Vote for Ella!

Tomorrow the girls' Middle School launches the week Ella has been waiting for since 6th grade.  Campaigning for Student Council Officers begins!  I'm not kidding when I say that Ella has been designing "Ella for President" posters for years.  This weekend our house was turned into Campaign Central as 9 creative and funny posters were cranked out.

Yesterday we even enlisted some help from Cora, Helia and Annelies.  This group represents a past Student Council president, a 7th grader, and two 6th graders-- Ella's target demographic! :)

This poster making party was so fun, it turned into a sleepover!

Ella has been parked at our table for most of this weekend making her ideas colorfully come to life.

(This Sorting Hat poster is my personal favorite.)

Ella is not the only one running for President and the competition will be fierce.  As we've sat together cutting and gluing the past 3 days, we've been able to talk about what it might be like if she doesn't actually win.  I'm proud of Ella for recognizing all the fun and reward she's already enjoyed in just creating her posters.  Win or lose, Ella has already said the running has been worth it!

High School Jen In Heaven

This weekend Dave and I were given tickets to an Amy Grant concert!  It was a wonderful gift that made for such a fun and nostalgic date night.  This school year Dave and I committed to being more intentional about monthly date nights, since the hassle of finding a babysitter is no longer something we have to deal with!  We had a nice dinner then enjoyed this fantastic concert in this beautiful outdoor amphitheater.

It's probably been over 20 years since I've heard some of these Amy Grant songs that I would listen to over and over on my AG CDs while doing homework in high school.  Amazingly, every single lyric somehow still resides in my head and I could sing right along!  I guessed what her set list would be, and, except for one song ("Thy Word"), I nailed it!  It was a true walk down memory lane.

Here are a few short videos of a few favorites: "Oh How the Years Go By", "Baby Baby" and "El Shaddai"

The last time I heard Amy Grant was at DC '94 when she surprised all of us in attendance with a concert WITH Michael W. Smith!  I remember lots of screaming and tears as I clung to my friends during songs like "Friends Are Friends Forever".  I love that this fun date prompted me to dig that memory out of my brain and revisit the music from that era with my high school boyfriend! :)

Old and New this 2018-19 School Year!

As I said on Instagram, "TWO VM girls are in Middle School this year.  And one is still in Preschool."  This year we try on old and brand new roles!  Ella begins her 3rd year of Middle School in 8th grade, an old pro by now.  I begin my 6th year teaching.  And Delia starts a brand new 6th grade path, joining her sister in the land of switching classes, lockers, and fun extra curricular options!

 In the days before school started this week, I was busy with training, meetings, and last minute preparations.  My friend Jetta was kind enough to take the girls for their last day of summer.  And she was strict enough to require my kids to join hers in an all day peach canning project!  I heard a lot of laughs were had around this table as a gazillion peaches were peeled and sliced.  I looooooved Jetta for wearing my kids out so good, they had no protests about an early school night bedtime! ;)

Also before the first day of school, we spent a night visiting the school.  The girls get their schedules and locker assignments.  There are loud, squealing reunions with friends they've missed.  And their yearbook pictures are taken.  No more first day of school pics with their teachers in Middle School, so here they are by their lockers.  So far, both girls are enjoying school.  They're tired and bummed about homework, but they've already each found things to celebrate.  Delia loves having a locker to decorate, and a study hall to get homework done in, and a legit choir to join!  Ella loves dreaming about and googling poster ideas for her Class President campaign, and enjoying a tiny 16 student high school level math class she was placed in (and they way this placement keeps her in a track for classes with all her smart friends who don't mess around!).

Though I'm battling the usual back-to-school jitters and, from experience, know my stomach probably won't be right till the end of September, I'm feeling pretty good about this year.  I have a small, but mighty class-- only 12 kids, but 9 of them boys, and many with big personalities!  After just a few days, several of these sweethearts have captured my heart already.  My co-teacher team is amazing this year.  We've had times to pray together and laugh together this week.  I'm optimistic it will be a great year for all of us!

Summer Lovin'

Here are some of the odds and ends that never made it on the blog this season.  As you can see, it's been another fantastic summer!

 We picked blueberries.

We rode roller coasters and spinny rides at Great America.

 We spent lots of hours swimming and reading at the community pool.

We also loved visiting our pool-owning friends.  We did a little tally and it ended up being 17 different people's pools we got to swim in this summer!  If you rescued us from triple digit heat and a boring day at home with an invitation to chat and swim at your place for a few hours...THANK YOU!!!

We tried to stay connected to our school friends.  With their buddies, the girls enjoyed making lemonade stands and having sleepovers and staying up late for movie nights and shopping at craft fairs and rollerblading in the church parking lot and sharing our dark sanctuary for Sunday night laser tag battles when everyone left after the pm service.

I'm so proud of Ella for finding all sorts of ways to keep the creativity flowing this summer!  After Hawaii, she taught herself to play the ukulele.

She'd encourage her sister to join her in setting up wacky and wonderful things in our house all the time.  They filmed newscasts with commercials and a full replica of the safety video you watch on airplanes.  They made a huge "Abstract Noun Store", full of decorative and seemingly empty bottles containing things like "contentment", "love", and "forgiveness".  She turned every room in the house into a living game of Clue we could all play, complete with weapons and costume changes for the characters.

 Ella also read a book about a kid who starts a business, thought it sounded fun, and launched her own business, 1 Thess. 5:17 Crafts, selling the little Altoid tin prayer boxes she loves to make.  One post on my Instagram account generated enough orders to earn her $39!

We survived another week of VBS.  Our church saw a record numbers of kids and we all agreed it was one of our best years yet!  Both girls have graduated to Crew Helpers, but Ella was needed to help play a dramatic part in our Bible room for a day.  She was great and convincing as the High Priest's Servant who gets his ear cut off in the Garden of Gethsemane.  She is now asking when Dave and I will retire from telling the Bible Stories, so she can take over. :)

This summer has also included family hide-and-go-seek laser tag wars, late night moon gazing, entire seasons of shows watched together, the 6th Harry Potter book read aloud, a million Minecraft homes built, crafts galore, and a sad goodbye to one of our guinea pigs.

It's been another summer of togetherness, adventure, and memories-- the exact thing I always crave at the end of every busy school year.  I feel confident that we are fortified and ready to jump back into our rigorous school schedule in just a few days after such a splendid season of fun and rest!

Adventure Playground

Our musical let out at 5:00, the WORST time to try and leave the city.  We decided we'd make Les Mis into a fun overnight in SF.  We ended up finding the best hotel deal across the bay in Berkeley, though, so this is where Day 2 was spent.  Our morning started with a couple hours of play at this crazy Adventure Playground.

Here it looks like we set our children free to play on trash heaps.  And, yep, that is sort of what we did.  This park has a unique vision of letting kids explore and create in unstructured ways.  The playgrounds are all things like old boats, pianos, tires, seats from buses, and hodgepodge play structures that are literally handmade of random piece of wood.  There was also a super fun zipline!

You had to run around the park and earn your tools by picking up garbage, splinters and nails.  Then you were rewarded with real hammers, nails, saws, and buckets of paint.  In organized racks were pieces and sheets of wood that you could use to build whatever you wanted.  Ella built a legit ladder with Dave, learning how to saw wood and hammer nails for the first time!

I love the above pictures because it captures us perfectly-- Delia didn't really want to do the hard work of building anything, she just wanted to run around and climb and play her imagination games.  Ella embraced the vision of this park and immediately started the scavenger hunt to earn her tools and get to work creating!

Delia did enjoy painting one of the structures, though.  She found this one that reminded her of the barricade from Les Mis and spent a large part of the morning acting out scenes and singing songs while on this structure!

Ella took the ladder she made and joined her sister.

You may be thinking this park sounds dangerous, but it was actually pristine and well supervised by staff.  The early child educator in me thinks this is just the most brilliant idea ever.  We are so protective of our kids, keeping them sheltered from anything that may harm them and doing everything for them.  I'm guilty of this too.  What a cool idea to, instead of confiscating dangerous items, actually give them a real tool and say, "Here try it!" while teaching how to NOT hurt themselves.  Or to give them a totally open ended playground and see what they decide to add to it and make of it.

We took a little walk along the bay too, enjoying those cool winds and a great view of the city.  Since we were by a great shopping center and passed another huge outlet mall on the way home, our overnight in the city ended with some fun back to school shopping.  It was a perfect little getaway and conclusion to our super summer of 2018!

Les Miz

Back in January we got en email from this fancy theater in San Francisco where we saw Wicked a few years ago that our all time favorite musical, Les Miserables, was coming for a short run this summer.  I snagged 4 of the quickly-selling-out tickets and we've been looking forward to this for 7 months now.  Our family has been obsessed with Les Mis forever.  Dave and I have loved the music before we even loved each other.  In college, he took me to see it in Chicago.  He has read the entire 1261 page Victor Hugo original; I've read the abridged; Ella read a young readers version this year.  The kids have grown up listening to the soundtrack and can both explain the beautiful story to you and sing every word.  We were SO EXCITED to share a viewing of the actual Broadway production with them!  It was the most grand of finales for our summer.

The Orpheum is an old and ornate theater.  I loved everything about experiencing this through the eyes of the girls-- one of the highlights being taking in such a fancy place!

The musical was phenomenal!  As soon as that first big "Bum-BUM" for the song "Look Down" came from the orchestra pit, I had chills.  What we especially loved in this performance was a combination of lavish production value, like real gunshots, strobe lights and smoke during the battle at the barricade scene, or lots of elaborate moving sets and interesting lighting and choreography, paired with several times where the actors were alone on an empty stage singing their powerful solos (like "I Dreamed a Dream" or "On my Own" or "Who Am I?") and letting the amazing music speak for itself.

I LOVE that the girls loved it as much as we hoped they would.  I have never been able to avoid the tears that come at the end of this story.  As I was wiping my own eyes, Ella next to me grabbed my handkerchief to mop up the tears streaming down hers as well.  We leaped to our feet in a rousing standing ovation, screaming cheers and clapping till our hands hurt when it was done and left the theater all goosebumpy for the rest of the night!

It was something I hope we'll all remember forever.  The short term impact has had the 4 of us singing, whistling, and humming the Les Mis songs for 2 straight days now...

This Week's Outing: California State Fair!

To keep our summer interesting and fun, and to take advantage of Dave's more relaxed schedule, we are trying to do one fun, bigger family outing per week.  We've done berry picking, amusement and water parks, ball games, camping, and, this week, the California State Fair!  We have great memories of previous visits to the State Fair, made in the past when the girls were very young and we had visiting family members.  We were excited to go back after such a long time.  

A favorite stop is always the baby animal area.  We just love those adorable baby lambs, kids, and piglets!

 We also got to watch chicks actually hatching!  These incubators were full of cracking eggs and newborn birdies soggy and stumbling around freshly hatched.  So cool!

 The fish and game section of the fair is always fun too.  Here Delia finally worked up enough nerve to put her arm into the tank of sturgeon.  And once she did, and felt how smooth and cool these fish were, she did not want to leave!

 At the Cal Fire station we talked with fighters about the sad and nearby Ferguson Fire.  The girls also got to sit in this (and another) brand new truck!

The agriculture area is a place to learn a lot.  There are huge gardens showing just about every kind of produce that our state grows, and plenty of pretty flowers too.  The girls learned about water conservation and each planted a flower/herb in a special water-wicking pot to take home. 

Now, let me take a moment here to say that I did great research on this outing.  I picked a day to go that had a nice "Kids Go Free!" deal.  I did NOT think to check out the weather forecast.  My phone said it was 102 degrees and that heat did slow us down quite a bit in the afternoon.  We found an amazing air conditioned pavilion that showcased wonderful farm fresh booths, handing out samples of all their goodies, like cheese, olive oil, nuts, ice cream and honey.  We must have walked through this area 17 times!  The honey sample people were starting to give us the stink eye.

One of these air conditioned pavilions also had our favorite Silent Disco.  Here you could grab a pair of headphones, set them to your preferred dance music (and coordinate your color with your peeps so you could all be hearing the same thing) and then dance away under the lights and disco ball!  Genius, right?!  And hilarious to see a bunch of people dancing to music only they could hear!

We ate fun fair foods, looked at all the arts and crafts submissions, watched a crazy motocross show, strolled through the barns of animals being judged, and took just one ride together on the monorail that drives you around and above the vast fair grounds.

It was hot day, but a good one!  I grew up going to county fairs with my grandpa, and, as I said, we had happy memories of visiting this State Fair with the girls years and years ago.  It was fun to go back and see, do, and learn more with them being older.

 The day ended with a soothing Footsie-Wootsie.  Still just a quarter! :)