Bear's eighth grade graduation + girls' bridging photos

We marked a milestone with Bear's graduation from Bluffview last night...the end of ten years of Montessori for him. It was a sweet, but bitter-sweet, ceremony. The girls also "bridged" into their next levels -- the only child NOT going through some kind of major transition was Alleluia Boy. Video to follow next week!

Recital time!

Mouse and Bear had their annual recital the other night; what you will see is Bear playing with the string ensemble, followed by Mouse on flute; then, unfortunately, only a snippet of Bear's solo piece. I thought I was recording, but I wasn't! However, you get a sense of how far he has progressed. The pause toward the end of the song is written into the music, not an accidental hesitation.

Clubhouse

Well, we didn't accomplish everything we set out to do over the summer, but one of the things we did finish was a treehouse/fort/clubhouse for the kids. (We haven't quite settled on what to call it.) The kids have been begging for a treehouse for years. We don't really have a tree suitable for one, but after salvaging our deck last year, I came up with the plan to re-use some of the lumber for this...clubhouse stilt thingy.

We spent most of the summer working on it a bit at a time, with a big push in the last week and a half. Most of the wood is re-used; the 4x4 timbers were originally support posts from the old deck, and the floor is an old barn door that had been left in the upper level of our garage. Bear did much of the construction work, after I showed him what to do. The idea was for him to master a few basic carpentry skills and to become comfortable with the tools. (Mouse was invited to participate but she didn't want to, and I wasn't up to making her...although I plan to have her doing home improvement projects around the house, too, eventually. Mouse did do most of the final coat of paint.)

Here's how it turned out:

The late January update

While the weather encourages hibernation (at least to us Southern transplants), we never stop.  A few things going on of note:

Bear got third place in individual and group kata at his first karate tournament!

Really, he's happier than he looks.

He also did an internship (more like job shadowing) for two days as a required project at his school for 7th and 8th graders. So his internship--at his instigation--was to shadow theology professors. My colleagues were very kind (he couldn't do it with me per se) and he really enjoyed it. He liked the college classes and mentioned he thought he could do the work. ;) He also interviewed a priest at our seminary on campus and the Dean of Campus Ministry. Last I heard, he wants to major in Theology, and double minor in Math and Communications. That's...creative....I guess we'll see.


 Mouse is a cupcake baker!

She got some cupcake tins and a decorating kit for Christmas and we have had quite a bit of cake since. Good cake too! This mixes in with a cupcake recipe book and a series of girls books on a group of friends who make cupcakes for fun and money. Her first cupcakes were pineapple upside down cupcakes. Yum.

Jubilee Girl got a haircut! Pictures coming soon!

The Music Man has all kinds of things going on...more at the Adopting Alex blog!

Sporting Rachelle's knit hat!

Mudpuppy is three and bored. Well, not all the time, but he is a bundle of energy and taking it out on our living room. Yikes. Beyond that, he showed us he is learning to read. He began picking out words and reading them, and pointing to letters and doing the appropriate sound. He isn't full blown reading, but clearly he realizes that those words mean something, and he is determined to figure out what.

Matthew sporting his knit hat from Rachelle!

Finally, we had a great visit from Joanna and her family. Joanna is a person we had only met online but extensively that way!)--a young woman who made it her mission to get the Music Man a family. She and her family live in Canada and were in MN visiting relatives--and swung a little south to meet us. We had such a pleasant visit! And we were thrilled that Joanna got to meet Music Man, and he got to meet her.

Joanna and Alex.

We'll try to get more cute stuff up soon. Its all crazy around here, but there is an abundance of cute too....

Starling

Bear leads a spontaneous exercise class

This was an amusing scene the other night...Bear often starts practicing his karate or just jumping around in the middle of the living room. This time, all of the other kids -- led by Alleluia Boy -- joined in. It was funny to see the little ones trying to imitate all of Bear's moves. Take a look:

"Amazing Grace"

Lately the kids have been singing "Amazing Grace" to Mudpupp -- don't ask me how this started, I'm sure I have no idea. In any case, he really likes it, and demands that they sing by repeating, "Song! Song!" until they do.

Stranger still, he has started learning the song himself. A few times now, he's sung the entire first verse all the way through -- although only when we're not paying direct attention. If we ask him to sing, he just looks at us silently, smiling. His pronunciation lacks a great deal, but he gets the basic shape of the words, as well as the melody: "Amazin' 'ace, sweet ah sound, ah save ah wretch lie me!" and so on, all the way down to: "...was los', now ah see!" It gave me goosebumps the first time he did it -- while I was changing him!

Mudpuppy likes to swing on the big-kid swings

Picking pumpkins last weekend - he was a little intimidated
at first by all the pumpkins, but enjoyed seeing a real cat
close up.

Helping with the pizza dough. He believes in being VERY liberal
with the spices!

Mouse and Jaybird carving their own pumpkins. Bear is
"too old" for such things.

Grandma hanging out with the kids on a sunny fall day by the lake.

This afternoon we were prepping the kids for our All Saints party at church -- Bear went as Paul Miki, Mouse as Elizabeth of Portugal, and Jaybird as J8ulia Billiart. We helped them find symbols of their saints to use as hints in the "guess the saint" game. At one point, I asked Jaybird to pick something up in the bathroom, and as she did, she cheerfully said, "Well, I am going to be a saint someday."

"You think so, huh?"

"Yeah, 'cause a saint is just someone who loves God a real lot and is dead. And I think I will love God a real lot when I am grown up!"

That's the hard part, isn't it -- the loving. The dead part, not so much.

A magnificent fall

This autumn has been pretty magnificent, if you ignore the rather cold and dreary weeks we had in the middle of September. Some highlights:

This afternoon we got out and raked leaves. It's a bit weird to be throwing
leaves into the compost while we're still harvesting basil and tomatoes,
but there you go.

The littlest kids enjoy being pulled to the compost pile in back. Their job is
to keep the leaves from blowing away en route. Jaybird is ready to roll in
the wheelbarrow (background); she enjoys being dumped in the growing
pile of leaves at the end.

Here's where all those leaves come from. They glow on the trees on sunny days.

Every noon, before his nap, Mudpuppy insists on going on a walk by the lake.
This is his favorite park bench (actually a bench swing).

We've taken quite a few fall color walks as a family lately. Last weekend,
we walked along the creek at Moyer Park in Bloomington. Here's Jaybird.

"Uncle Andy" on the same walk.

And the kids on a walk in the bluffs the week before that.

And today we went to the Bluffview Fall Festival, which was held on a farm.
See Jaybird (Dalmation cape) on the hayride?

Meanwhile, the older kids spent most of the time jumping around the haystacks
piled up to the rafters in the barn.

And besides the fall color, we've also been enjoying a profusion of Morning Glories--finally!

Goodbye to summer!

Well, it's officially fall now, and the jackets are hanging on the hooks by the back door. Time to catch up on how we rounded out our summer!

Mouse and I went on a bike ride by the lake one day -- she was having a rough day and needed some alone time with a parent. We sat on this bench and watched the sun set. As we biked along the path, she commented on how "romantic" various spots would be. She liked the idea of having a date under a willow tree, but thought that the bugs might be an issue. This bench made an acceptable alternative. We also talked about all the types of jobs she could possibly have when she grows up -- all the different types of writing and artist jobs, and other possibilities, too.

Here is a great shot of my mom with Mudpuppy. We took this picture during our visit to the Cities (at the same time we visited the state fair). This shot required multiple takes!

 

I ask you, would summer ever be complete without a lemonade stand picture? No, it would not. Jaybird and her friend sat out on the sidewalk for more than an hour and got three (non-family) customers. God bless people who stop for little kids' lemonade stands; they are nurturing the nation's future Job Creators (as our Republican friends would say). It's a patriotic act, I tell you. It's too bad I didn't take video -- they spent much of the time marching up and down the sidewalk yelling, at the top of their lungs, "LEMONADE! ONLY 25 CENTS!"

Bear enjoyed kayaking on the lake, but he really enjoyed...

...this paddle board. You stand on it and use a long paddle to get around. Park rec had a couple for "rent" (for free) this summer, and they were very popular indeed. Bear couldn't stop talking about it for a few weeks.

Icee pop on the deck...pretty much speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Last weekend was really warm...the perfect day to go canoeing on the lake with friends!

This summer, if Mouse has not been reading, she's been scootering, back and forth down the sidewalk in front of our house. She pretends that she's flying, which she almost looks like she is.

Making honey! One of the great things about this town is connecting with so many people who are connected to the land -- including some friends of ours who not only raise chickens in their (urban) backyard, but also keep bees. We visited them as they extracted the honey from the combs -- I have a video of this that I will post if I have time.

Bear also got to go out on the river a few times with his good friend's family. Once, they went jumping into the river from this rope swing on an unnamed island. Here's Bear jumping in.

No garden tour this year! I think I have to deem the garden a bust this year. Our harvest of everything from tomatoes to carrots to peppers and apples and berries was really disappointing, nothing like previous years. I put this down partly to the bizarre weather, and the hottest summer on record (peppers and tomatoes don't set fruit when the nighttime temps are too high); partly, to some basic mistakes on my part (for instance, interplanting carrots and lettuce too close), partly to dumb luck. However, there's always a silver lining...and in our case, that lining comes in the many colors of our bumper crop of fall flowers. We have morning glories for the first time this year, as well as dozens of these stunning sunflowers.

And that seems an appropriate way to wrap up this post!