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!

A pair of Christmas concerts

Mouse and Alleluia Boy both had Christmas concerts . . . we're working on finding video of Alex's concert:

First day of school 2013

Sign #34 that someone's the parent of five kids...the first day of school documentation is more slap-dash than sentimental, huh? But for the record:

Alleluia boy's first day

His teacher, Ms. Anna, demonstrating a work.

Spring concert

 

 Mouse had her concert debut on the flute last night...and Bear had a short solo on the violin. See highlights in the video below. Mouse playing "Amazing Grace" (shot by Jaybird...sorry for the shaky video) is at 4:20; Bear's solo is at 9:20.

Of birthdays and various things

Well, it has been a long time since I last posted...it is insanely crazy around here, again...so here's a quick catch-up post.

The weather continues to be exceptionally mild (for the most part...we had snowflakes
in the air today)...extending the playground season.

I turned 42 on Nov. 7. A few nights earlier, Starling and I went out to eat in La Crosse (woo-hoo!), the first time we'd done that in years, due to Mudpuppy being so young. I went looking for a fancy-but-not-too-expensive restaurant and thought I found one in the Waterfront. I couldn't get their menus to come up, but another review said they were "reasonable," which turns out to be a relative term...as we found out. Everything was wonderful, from the service to the ambiance to the (truly amazing) food. Starling said she had the best scallops she'd ever tasted, which is saying something for a girl who grew up on the Eastern seaboard, and whose parents now live on the Gulf Coast. But I couldn't help feeling bad about the expense...what would St. Francis say???!!! Yikes. The penultimate "fancy restaurant" moment came when someone other than our server stopped at the table just to brush a few bread crumbs off the white linen tablecloth.

Isn't this just cute? It's a mousse something or other...note the little ice bridge
connecting the two berries...and that is a curl of pure chocolate on top. $9.

My favorite part of my birthday is getting homemade gifts from the kids, along with their kind words. Every year I say the same thing: "Do you know what my best present is? You!" Only this year when I said, "Do you know what my favorite present is?", the older kids said, "Yeah, yeah, us!" And I said, "No! These warm pajamas!" Ha ha, just kidding. The older ones are at that jokey stage. We ended the party with a big group hug.

Mouse and Jaybird with their paper airplanes.

The day of my actual birthday, the kids were off of school. Happy birthday, you get to watch the kids all day! Actually, they were very good -- they entertained themselves most of the day. They rediscovered paper airplanes, and spent hours making them and flying them, both indoors and outdoors.

And finally, before I turn in for the night, here is a bit from the kids' Fall Sharing Night:

Bear with the classroom salamander.

Mouse with an algebraic cube.

Jaybird demonstrating her mastery of terms for three-dimensional geometric objects.
She also demonstrated a word-matching work.

And here is Bear with his favorite work -- maps! Here he is working on placing
city names on a map of the Ukraine.

That's all for now!

First day of school

It was the kids' first day of school on Tuesday. As you can see, they met the day with shining, expectant faces!

Overall, it was a pretty smooth launch. Everyone got up and dressed early enough, the kids were in an upbeat mood, and we had time for a few small rituals. We usually do a blessing for the beginning of the school year -- we did that again, this time with our first-class relic of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (patron saint of schools and schoolchildren) at hand. Then we had pictures, and we drove the kids into school.

For the first time, we did not go in with the kids. We've found that Jaybird does better separating at the car. Unfortunately, it was a rather chaotic scene when we dropped them off, and right away Jaybird got lost in the crowd and panicked. A teacher got Mouse, who guided her to her new classroom -- Mouse's old classroom.

Bear had shown signs of being nervous about the first day -- he has another new teacher (they're supposed to have the same one for three years in Montessori), so I think he was anxious about that. Mouse was worried about being separated from all her old friends and not having any friends in the classroom. Jaybird was a little anxious about the new routine in first grade -- not knowing the work and all.

Mudpuppy stayed home, but he has his own
"school" experiences on Tuesday and
Thursday mornings.

But when they finally came home, everyone gave a positive report. Bear had nothing but praise for his new teacher, especially the way she handled the class. He also said he was going to make a couple new friends this year. Mouse made a new friend, someone new to Bluffview. And Jaybird -- well, actually, she complained quite a bit about all the "sitting, sitting, sitting" they had to do on the first day while they went over the rules. Her experience may have been colored by the fact that she couldn't find her bus at the end of the day -- Mouse, who was supposed to guide her to the right bus, was nowhere to be seen, so she started to panic. That got the teachers' attention, and they spied Bear walking away from the school -- he had had our permission to walk home, but the teachers didn't know that, so they held him. They got Jaybird hooked up with Mouse on the right bus, and I got a call from Jaybird's teacher about Bear walking home around 2:30. It was so late at that point that I just went and picked him up with the car. (It's a half-hour walk home.)

Mouse and Jaybird spent over an hour on the bus ride home. It's incredibly ridiculous that they get home an hour after dismissal, given that we live 5 minutes from school; the bus drives right past the house all the way to the east end of town, then works its way back. I guess they lost a kid on the first day, which contributed to the delay, but they were really late again today. We'll see how this plays out....

Anyway, we ended the day with a special dinner, including double chocolate brownies for dessert. :)

Here's a video of the morning and homecoming. Sorry for the blurry middle section -- the camera started out out of focus and doesn't auto-focus once it's in video mode.

Getting ready for school

We're very busy getting ready for the start of school these days, and one of the items on our list is the annual family photo. Children's House and E1 classrooms at our Montessori school ask the children to bring a photo of their family to keep in the classroom -- hence the annual chore. Here's this year's version, taken by our nextdoor neighbor.

Last day of school

Mouse and her friends, all members of the apparently notorious "Ant Club."

Mouse and her teachers: Ms. Carol (teacher's assistant) and Mr. Jason, who
substituted for Ms. Ellings during her maternity leave.

Mouse with her beloved Ms. Ellings.

Bear with his teacher, Ms. Wrobleski.

Jaybird and Mr. Eric.

Jaybird and Ms. Heather (teacher's assistant).

We had two children “bridging” on the last day of school (June 8): Jaybird is moving from Children’s House to E1, and Mouse is moving from E1 to E2. (For the uninitiated, in the Montessori method, children stay in the same classroom for three years at a time.)

That meant a real marathon for Mom and Dad and little Mudpuppy. We arrived at school at 9:30 for Jaybird’s bridging ceremony, stayed for cake and then a picnic in Mouse’s classroom, then stayed for Mouse’s bridging ceremony. We got out of there around 1 pm—long past Mudpuppy’s nap time. He held up pretty well, considering!

It was a TEARFUL day. Some of the children bridging from Children’s House to E1 cried, and that made their teachers cry, and that made everyone in the audience cry. Jaybird did not cry, although she said she ALMOST did.

They keep the Children’s House bridging ceremony very simple: there are no speeches from the teachers, no preamble of any kind, other than a short concert of songs that the children have learned during their years in Children’s House (“Days of the Week,” “Seven Continents,” etc.). Each child is called to the front by their teacher, who says a few words about all the child has accomplished during her time in Children’s House. Then the child receives a spider plant, which she carries over a bridge on the stage; on the other side of the bridge, she is greeted by the E1 teachers.

Mr. Eric, Jaybird’s teacher for the past three years, had some very kind words to say. “You have grown so much in your skills and confidence,” he said. “You are a graceful person, always kind to the little ones.” And always responsible and respectable. “I will not forgot how much you learned about friends. A lot of people want to be your friend; you should continue that in E1.”

After the Children’s House bridging, we went to a pizza picnic in Mouse’s classroom. The kids, including Mouse, were WIRED. Eating lunch on the classroom floor with her, plus Mudpuppy (who naturally wanted to explore), plus Jaybird, was a challenge.

The students had spent the morning making friendship bracelets for the departing third year children; all the third years also received laminated sheets with comments, compliments, and farewell messages from all their classmates and teachers. Mouse just glowed over that.

Mouse’s bridging ceremony was a little different than Jaybird’s; each student was paired up with another student in the class who said something nice about the bridging student; then each student walked across the bridge (with a lot more confidence and poise than we saw in the Children’s House kids!).

The real drama began after the bridging ceremony, when it was time to say goodbye. I went to get Mouse in her classroom and told her it was time to go, and she just bent her head and began weeping, obviously trying to hide it. Several of her classmates saw her and came over and gave her hugs and said goodbye, which made her cry even harder. Her teachers also came over and gave her hugs, and we managed to get a few pictures of her with them.

The floodgates really opened when we got home, though. She cried off and on for two days, especially in the evenings! She is really devastated that her close-knit group of friends is breaking up. One is leaving for another school; another is moving to China; and another will be staying in the same school, but with only a one in three chance of being in the same classroom. She will also have new teachers next year, and she really loves the ones she has had.

We tried to console her with an ice cream treat at the Lakeview, to no avail.

Kind of a warm-up for things to come, hmm???

Bear’s end of year story is pretty straightforward: he’s glad to be done, and sorry his teacher won’t be returning next year.

Here is a short video of Jaybird's bridging ceremony. There is lots of background noise due to the 30+ preschoolers in the room.

May Display Day

Every May, the elementary classrooms at Bluffview have "May Display Day": the kids work on some sort of research project, and then prepare a presentation on their topic. Every kid has a booth and all the parents come and walk around the classrooms, seeing the different presentations.

This year, Bear did a presentation on the ancient Greeks; he had a model Parthenon, along with a very good (and funny) prepared speech about the ancient Greeks. Other kids in the upper elementary classrooms did presentations on tornadoes, the Kennedys, Judy Garland, and the Egyptian gods, to name a few.

Here are Mouse and her good friend displaying the book they created. It's a collection of stories about Little Ant, a character they created with a third friend way back in first grade during a creative writing exercise. We've been hearing about Little Ant ever since -- as has the rest of the classroom. Mouse and her two friends formed "the Ant Club" and wrote dozens and dozens of stories about Little Ant and his family and sidekicks (including Uncle Larry). Little Ant has become something of a legend in this classroom; they even got their classmates to write little reviews on the back cover ("fantastic-ant!"). Alas, the book is going to be a gift to their teacher's newborn twins.

And here is Mudpuppy, displaying his agility with stacking blocks.

Christmas catch-up

It has been a busy, busy Christmas season, let me tell you . . . so busy that I haven't had a chance to update our family journal. Here are some of the photo highlights:

Here's the whole family visiting Santa at Lark Toys (in Wabasha, MN)
after much pleading from our youngest daughter, who once again...

...sensibly refused to get anywhere near the big guy in a red suit. I nearly knocked over
the set getting her this far. (After weeks of begging, I didn't want to hear, "But NOW I'll
be brave!" on our way out of the parking lot.) 

Here's the little munchkin trying on a Santa hat in the
store.

Bear, who is in on the Santa secret, was more than
forthcoming about his wish list, his opinions on his
favorite toys, the state of the polar ice cap, fun facts
about reindeer....

Thankfully, he's not too old for the hand-carved
carousel.

The Catholic Worker house has a humongous real Christmas tree.
We visited on Christmas morning, too, for brunch, with a smaller crowd.

An annual school ritual is the "Holiday bazaar."
Each upper elementary student creates a product and a
business plan and sells it during the holiday breakfast
(for which we all get up at the cheerily dark hour of 6 a.m.).
Bear sold colored "funny putty" this year. (Do you know
how hard it is to find liquid starch anymore???)

Another annual tradition is decorating our Christmas tree. This is Mudpuppy's
first year really participating in that event.

(Every one of the three preceeding pictures was shamelessly posed. Sorry,
but I'm not THAT good of a photographer!)

Visiting friends and family is the best part of the season!
Here is Jaybird dressing up with a playmate from church.

And here she is with one of her Twin Cities cousins.

Christmas morning.

Mouse with her beloved Kaya doll.

On our visit to my mom's, we took a walk around Centennial Lakes, which
has an ice rink. The kids went skating; all of them have improved since
last winter. 

Christmas leaves me exhausted, too, kid. (The girls have been sleeping
on the living room couches as one of the "privileges" they're earning
on their new point system.) Sweet dreams!