tawbubby

Amelia is learning so much.

They made this eye color graph in the first week.

Tonight she told me “rainbow is a compound word, one of those words that is made up of two words”.

It takes a lot of concentration to type!

We went to the cabin in Highland County on Friday.  The plan was to winterize, even though Friday’s temperature was 97 degrees in Richmond.  Last year, the second weekend of October was too late at the cabin, there was a freeze.

Daphne found a fuzzy caterpillar climbing the screen on the porch.  She tickled its feet and watched it crawl by segments.

Amelia spent a lot of time drawing on Saturday morning.  She learned how to draw a fish in her kindergarten art class last week.  She showed me how to make on this weekend.

And then drew this house-on-fire scene.  It has a frowning family, and dog, and a three-dimensional fire, stars (I made those), and moon.  Very funny!

Daphne put together her Winnie the Pooh puzzle all by herself!  She loves Darby.

We went to Gigi and Gifer’s cabin and they enjoyed playing with some walking sticks that stay there.  She’s holding a frog here.  She found another one with a fish handle, and used it as a fishing pole.  She caught a fish every time!

We all crossed the raging Bullpasture River so Gigi could take a picture of us on the other side.  It hasn’t rained much this summer so the water levels were pretty low.

A few weeks ago, Allison started talking about a neighborhood outdoor film viewing. I’ll admit, I was dubious. When we were talking about it, “outdoors” was synonymous with “hot & mosquito infested”. I’d rather watch a movie on my couch. Most of the conversation was around what was a good family movie. (Hint: Ghostbusters is more kid-inappropriate than you remember.)

Luckily, my wife has a nose for fun and is willing to try new things. And let me tell you, watching Star Wars outside Saturday night was completely awesome.

It was a neighborhood affair. Chuck & Wendy constructed and hung the projection screen. Allison and I provided the rest of the A/V setup… projector from work, DVD player, bookshelf stereo system for 2.0 sound. Craig & Laura have a home theater and provided the really cool movietime popcorn & candy, as well as a fun old-timey “warmup” video. Kids and adults took turns telling jokes in front of the screen. Once it got dark, we started Star Wars. (Amelia kept asking all day, “Well, which Star Wars?” She can’t accept that Episode IV wasn’t called “A New Hope” when we were growing up.)

In the end, we had six families in attendance, including 11-12 kids, mostly in pajamas. The weather was perfect, breezy and cool, with rain coming a few hours after the show ended. During the show, the kids would find excuses to stand in front of the screen and see their shadows. Allison giggled every time.

This is a glowstick in a popcorn bucket. The glowsticks also doubled as lightsabers.

It was completely awesome to watch a movie outdoors sitting in a lawnchair. Kudos to my brilliant wife.

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She has a new class, too.  Daphne moved up to Purple Room (4 year olds, preK).   They have a Sesame Street theme and she is in the Zoe group.  The cool thing about Purple Room is she gets a locker!

You can see a note from Amelia hanging inside her locker.  She wrote “Wow you’re a big girl Daphne! I love you!  XXOO Love Amelia”  (I asked her to add the ‘ and e to your).  It’s a sweet note that her big sister wrote on the first morning of school, a pretty nice gesture on a big deal day.

Daphne’s with all the same friends from Green Room.  They’re some of the “big kids” at preschool now.

Amelia is in Kindergarten!

Seriously, she was the only kid not smiling in the group shots at the bus stop.  Fast-forward to 5pm when Ethan drove in the driveway with the girls.  Amelia told us about school for an hour and a half! That is pretty cool.  The only thing that stopped the stories was our neighbor knocking on the door to see if the girls could come out to play.

Some highlights.  The principal was standing at the door to greet each kid with a hand stamp.  “Not at the door we usually go in (for Daphne’s speech therapy) where there are two doors, but in the hallway where there are four doors together.  Not the cafeteria, that has only one door.  And Mrs. Cook was there!  And she pointed a pencil at me and said ‘You look like someone I know!’  And…”

Apparently a boy in her class is still healing from some bad burns.  The nurse who cared for him the most in the hospital visited the class to tell them all about what happened.  They watched some sort of movie about it, and looked at a slide show about his recovery.

Amelia saw two of her neighbors during the day, and one classmate was in her preschool class last year!

They had music class today (Tuesday mornings).  They learned the behavior rules and a sticker reward system where they get a toy or candy after 10 good behavior stickers.  Oh, and sang a few songs.

They had recess!  They run laps around the playground track once or twice each day.  Today the teacher asked them to run one lap.

Amelia is really excited her teacher has extra large versions of Mrs Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, and another Mrs Bindergarten book.

The teacher told them that Friday was pizza day and they could buy Little Ceasars pizza for lunch, if they were buying lunch.  (Ethan found out it costs $1.95 every time we recharge her account with money- Scam!)  We packed her lunch today.  She ate her sandwich and cookie.  Skipped the banana.  Go figure.  No cookie tomorrow.  And some familiar faces (Mrs. Cook!  Ms. Beth!) are lunch monitors.

They didn’t have any time to lay down on their rest mats!

Here she is telling us about her art project.  They read The Kissing Hand, and made a hand-print with a heart on it.

They have a folder with “keep” and “return” sides so we know what to do with the papers.

The Listening Crew.  Daphne got a few words in, just a few.

She apparently loves Kindergarten.  Hooray!  Her teacher called tonight to see how she was doing.  She said Amelia was “cheerful and engaged” today.

Daphne’s reward for the hour and a half of stories about Amelia was a walk up to the stop light with mama.  We counted the red cars until we saw…Bebe!  She was sitting at the light waiting to turn into our neighborhood to check on how their days went.

Check back tomorrow for a picture of Daphne with her new purple room locker!