Dance Festival

Ever since I moved to Idaho, I’ve wanted to go to the international dance festival that they have up in Rexburg. This year, Patrick’s parents took all of us to it. It was very fun watching the different teams, especially the Russian, Hawaiian, and US teams. The Native American dancer had all of the people who have served in the military come up on stage. Patrick’s dad stood there pretty stoically as the man did a special dance honoring veterans, parts of which were performed very close to his face.

Afterward, the girls got to meet some of the dancers. Anna thought the Russian girls looked like princesses. Rachael's favorite dancers were the little girls who performed before the actual show. She liked their silver dresses.

Zoo More

Here are a few more pictures from the zoo. We saw an uninvited guest while there this time. A muskrat family moved into the duck pond. I saw a few of them swimming back and forth and one of the docents mentioned they had just shown up a few days before.

Week 5...Yes, we are Alive.

I made a concerted effort to get it together this week. We had some really fun projects. For our reading day, we took the alphabet cards we made in an earlier week and attached pictures of items starting with those letters that the girls found and cut out in magazines. Anna liked the cutting practice. Towards the end, it started getting difficult to find things that began with certain letters. Notably, z and q were easy (zipper and queen). X, not so much.

For science, we continued our discussion of plants and talked about leaves and their jobs. Then we made leaf prints of a variety of leaves from our yard. Rachael was very detailed in painting her leaves as you can see.

We made rainbow arches for art and talked about color order. Rachael hung hers on the fridge, and every time I see it out of the corner of my eye while I’m at the stove cooking, I’m startled thinking someone is standing there watching me.

We worked on estimation during our math project. We talked about guessing and then educated guessing using pompoms in different sized mason jars. In retrospect, I would use something not so squishy so that our educated guesses would be closer. The girls mostly liked putting the pompoms in and taking them out again.

Week 4: Reflection

Ok. So week 4 didn’t really go as planned. With my birthday and then the holiday, we didn’t do any projects until Saturday. Lame, I know. We turned off all the lights and explored light and mirrors. After showing Rachael and Anna how reflection works, they practiced trying to get the flashlight to shine on different objects in the room using the mirror.

Fine Fourth

We went to the parade downtown as per family tradition. The girls got lots of candy, which they loved. There were a few more politicians in the parade due to the elections coming this year, although I think the Republicans cheated. They had one big float with all the various banners of those running in the area, but only guy actually riding it. There was a fabulous Ferris Bueller float done by a stake here in town.

After the parade, we went to Patrick’s parents house. The girls spent a good amount of time in the water in the backyard or stuffing their faces. Or both.

We went to watch the fireworks later that night. The girls kept chair hopping, so it was a little difficult to see all of them. Thank goodness it is a pretty long display. They were both out before we even got to the main road to go home afterward.

Summer Swan and Monkey

At the beginning of the summer I gave Rachael the option of doing gymnastics or dance. She chose dance. I didn't want my 5-year-old learning hootchie moves, so I looked into ballet. We found the Idaho Falls School of Ballet. They do a Tutus and Fairytales for children Rachael's age to introduce them to a few ballet basics, as well as the story and music from a classic ballet. For a month, Rachael told everyone we met that she was going to do Swan Lake. She was so excited. We went to ballet everyday for a week. At the end, they had a 15 minute performance for the parents to see what they had learned. Rachael loved the story and even recognized the music when we heard it playing on the radio a week later.

Anna was so disappointed every time we dropped Rachael off and she couldn't go dance with her. We started Anna in gymnastics since she was too young for the ballet. She was definitely glad to be down on the floor and all of the equipment instead of watching Rachael have all the fun. She has no fear.

Week 3

For Reading this week, Anna worked on the letter C while Rachael did the "AN" word worksheet. I kind of feel like the worksheets are a cop out, but I guess that's ok once in a while.

We learned about the different parts of plants and what they do. Then we put celery and food dye in water to see how the stems move water to the leaves. We had to wait a day or two to see the results. The blue worked the best, but Rachael had also diluted her red after we set up the experiment.

We made bean mosaics for our art projects. We used navy beans, lentils, and popcorn. Anna liked the different beans. Rachael was more interested in making intricate pictures and patterns. We made sure to have paper towels ready for wiping glue and all went well.

For math day, I had the girls bring 3 toys. We measured the length of each. I then explained how graphs work to help you easily compare information. We graphed the lengths of the toys and then used the graph to figure out which toys were longest, shortest, and in between.

We're Still Alive

This week was Gary’s first birthday. I’ve been dreading it for a while. I decided at the beginning of the month that I wanted us to do some kind of service on the day to make it less about me and more about us as a family and the good that we can do. We gathered up a bunch of stuff and took it to the Haven which is temporary housing for homeless women and their children. Rachael and Anna both donated one of their baby dolls. Then we stopped at the cemetery with some flowers. We grabbed some sandwiches from Geraldine’s afterward. When we got home, we worked on the garage, which needed some definite decluttering. 

The busyness helped. Of course we had a lot of sad moments throughout the month. It is hard to remember the good things that happened a year ago without the intense pain I felt then pouring back over me. I’m so grateful for our family and friends that have helped us through this year and thought of us on this day. Thank you.