Welcome May and Spring!

Hello!

This month has flown by, and I have let the blog postings slip. Ugh! My problem is, I enjoy posting photos, and I think they make the blog more interesting, so if I don't have any photos or clipart ready to put in, I think the blog is a little boring.

Problem is, adding photos takes longer, and in my mind I say, "I don't have time to add photos," and then I don't post anything at all.

Soooooooooooooooo! I am setting my expectations a little lower for myself! "Something is better than nothing," in this case...I think! Maybe ALL my posts won't include photos. But I'll write more consistently.

Here is a little of what we've been doing.

APRIL BREAK! The kids had no school for a week, 10 days ago. We went to the New England Aquarium in Boston one day, and there were playdates and sleepovers for Kara. David had a group of friends over to play games one night. It was awesome to NOT have to rush everybody out the door by a certain early time every day!

DESTINATION IMAGINATION. Kara has been working hard, brainstorming with her team, making the presentation better here and there. Remember they are preparing for the Global Destination Imagination in Tennessee later this month. Saturday we spent participating/holding a Yard Sale, to earn money for the kids for the trip.

(Yes, more awful fundraising for Kari--if you don't know, it's just about my LEAST favorite thing on this planet to do. I am sucking it up to give the kids an educational experience...Kara for her Tennessee trip, Teresa for Peru. Maybe I'll get my Mother of the Year award yet...??!?!)

SOCCER, GYMNASTICS, TRACK and ULTIMATE FRISBEE. Let the spring sports begin!

Our general rule is "one sport a season," but because of a little miscommunication and confusion, Kara is doing both soccer and gymnastics this round.

Teresa is running 8th grade track. Last Friday she ran the 4X100-meter relay (3rd place), 400 meter race, and the high jump (2nd place).


David is playing Ultimate this round--I think it's a "club" sport at our high school right now. They plan on making it a regular sport in the fall. It used to be called "Ultimate Frisbee," but the word frisbee is a brand name so they changed it to just "Ultimate." It's a pretty big deal on the West Coast and the East Coast. More and more colleges and universities are adding teams and competing.

I like the competitions and even watching the kids practice. But with these 4 sports going on, plus music practices and Kara's D.I. continuing, every day after school becomes a driving loop for me. Luckily, the kids are not so little, so it doesn't matter if I'm a few minutes late. When they all finish at about the same times, SOMEbody has to wait a little.

SPRING. It is finally spring here--beautiful flowers and bursts of color welcome one of my favorite New England months: May. Our neighbors have a beautiful Forsythia bush and a big Magnolia tree that are blooming right now. Gorgeous!

Have a wonderful week. Kari :)

Peru This Summer

I never did talk about Teresa's Peru trip coming up. Actually we are planning for both of us: I am going, too!

Teresa's favorite social studies teacher, Mr. Fernandez-Davila, is from Peru, and he is also an archaeologist. Every summer for the past 13 years, he takes a group of students and parents to one of five remote villages in Peru. They raise money for school supplies for the children in the village, and this year they are also helping re-build the school building itself, which is dilapidated and falling apart.

The villages are far off the beaten path, as a huge understatement for you. The group flies into Lima, then drives in big trucks north and into the mountains, as far as the roads are paved. Then they get on horses and hike, on narrow trails and through the mud for a few days.

They finally reach the village, and it's a celebration to be had! The supplies are opened and it's like Christmas for the kids, and like I said this time, during the days spent in the village, we will also help build the school building and a playground for the children. Teresa was just ecstatic to be invited on this trip. The draw for me was: the service opportunity.

If I planned my own trip to Peru, it would not be anything like this. Daniel (Mr. Fernandez) has his endless network of family and friends down there, and has the whole trip down to a science.

He also has us hike to some archaeological sites in between, to learn about the ruins and mummies of ancient civilizations. Since last October, the students have been working hard all year to raise money for the Peruvian children, and for their own expenses down there.

Teresa is raising money in a few different ways. She has been baking zucchini bread like crazy, taking orders from people at church and school. She has also been babysitting, recycling ink cartridges from printers, and selling Silpada jewelry. We had 2 Silpada parties with neighbors and teachers, since Teresa's aunt sells Silpada jewelry.

It has been a learning experience, to be sure, for all of us. But I think it has been good for her to learn how things like this work, and how fundraising does actually help you but it takes time and energy! We will be gone the last week of June & first week of July. Yes, a two-week adventure that takes lots of preparation.

We'll bring back our own photos, of course! And hopefully a new appreciation for a different culture and for our own lives and circumstances. I think it will be a good experience.

Destination ImagiNation and The Wiz

Hola! (Just so you know, I have tried for 5 minutes to get these spaces edited out of the post! I don't know why they won't "delete." I'm giving up on that computer glitch, but I thought I'd type IN the spaces so you know why they are there...) **You can also click on photos to enlarge them.**

I haven't said much about Kara's most recent successes...she's been working with a team for D.I., or Destination ImagiNation. It's kind of like Science Olympiad. They choose a challenge to work on, and the team problem-solves and comes up with a solution to perform the challenge.

Their team's challenge is to move 4 objects from the top of a 6-foot structure, to the floor, and 4 objects from the floor to the top of the 6-foot structure. They can't touch any of it, so they had to build some kind of contraption to move the objects. They had 8 minutes to perform the task. During that 8 minutes, they were also to talk about and "sell" the contraption, telling their audience how it worked and what it did. So, last weekend (9 days ago) they presented the solution at "Regionals."

There are 9 regions in Massachusetts. They competed against about 10 other teams on this same challenge. They won first place! That moved them to the "State" competition, which was held Saturday, 3 days ago. 9 regions, with 6 challenges. The first-place teams from each region, from each challenge, came to compete. There were 9 teams at the elementary level for their challenge, so they competed against 8 other teams yesterday. They did really well...actually, again, they took first place! It was very exciting.

So NOW...the Grand Pooh-Bah event of Destination ImagiNation is called the Destination ImagiNation Global Finals. They go to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for 4 days, and participate in all kinds of fun activities with D.I. teams from all over the world, literally. 40 states (U.S.) are represented, as well as 30 other countries. The kids get to interact with and learn about the home countries of teams from those other countries and states. They stay on the University of Tennesee campus, and it's a pretty big deal. That's at the end of May. Kara is pretty excited. I'll include some photos. The kids built a kind of electromagnetic "crane" to pick up the items, as well as using duct tape (use #1034, I'm sure...) to help on some of the items. Kara and her team member Alex did the advertising bit, having a newscast interview talking about the crane and how it could pick up each item.

The other Big Event I did not mention was that Teresa performed in the middle school production of "The Wiz." She was a citizen of the Emerald City, bright green skirts and hair ties. The costuming was pretty elaborate (a stage full of 50 rainbow-colored munchkins) and the kids did a great job. Here are a few photos from that weekend.

The dark ones, where she is wearing black: she was a "Tornado Dancer," where they did a dance around the house during the tornado, spinning the house before it landed in Oz.

Then she stayed in the green costume for the rest of the production.

This is a good synopsis of these two events. Next time I'll talk about Kara's birthday party. My 20 minutes have expired. :)

Have a great week! Kari

Changes

Wow, Hola!

March is Marching on, and I haven't written in a little while. Here are a few changes around here:

SPRING. We can see lots of grass in the neighborhood now; the slightly warmer temps and rain have melted our snow down, inch by inch.

Our sump pumps are working overtime, and we have NOT had water in the house! Yippee, I can't tell you how relieved that makes me. Every. Single. Day.

(Blast from the recent Past: Exactly one year ago today, our flooding nightmares started. Basement water, round-the-clock shop-vac...I can feel myself start to hyperventillate just thinking about it. Anybody have a paper bag?)

BIRTHDAY TIME. We celebrated Frank's bday 10 days ago, with balloons and chocolate pie. Here is Kara helping him blow out his candle. Happy Birthday, Frank!

CHANGE. Frank has been working (another thing we are HUGELY grateful for), while looking for a job, since about November. He's been with this company for three years, and our expectations for the position and company have not come to fruition. Time to make a change.

After multiple interviews and meeting bosses and team members, he accepted an offer with Hewlett-Packard. Also known as "HP"--go ahead, look around your house--I bet you have SOMEthing in your house from HP! Printer? Laptop? Phone? He'll start a week from tomorrow. Still in Human Resources, except now instead of pharmaceuticals, it's a technology company.

The position is home-based. We will set up an office for him in our house. Lots of phone calls, computer work and video conferencing, a little travel and voila! No commute. Should be interesting--we've never done that before.

Onward and upward! Hope spring is inching its way towards YOUR neck of the woods.

Have a great week, love, Kari

Stuff This Week

Hello, World!

We just finished our "Winter Break" week. We did NOT plan any trips to the Bahamas, but well, you know, we made it to some other fun places.

Like...the Library! The Grocery Store! Ok, we did make it over to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts one day. Friends came over, the kids went to other people's houses. Kara would go to or have her own sleepover here, every other night. She loves those.

And Frank worked. Isn't that just how it goes! The kids get off school, and Dad goes in to work, business as usual.

Nothing earth-shattering. Just a break from the routine. I did not have to set the early-morning seminary alarm in the morning, and rush everybody out the door. That was the best part.

This morning we awoke to 5 inches of fresh snow on the ground. Just when we thought we'd start to see our grass again! Well, not really. The edges of the lawn, maybe we can see a little grass. Most of the lawn still has a foot of ice and snow covering it.

Oh, and here is Kara, playing the saxophone--her photo was in the local weekly newspaper, as she got ready for their Bandfest concert about 10 days ago.

Movies of note:

"Unknown" -- action-packed, keeps you guessing.
"Ella Enchanted" -- her stepsisters are pretty nasty.
"Social Network" -- I really hope Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder/boy zillionaire) isn't as unstable as the movie makes him out to be. Kind of a sad story, what he did to his best friend.

Back to setting an early alarm tomorrow. Have a wonderful week! Kari

The Mexico Chapter

Hola!

I used to like to take pictures. One drawback was, that I couldn't see the picture before I took the film in to be developed...I would have high hopes, thinking the lighting was just right or that I captured a wonderful expression on someone's face. Then I'd get the photos back, and ... not so much.

THEN...some genius came up with digital cameras. I can LOOK at the photo, seconds after I take it, and if it's a bad one? Delete! No wasted film processing fees or materials. Wow. Could this be real? If I miss a perfect expression or snap the photo too late, NO BIG DEAL! Now I REALLY like to take pictures.

I also used to like scrapbooking. But I got a little burnt out of it: it's messy, lots of materials to keep organized in drawers, and I could never get "caught up."

THEN...some genius came up with digital scrapbooking. I can do it all on the computer, and there's no mess to clean up and put away when I finish my session, whether I worked on it an hour, or just 10 minutes. I can not BE a professional, but my results look professional. I really like scrapbooking again!

Notice that I did not say I can be "caught up" with digital scrapbooking. I have accepted that it is simply an ongoing hobby. Even if I only do a few pages a year for each of my kids, it is more than they would have had otherwise, right! Those few pages look pretty cool.

OK: all that, to get to my drumroll please...we have been back from living in Mexico, for about 3 1/2 years now.

I finally finished our Mexico Book! (And there was much rejoicing.)

I have quite literally been working on pages, off and on, between other projects and life, etc., for 3 years.

Shutterfly lets you upload pages and they will put them in a bound book for you. We received it yesterday, and we like it very much! (Probably nobody likes it as much as I do, but...the rest of the family still likes it.)

I can't send you the book. I only made one. But I can give you the website, so you can page through our book!

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AatGrVo2ZMWLrw

Try it: go to the site, then click the yellow "View Photo Book," then click "Full Screen" in the upper right. If you also click the single square: "Single Page View" above the picture, it makes it a little bigger. It will play the slide show, or you can turn pages at your own pace.

Happy Wednesday! Kari

Old South Meeting House

Hi!
I have to say: one perk about living in New England is that the kids really go on some fabulous field trips.

1) The sixth graders study Henry David Thoreau, writing and reading and learning about nature, then one day ride their bikes the 8 or so miles up to Walden Pond.

2) The 8th graders study law-making, government and the details of democracy all year, and cap it off with a trip to Washington D.C. in the spring.

3) The 3rd graders study the Revolutionary War, walk part of Paul Revere's Ride, and go to the North Bridge in Lexington: the Shot Heard Round the World.

4) And this week, Kara (5th grade) went downtown to Boston. They were each assigned to be Loyalists or Patriots, and they each had a different character part. Kara was a Patriot, a Leather Dresser. Her business had benefited from the boycott on English goods, and she thought men should live free, not under the harsh rule of a tyrant like King George!

They went to the Old South Meeting House, where in actuality they DID hold this meeting in the late 1700's, cramming 5,000 people into this small building, and they debated on the blessings and curses of living under English rule.

Here is Kara in her "period dress." They made cool black paper hats, too, but it was also raining a little so those didn't last the whole day.

It is pretty amazing to be so close to the actual places these things happened. It really brings it all to life!

Kari