Ella the Actress

As you may remember from a post I wrote last year, the 4th and 5th grades traditionally put on a huge stage production at our school.  The 4th graders serve as the choir and the 5th graders get the acting parts.  Ella has known about and looked forward to this for years and was excited to be given the role of Mary, Tom's cousin, in the musical Tom Sawyer.  Totally on her own, she even picked up and read the Mark Twain book to better understand the story and her part!  Ella has loved every piece of this process-- the try outs, the practices, the lines (which she memorized effortlessly and with zero help from us at home), the solos, the costume, the make-up!, and the 3 performances they've done for our elementary school, the neighbor school, and all the parents, over the past 2 days.

 Mary, Aunt Polly and Sydney taking turns singing their frustrations out in the song "What Do You Do with A Boy Like That?"

 Mary watching her cousin get in trouble yet again in the classroom.

Rousing her mischievous cousin from bed after his late night in the grave yard.

 Mary reading her aunt and brother the note Tom left before going on his big rafting adventure with the boys.

 Sobbing at Tom and Huck's funeral, when the town thought they had drown in the river.

 She's REALLY upset. :)

Singing "Hallelujah" with the choir when it is realized the boys are alive!

 Tom and Becky have fallen in love, the bank robbers have been caught, and all is well in Hannibal, MO.  A reprisal of the big opening number closes the show out.

 Curtain Call!  Ella said hearing the big applause and cheers from the audience was always her favorite part.  I think she's hooked! 

 With her buddy, Emma, who played Aunt Polly.

 The whole 5th grade cast.

 Friends and flowers!

And some frozen yogurt with the family to celebrate a job very well done.

I totally get that I only contributed half of Ella's genes and I am so happy to see that Dave's love for the spot light seems to have trumped my stage-fright in the genetic make up of our daughter.  But, I am still SO delighted and proud to see my girl doing something I could and would never do.  Singing solos and speaking on stage in front of a packed auditorium!  And doing it perfectly and with no nerves!  How awesome when our kids surprise us like this.  What other amazing things are these girls going to do?!  I can't wait to find out!

Phone's "Available Storage" Boosted! (A Catch-Up Post)

 Time to clean out my phone and dump a bunch of random photos on the blog! :)  I've been okay about keeping our big outings and events recorded, but here are some of the smaller moments and memories from Winter turning into Spring 2016...

Every Thursday, while Ella does her piano lesson, I get to play with these cuties!

 Ella had to read a biography and make a diorama about its subject for school.  She chose Corrie Ten Boom and was deeply impacted, as anyone who reads her story is, by Corrie's faith and testimony.  Thanks to Uncle Kyle, for gifting her with the book!  I thought her diorama, which she did 100% by herself, was great!

 The new craze here is Kendama.  This is an old-school ball in cup/yo-yo toy that surprisingly consumes a great deal of time!  Delia was given an old Kendama by a friend and when it broke, she wanted a new one ASAP.  The kids are SO into this trend, Delia gave me an entire Saturday of yard work and week pulling, just to earn a new one!  It is cute to see all the kids at recess standing in groups working on mastering the tricks.

Every year we look forward to Almond Blossom and its reminder that Spring comes early here in the Central Valley.  You already saw our blossom pics (plus this one more off my phone, below), but here are a few peeks at how we celebrated at the Almond Blossom Festival this year.  We went to $1 Ride Night at the carnival for the first time and had a blast running into so many students and friends.  The girls also continued to amuse and confuse us with their passion for spinny rides.  At the parade a few days later, the girls ditched their old mom and dad to sit with some friends.  We're moving into a new, more grown-up stage of life for sure!  Still figuring out how I feel about it. ;)

 Almost-Spring weather is different every day.  Some days it can't make up its mind and gives us both sunshine and rain.  It seems like we've had LOTS of rainbows lately.  This is a picture of one Ella snapped on the way to school one morning.

And this week I taught one of my favorite units, using snail activities to get the kids excited about the two topics "Signs of Spring" and "Patience".  A highlight is always the snail painting, and this year's class looooved it more than any other!  Most of my kids used their full free play time to just hang out in the art center watching, laughing at, and squealing over these slimy friends leaving colorful paint trails all over the art papers.  And the snails Ella and Delia wrangled from our garden were a hardy bunch this year, they all survived and earned prettier, more decorated shells, for their artistic efforts! How fun is my job?!

Belong Believe Become Conference

This weekend I had the great privilege of hearing one of my all time favorite bloggers and authors, Jen Hatmaker, speak at an intimate conference for 660 women.  Jen's book, For the Love, about giving yourself, and by extension others, grace in a world of impossible standards, was a game changer for me.  My Book Club even discussed it and appreciated how real and lovely Jen is, like a best friend you never met.  And hearing her speak was exactly the same!  She cracked us up with stories about mothering her five kids.  And she rocked our safe, comfortable, Christian worlds with the challenge to "stop being weird" and giving Christians a bad name, and just get out there and love people.  I have pages and pages of notes with excellent quotes like, "If someone doesn't like you because of Jesus, that's on them.  But, if someone doesn't like Jesus because of you, that's on you." or "You can't think your way into a new way of living, you must live your way into a new way of thinking." or "We need to be representatives of the Gospel, not defenders and protectors of it."  My drive home was 3 straight hours of processing what all these new challenges are going to look like in my life.  

Hearing Jen Hatmaker was amazing all by itself, but what made this weekend extra special was the opportunity to share it with my dear friend Teri.  The conference was hosted by her church and located at her school, so she took me in for the weekend and blessed me with meals and good conversation in our down time.  

Also fun was seeing so many familiar faces from home!  Though the conference was down south a bit, dozens of my favorite ladies from our church and friends from school made the trip too and it was cool to connect.

The whole weekend gave this tired, dry, mama and teacher a much needed gulp of fresh water.  I am humming the powerful and God-glorifying songs we sang in worship.  I am still smiling over Jen's hilarious stories.  And my heart is stirred with her reminder of HOW LOVED we are by God and her bold demand that we represent Christ and that love better and without judgment, hypocrisy, or inflexibility.

Blossom Time

It's mid-February!  Time to turn off the heat and break out the short sleeved shirts! ;)  

Enjoy a taste of Spring via this year's crop of almond blossom photos...

 

Long Weekend Adventures

Our school has always given us a four day weekend for Presidents' Day.  And we love them for it!  In the past, we've used this time for mini vacations to places like Monterey or Mendocino.  This year, however, we used that mini-vacation time and money in January with our friends in the snow.   So, we found some other clever ways to make this long weekend feel special with lots family time and even a few day trips.

I made a list for the girls that included awesome options of places to go for the day, like the Sacramento Train Museum, the beach, and Yosemite.  Their choice?  The Jelly Belly Factory!  I guess we shouldn't be surprised. We were happy to discover that the free factory tour we've taken a dozen times has been changed to a self-guided tour.  So, instead of being bunched up in a huge group, feeling like we could recite the lines with the videos, we could go through at our own pace and spend long periods of time watching the things we found interesting-- like the workers laying out all the different flavors of jelly beans on the conveyor belt making mix bags, or the chefs mixing up the very pungent lemon and sour apple sauces that coat the beans in the vats.  No pictures during the tour, so here are a few in the art gallery and gift shop.  Delia was delighted to discover some new jelly bean artwork featuring a giant panda and a huge Star Wars display.

Since the girls got their candy tour, we did a little compromising and spent the afternoon in Napa.  We've never tried to do a winery tour or tasting with the girls along, but thought we'd go for it on this trip.  We chose Sterling Vineyards, which was actually very family friendly.  To start, the winery is perched on top of huge hill, so to get to it, a ride in their gondola is required!

The girls were also given gift boxes with snacks, activities and juice.  These gondola boxes have been played with non-stop for the past 4 days, hauling stuffed animals up the shoe-string laced gondola tracks the girls have built around their bedroom!

Sterling also offers a self-guided tour, with their 4 tastings along the way.  No part of it was too boring for the kids.  And the views at the top and end of the tour are unsurpassed.  We even scored a bonus 5th taste while strolling around their Ansel Adams gallery.  A worker said, "You need some wine while enjoying the art!"

Just being in Napa during Spring was a treat!  The whole place was bursting with the colors of wild flowers in bloom.

On Saturday, we continued the family-fun with another little outing to Knight's Ferry.  The girls love, love, love climbing all the rocks here, so our hiking adventures are exciting and tackled without complaint! :)  Ella even brought her sketch pad and sat for a while drawing the covered bridge.

Here is was nice to see the water level looking somewhat normal and the wild poppies starting to dot the green hills with pops of orange.

At last year's Guatemala Mission Trip dinner, we won a gift basket to this fantastic ice cream shop in Knight's Ferry.  We finally used it on Saturday to reward our long, happy hike with the splurge of giant scoops in the fancy cones.

Besides these two outings, this weekend we also...
-played lots of board games
-rode bikes
-watched movies
-read an entire book in one late night! (This was me and it is my crazy favorite thing to do-- stay up way too late finishing a good book, knowing an early morning will not kick my butt the next day.)
-sat with and got to know an interesting new couple at a church dinner
-went to a birthday party for a 90 year old friend
-completed a big landscaping project in the yard, which included a fun stroll around the nursery to pick out new plants

It was a GREAT weekend.
If only they could all be 4 days long. Sigh...