A Greek Tableau

On Thursday of last week we went to Chloe's arts integration night. An art integration night is what happens when you send your children to the arts magnet school and they bring you in to see what they have been doing. It was quite lovely really. Chloe's class performed a tableau about Pandora's Box. I did film it and I will see if I can get the site to post it. Sometimes it gets grumpy if the file is too big. I did capture a few pictures.

Chloe was one wing of the giant bird. You know the one that gets to repeatedly pierce the liver of the poor sucker who irritated the head hancho.

A Little Snow, Finally

We finally got a little snow about a week ago. Ironically they are predicting A LOT of snow starting tonight. Which will be loads of fun for all of us except my sister and her husband who will be trying to fly in to see us. However, I have digressed. We finally got a little snow the other day and Alexa was so excited to have some she scooped as much as she could together off the deck and built a little snowman.

(Like the well placed snowflake in front of her face?)

He was gone in a day as it turned over to rain and melted him. The weather people are now tossing around numbers like 18 inches for tomrrow though so hopefully she can build more!

Post 700

As a small defense in how long it has been since I posted anything (over a month as my mother point out last weekend) I did try topost last weekend but I had to fix my album so that I would have enough space to download more pictures. To be honest last weekend was a bit crazy as you will soon see.


Rounding out for post 700 I present you all of the things that I have not written about in weeks! Also known as finally downloading the pictures form my camera! We visted Maine over Thanksgiving. I mentioned to my mother that if she ever felt the need to just wip off more mittens our mitten basket seems to be full of singles. Not really sure where the other mate wanders off to. We left on a Saturday where she had begun a mitten for Chloe out of left over yarn she had from other projects. Four days later on Wednesday these arrived in the mail. Grammy is a knitting amchine I tell you!

 

 

I captured this very sweet moment of the girls reading together one Sunday morning after breakfast. Alexa had dug out all of our favorite Sandra Boynton books that we can not possibly part with. 

 



Chloe had a birthday since I last posted too. Prior to her birthday party (which was a slumber party) I let her open the present from Grammie Eva. Grammie had gotten her a new sleeping bag. Since she has started attending sleepovers she has borrowed her sister's sleeping bag as she found her old Winnie the Pooh sleeping bag to be too embarrassing to use.

She was pretty excited!

The party was what you would expect with a total of seven children and me, but they all had fun and the house is still standing.

We decorated our Christmas tree.

And the dog...

Chloe requested a chocolate cream pie for her birthday this year instead of cake.

She opened her presents on the morning of her birthday.

And there you have it! Camera is empty and you are up to date. Hopefully it will not take me another month to post, but I make no promises!

Bread and Soup

Last week King Arthur Flour came to my school and presented their Life Skills Bread Baking Program. Basically they come and show students how to bake bread. Then they send each kid home with most of the ingredients to bake the bread. The recipe makes enough for two loaves of bread. One loaf you keep at home and eat and the other loaf you bring back to school to donate to the town food shelf. I got to bring home a bag of the ingredients. So today Alexa was eager to bake our loaves in order for me to bring the loaf back to school on Tuesday.

They turned out quite well!

We also decided to harvest the last carrots in the garden today. Alexa set to cleaning them and I chopped some up to go into a soup to go with our bread for dinner tonight.

Alexa's Literacy Breakfast

Today I went to school with Alexa to attend her literacy breakfast. She has lots more rules about taking pictures at these events than Chloe does. I was only allowed one picture.

Here she is with her bin of books. We were able to read a few of them before I had to run off to get to work.

The Cowgirl in her

Alexa was invited to a birthday party yesterday. It was a cowgirl theme. Now Lex likes to dress up, but I didn't think she had a lot of cowgirl type stuff. She pulled it off though. She dug out a horse skirt, horse shirt, and her Hello Kitty boots. They made vests at the party and each got a hat.

She now has made a special cowgirl section of her dress up stuff. Hee Haw.

Alexa's Homework

Alexa has a dream. Her dream (well one of them) is to have homework. All through kindergarten she waited. Nothing. Not one assignment. Her desire causes Chloe to look at her and say,"Are you crazy? I hate homework." But Alexa dreams on.

"I just want to know what if feels like to have homework," she explains. Well last week, she got her wish. A big one too. Her assigment came home. She had two weeks to make a model of her bedroom. Her class has been studying maps. Her teacher assigned each student to take a small box and recreate their bedroom. Alexa began rifling through the recycling to find materials to work with and assembled a pile. This weekend we put it all together.

She got right to work painting the wall the correct shade of blue.

She created her furniture out of egg cartons, boxes, pompoms, and fabric scraps.

It was assigned as an assisted project with parent help so I helped with the tough cutting and hot glue. She is so excited. It is finished a full five days before it is due.

And later today Chloe decided to make one too, just for fun. Alexa said, "See, Chloe, I told you homework was fun."

Pumpkin Carving

Since we seemed to be on a Halloween roll for the last 24 hours, we went to the pumpkin stand to get pumkins today too. After about twenty minutes of hard exploring, they each settled on a pumkin to get.

 

Theyd rew the faces on first. Alexa gave hers eye lashes. She started out wanting to make hers a scarey face like Chloe, but in the end she doesn't have the heart for it. "Mine is a happy, little pumpkin."

All set for Halloween!

 

Trick-or-Treating on Church Street

Dispite having attended the school party last night the kids still wanted to go to the annual trick-or-treat at the stores on Church Street. I am actually glad to see the costumes get so much use.

The peacock costume for Chloe took some figuring to get right. She was thrilled and people keep commenting on how neat it is. It did come out well. Last night it had some malfunctions, so we reinforced her feathers today before heading down.

Alexa's panda costume was pretty easy to complete. She loves it and keeps describing herself as a fuzzy, little panda bear.

She stayed in character all the way down to Church Street.

Church Street is crowded for this event, but it seems easier to take. You are outside, which helps, so you can step away from the crowd and the air is cooler. The craft table didn't have much of a crowd at all, and it was edible!

Just your average day with a panda and a peacock eating a snack in the park.

We headed home after and they are all set for Wednesday night!

Halloween Party

Last night was the kid's school Halloween party. They wanted to attend and even though costumes were optional, they wanted to wear them. Which pushed up the Halloween costume making by about 5 days. I made it though and we headed out.

The place was really crowded. Really. I tried to get a few pictures but mostly other children kept walking in front of my camera.

There was one really sweet moment where Alexa was afarid to got hrough the giant catdboard box tunnel they had created, so Chloe took her hand and took her through. A sweet touching moment...

and they are blocked by balloons and my inability to get around the crowds to get any closer. Sigh. I promise you it happened people!

The cookie decorating was the best I could do for photos.

We took Alexa's panda suit off so it wouldn't get frosting on it. She looks like she was just in a fight. They had fun though.