French Camp

Sadie went to French Day Camp at Concordia Language Village. They do all of the usual camp things: games, songs, arts and crafts, etc. only they do them all in French with the counselors only speaking in French (and lots and lots of dramatic movements and hand signs) the whole time. The counselors also only speak in French to the adults who come to pick their children up. I just smile and nod, smile and nod because I have no idea what they are saying!! Sadie says the best part of French camp was "all of it."
These pictures were taken at the end of camp at the performance. All campers in all of the villages get a wooden nametag that they wear every day. Sadie's French name was Cecile.

Why is she waving the Belgian flag? Their presentation was about francophone countries and they speak French in Belgium.

Here are some of the campers singing the "Lac du Bois" song.

Kitchen Update: Before and After

For the last 4 months Dennis and I have been spending our spare time updating our kitchen--updating to make it look a little vintage-- but updating no less. We (mostly Dennis) did all of the work ourselves, with the exception of the quartz countertop. Dennis is quite the handyman. Who knew he could do plumbing, electrical work, install flooring and a backsplash and rebuild cabinets. With the help of youtube and a can-do attitude we accomplished it all!! Here's what we did. The before:

 

Drumroll please... And the after:

I'm so happy with it I can't even begin to tell you how much I love it. Let me give you a run down of the work we, ahem, he did and I assisted with.

First we painted all of the cabinets white, which was probably the biggest pain of the whole project and the part that Dennis reluctantly agreed to. Then, we added all new hardware and took out several of the wood faces of the cabinets and added glass fronts. It's hard to tell, but the insides of the glass cabinets were painted gray. We also added a small molding piece to the tops of the cabinets. I can't tell you how long I've waited for that little piece of molding. It automatically made the kitchen look a thousand times better! I painted the walls a yellowish white color (I think it's called Canvas). We changed out all of the lighting and added 4 more lights above the windows. Dennis must really love me, because he agreed to let me spray paint my new lights black! I had all sorts of crazy ideas, I tell you.

The next, obvious difference is that we moved the sink to where it should have been installed from the very beginning. Now I have a work place where it should be and I no longer cram my work into a small corner between the sink and the stove. Moving the sink involved making new drawers and moving around some cabinets. We installed butcher block counter top on the back counter and black quartz silestone on the rest of the cabinets. The quartz is the only thing that we hired out for and let me tell you, it's the part of the project that took the longest!! In between the installation of the two countertops we put in new cork flooring. This was another thing that I had to do some persuasion on, but it looks and feels great!

Finally, we added the subway tile backsplash with the charcoal grout and added new black switch plates. Oh, and Dennis made and installed a new cabinet/bookshelf/wine rack above the fridge. The original cabinetry had been torn out by the previous owner in order to fit the larger fridge but had never been reinstalled. You can see that in the first picture.
Considering I spend about 75% of my home waking hours in the kitchen, I'm thrilled with how much our hard work paid off. Dennis thinks it's too black and white, but that is exactly what I love about it. From his reaction, you can tell that this was a labor of love for him and he agreed to most of the changes without too much debate.

Spring Piano Recital

I can't believe the kids have been in piano for almost 2 years already. Getting them to practice is always challenging and I'm often wondering why I have them in piano lessons. It is a skill I do believe they'll thank me for one day, right? I hope so. Learning new pieces, practicing a gazillion times until it's perfect, performing in front of an audience is a good for them on so many levels. It's probably more nerve racking for me at the recital than for them. In both of their songs, they both make errors on songs that they've played perfectly a million times. It just goes to show how challenging calming those nerves can be sometimes!!

A New Belt

Eli started Tae Kwon Do in March. He had his first belt test last night and broke his first board. He was pretty excited to get his orange belt but was so nervous during the test. He almost forgot how old he is but rocked the rest of the test!

Schoolcraft's Spring Concert

Schoolcraft held it's spring concert last week. Each class sings several French songs and a song based on their expeditions theme. Here are the highlights:

A Celebration of Learning: Sadie's Bird Expedition

Sadie's class has a pet bird. He's a budgie named Speed-e and the kindercrew spent the semester learning about Speed-e and "What Makes a Bird a Bird?" (Feathers...that's what makes a bird a bird, in case you didn't know.) On their expedition they learned: about beaks, feet, feathers, bird adaptations, nests, bird identification, and more. Because of this expedition Sadie has become an avid bird watcher and can identify more birds than me!

In art, they made wings and masks.

Owl pellets.

Nest building

Feather identification

Bird watching, identification and graphing

Creating a bird.

A Celebration of Learning: Eli's Transportation Expedition

Eli's crew spent the semester being engineers and learning all about transportation. They focused a lot of their time on transportation problems in the community and came up with ideas on how to solve these problems. The solutions were creative and interesting. They also learned a lot about physics, simple machines, tools, and transportation of the past, present and future.

Eli sharing transporation problems in the community!

The Fast Master

 


Eli worked with a partner to make a commercial to sell their Fast Master.

Transportation time line

Building vehicles at the celebration

Making boats.

The Longest Winter Ever!

I think we might actually be done with what was the longest winter ever!! Woot! Yesterday, was ice off on Lake Bemidji and the snow finally all melted from our yard.  We had lots of snow this year. The skiing was good, but after 6 months of snow, I'm glad that it's gone. I've never experienced a winter like this.... I can't even explain it because just the thought makes me crabby.

The picture above was taken at Lake Bemidji State Park on May 14. Lake Bemidji still had ice and it was super windy. The waves blew the ice onto the shore. It was eerily cool. The ice was like a giant blob creeping up the shore. It sounded like a tinkling freight train. We stopped after school to view mother nature at work. Then the next day, it was gone. Finally I can say, "Welcome Spring!"

A New Nephew

Back on February 15 my brother called in a panic. It seems my SIL was going into labor and their plan of having her mom come and watch the kids wasn't working. They couldn't get ahold of her and Talia wanted to get to the hospital "right now" and would I please come over. I was out the door in 5 minutes arriving at about 6:00ish. They were out the door by 6:30 because my brother was adamant about installing the car seat and he needed to vacuum out the car. Don't ask. Brothers do weird things when their wife is in labor. Darren called about an hour and a half later saying that Talia already delivered the baby. Bennett came fast and furious, but at least it was at the hospital and not in the freshly vacuumed car! He was a chubby little thing and big compared to her other two peanuts. Welcome to the world Bennett Gabriel! We can't wait to watch you grow.

The hospital announcement.

A happy family.

Proud (and tired) mom and dad.

Dennis holds Bennett for the first time!

Skip to the last weekend in April when Bennett was baptized. Here he is at 10 weeks!

Proud auntie.

Doting cousins making Bennett smile!

Waterpark Fun

During Spring Break way back in March we went on a totally kid-friendly trip to Wisconsin Dells. We stayed at a hotel called the Wilderness which boasts 4 indoor waterparks, 2 mini-golf courses, too many arcades to count, a haunted house, a ropes course, a gigantic indoor playpark, laser tag and more. It was a crazy noisy experience and I'm pretty sure every kid and their parent in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois was there. It was insane. As you can imagine taking pictures at a place like this just doesn't happen mostly because I was wearing my swimsuit the whole time which meant no pockets and when I did have my camera we were in a place that was dark like the glow mini-golf courses or the haunted house or the laser tag. Plus, I was too busy participating in said attractions and had my hands full so taking pictures just wasn't going to happen. But, here are a few highlights anyways!!

Eli loved the wave pool and the indoor/outdoor hottub. Sadie prefered the water play areas with fountains and dumping water. The water slides were fun too but the lines were long.

One of the 3D mini golf courses...

One of the many fountains that Sadie made me take a picture of her sitting on.

One of the great things about this trip is that we did not even have to leave our hotel. We were there for 4 days and only left our hotel once!! There were 2 tvs even so the kids could watch their shows and Dennis and I could watch ours. I even saw my first episode of Duck Dynasty-- who knew?? Needless to say, after too many trips of driving, driving and more driving the kids were thrilled to experience a hotel vacation where they didn't have to sleep in a tent and had nothing pressing to do but kid fun!
We did leave to go to restaurant one night that we heard was fun because they deliver your food by train. We made reservations so we could get one of the train tables, but we still had to wait for our table. The kids loved sitting up at the bar, ordering root beer, wearing buffalo hats and sitting on a saddle. How fun is that?

And look... the food does come on a train. It was a fun night out.

I'm sure the kids can't wait to go back and that they would count this as one of their favorite trips of all time.  Dennis and I loved seeing the kids have so much fun!

New Girls

All photos courtesy of Sadie's ipod!

We had a masacre this winter. A masacre that killed the last our poor little girls including our dear sweet Annie that we all loved so much (including our neighbor who found her not once, but twice in his house). She was a special bird who never failed to make us laugh. Who knew you could love a chicken so much!? Were were all heart-broken that day.

 We were chickenless which meant we were also eggless so we were patiently waiting for chickens to arrive at our local fleet farm so we could get some new girls. Then, the chickens showed up but spring didn't... we waited as long as we could and finally the kids convinced Dennis that we absolutely could not survive another minute without chicks. We bought 4 chicks which is enough for us and our purposes. The kids each picked one out. Sadie picked a bantam and named her Chippy. Eli picked out a Blue Polish and named her Smokey. Dennis got a black sex-link and named her Clementine. They picked out a Polish for me since I wasn't there and I named her Catalina. The Polish have crazy feathers on the top of their heads and right now they look a little crazed as their fluff is changing to feathers! They are pretty cute. Now if they'd just hurry-up and lay already.

Peacemaker Club Project

One part of my job is to advise an after-school club called "Peacemakers." We have spent 6 months working on a radio program about exclusion and bullying to be aired on a local radio station KBXE. Here is a news story featured on Lakeland News:

Schoolcraft Open Mic Night

One of Schoolcraft's PAC fundraisers is an open mic night. It is held at a local pub called Brigid's. The students sign up to perform. There was everything from piano, to jokes, to cup pounding, to pogo stick jumping. The talent abounds--and where the talent was little, the confidence was there to make up for it! Eli and Sadie selected a piano song to play. I was even suckered in to playing a duet with Sadie. I have not played in a piano recital since I was in third grade, but I think we rocked it! It was a great experience for the kids and for me too.

Don't Give Up On Me!

Dad: Funny, Mom: Love, Eli: Weird, Sadie: Cuddly

Hey all! Don't give up on the blog. Eli and Sadie's blog is not over, it was just on a long vacation. I am promising you that I will catch you up with all of our happenings during the month of May. Keep checking back for highlights!!