system's massive Kindle lending library.  All 4 of us got cards on this stop and have already been enjoying the luxury of nearly any book we've been wanting to read able to be delivered immediately to our devices, or put on a waiting list.  The SF library was something cool to see all by itself too.  With 5 floors, rotunda, and a children's section bigger than our town's entire library, we were amazed.  Definitely worth a stop next time you're in the city; just be prepared to see some colorful characters! :)

  

For our one big outing, we chose well.  This day was a real Christmas Break high point!

The 12 Days of Christmas...Vacation

What a blessing to spend a relaxing Christmas with my true loves!  This break gave us the perfect combo of lazy days, outings, fun with friends, drummers drumming, golden rings and turtle doves (just kidding about those last 3).  This post will chronicle our very own 12 (or maybe 15) Days of Christmas.

On the first day of Christmas Vacation we caught up with Jeff, Amy, Jonathan, Grace and Benjamin.  Amy always plans some creative way for the kids to get involved in the after-dinner treat making. 

On the second day of Christmas Vacation we stayed in our jammies ALL DAY and drank hot chocolate and started reading aloud the next Harry Potter book.

On the third day of Christmas Vacation we did our traditional Christmas Eve present giving, timed to happen right along with our family in Chicago.  Many generous and perfect gifts were opened (American Girl Doll RV, telescope, kitchen gadgets, sewing machine, hiking boots, special commemorative, hand-painted Cubs baseball, tickets to an Escape Room, LEGOS, etc.), but the gift Dave and I were most excited to give was for the girls-- these jerseys for their favorite Cubs and Blackhawk players.

On the fifth day of Christmas Vacation we took a little drive to see this You Tube sensation house with an impressive dancing light display-- this year with a Harry Potter theme!

On the sixth day of Christmas Vacation we all got haircuts and crossed the thing the girls were most excited about off the to-do list: seeing the movie Sing in the theater. (No pictures, though, sorry)

On the seventh day of Christmas Vacation, we partied with our church VM family.  We stuffed ourselves with warm Olie Bollen.  We (just Dave actually) did some skeet shooting over the pasture.  We froze hanging off the back of Grandpa Ed's fire truck, whizzing down the back country roads singing Christmas carols.  We had several hours to fellowship with some of our favorite people.  

On the eighth day of Christmas Vacation, I was honestly getting a little weary of my true loves' fighting and mess making, so I whisked them out of the house to burn some energy.  We brought our roller blades to a nearby indoor roller rink for their open skate time, and it was AWESOME!

On the ninth day of Christmas Vacation we took our one big outing to the coast to explore the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve.  The miles of tide pools and ocean wildlife that we discovered here were so cool and such a Christmas Break highlight, they are actually going to require their own post, which I will write next.

On the tenth day of Christmas Vacation we celebrated our birthday boy, who turned the big 4-0 this year!  I tried to talk him into a party or a trip to Mexico or something special to commemorate this milestone of age, but he assured me all he wanted in this busy season was our annual double date with good friends Phil and Jetta.  So I set that up and we loved watching Passengers with them and talking for hours over Mexican food.  The girls and I also baked him a Boeter Koek and designed a "Chose Your Own Adventure" 40th birthday present.

On the eleventh day of Christmas Vacation, we once again rang in the New Year with a crowd of church friends at Phil and Jetta's house.  We revisited a NYE theme that was a favorite from years ago-- dancing!  We rigged up the Wii to the projector and Just Danced the night away.  New this year was the addition of the cool laser light thingy Dave got for Christmas.  We projected that onto the ceiling and walls, making the atmosphere so fun!  It was dark and I was so busy dancing, this is actually the only picture I took.  

On the twelfth day of Christmas Vacation we recovered from New Year's Eve and had a lovely down day at home, decorating a giant box a present came in and watching movies together as a family.

On the thirteenth day of Christmas Vacation, we had our good friends Sara, Arend, Anja and Anika over for pizza and games.  It's always a good time catching up with this sweet family and this get together was much overdue.  We love watching the friendship between the 4 girls grow too, even though there is an age difference, they play so creatively together.

On the fourteenth day of Christmas Vacation, we started preparing for life back in the routine of school and work.  We took down the decorations.  We thoroughly cleaned the house.  We grocery shopped for school lunch foods.  We plugged in the Chrome Book for charging.  I wrote 35 thank you notes for all the generous gifts my students gave me.

And on the fifteenth (and LAST) day of Christmas Vacation, we planned one more family date, back to the beloved roller rink, this time with Dave.  It was fun to see that tons of other people we knew had this same idea for the last day of break.  We saw 4 other school families there!  Two of them had kids in my classes!  Skating around the rink, holding hands with some of my little students was actually the perfect way to start getting excited about seeing them all the next day at school. 

So, as you can see it was a very full, but very wonderful and relaxing, break, packed with a wide variety of activities and fun!  The only thing we may have been missing was an actual partridge in a pear tree!

Christmasy Things

Maybe you've heard.  This weekend a giant storm is supposed to slam into CA.  While my family braces for it on this gray Saturday, cuddled up with various mugs of hot drinks, books and Odd Squad, I thought I would FINALLY get around to blogging about Christmas 2016.  I think I just need to start with a list of all the random fun things we participated in leading up to Christmas Break...

Delia's dance studio was once again featured in our small town's Christmas Parade on Main Street.  She loved getting her wacky Christmas leggings and headband on and dancing her choreographed routine as she followed the big float down the parade route.  After the parade, we strolled around the downtown, bumping into church friends and frolicking under the snow machine.

On December 5, Sinterklaas made his annual appearance, leaving small gifts in the girls' klompen by the fireplace.  The girls still act like they are buying this, so we continue!  Plus it's just tons of fun!

One night we were delightfully light on homework, so we did an impromptu restaurant dinner date.  On the way home, we drove down this festive block where everyone has "dancing lights" choreographed to the same music.  It is fun to just park and watch all the different houses around you flashing.  This year, we discovered it's extra fun to watch through the new car's sunroof!

We enjoyed our church's annual Sunday School Program where Delia had speaking parts and singing parts with a small group of girls and Ella played her saxophone with an ensemble of high school woodwind players.  

We also celebrated wonderful working environments for both Dave and I with two separate restaurant meals.  My boss, Elly, takes the entire preschool staff out for lunch where we get to know each other out of the classroom and exchange Secret Santa gifts.  And Dave and I take the whole church staff to the steakhouse where we laugh for hours and thank God that He has put such good people into our daily lives.

And then it was Christmas Break!  One of my favorite co-teachers, Lisa, and I showed up in matching vests the day we let out.  Posts about Christmas Vacation Happenings coming soon...