Partying, Graduating, and Blobbing (in that order)

Things are really cranking up with camp now. The entire staff arrives tomorrow (Friday), though a lot of them are already here because of trainings we held this week. Some are helping with a large group we're hosting that won't leave until Saturday. The timing wasn't so good on that one, but we need the money!

So far we've held a horseback riding certification clinic last week, then archery, riflery, lifeguarding (in a VERY cold lake), and tomorrow will be First Aid and CPR for the whole staff. It's been fun having the early arrivals here. This is the time of year we live for!

A few other things have happened since my last post. Mothers' Day and baby decication, for instance. No pictures. Taking my mom horseback riding on Mothers' Day. NO pictures. Last day of gymnastics. No pictures. (Both kids are doing cartwheels well now, if you need a gymnastics update.)

I do have pictures of our class Sunday School party a few weeks back. We had a potluck supper and then all of our kids disappeared to another building at church to be looked after by some wonderful high schoolers raising money for a mission trip. Then the adults had a game night. Very fun!!

Guitar Hero, anyone? Our Sunday School teacher Jay walked in the room to No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn (Beastie Boys). You can find it in the Baptist Hymnal. I can't remember which number it is.

Everyone's trying so hard to focus on what the screen says to do that it looks like they're being tortured instead of having fun!

Golf, I think. Or tennis. I can't remember.

Spades! This game went on for two hours. I think it's cool how playing a game can bring together four people who otherwise might not hang out.

The spades table for the card playing challenged. Amanda, Rebecca, Jill, and me. And a couple of chocolate chip cookies.

Jay, our Sunday School teacher, and Curtis D.

A milestone was reached this past week as well. We've officially graduated a kindergartener! Actually it was unofficial. Many friends went to their kid's kindergarten graduations and programs where they received diplomas and recited some of what they learned this year.

I let my kid dress herself and gave her a popsicle. Pretty much representative of the formality of her first year of school.

I didn't go with a curriculum this year, I just got some guidelines as to what kindergarteners should know by the end of the year and worked with her for about an hour a day to accomplish those goals. I wrote down daily what we did, in case I wish to repeat our not-so-formal school year with the others. My goal was to get her reading, doing a little math (money, basic fractions, adding, subtracting), and learning about God's world and nature. She didn't get any kind of test at the end of the year or anything, but as a possibly biased teacher and mom, I think she did very well. She exceeded my expectations in reading. I'm having her read a chapter book about Heidi to me aloud, and as an example of how she's doing today she read things like, "The lid was not properly fastened, and suddenly there were kittens everywhere," and "'Oh!Oh! Oh! Get rid of these horrible creatures!' She turned to Heidi. 'You dreadful child! You shall be shut up in the cellar with the rats as your punishment!'"

I hate to brag (not true, I'll shamelessly brag on her for a minute), but she won't be six until next month and she reads stuff like that without help. Phonics worked for us...but what's cool is how brains can memorize so much stuff. There are a lot of words in those sentences alone that can't be sounded out like they are spelled. The more I work with a new reader the more I am amazed that anyone who isn't a native English speaker can ever learn how to speak it, much less read and write it. It makes no sense!! It's funny now that she's reading she's forever asking me what a word she just read means, even after sounding it out correctly. She wasn't sure what a cellar was but she read it correctly. Why does "c" say "s?," and how did she know it did in this case? Brains are amazing.

Anyway, I will be homeschooling a first grader this next school year. It still feels right to keep her at home, so that's the route we're going for now. Shannon won't start kindergarten until the following year even though he's just 14 months behind her because of his October birthday. I plan to pick up with our reading lessons with him this summer, and I'm also going to order some piano books and hopefully start that with both of them soon.

Last Wednesday through Friday I instructed a horseback riding clinic to certify riding instructors from five different camps. I only needed one of my folks certified, but it was easy to fill the rest of the clinic with folks who will work at other camps this summer. It was a lot of fun, and proof that God answers weather prayers. There was a 50% chance of storms and we got about four drops of rain the whole three days.

Here are the folks who participated in the clinic, along with my fellow instructor Janice (on the far right). She is planning to start a theraputic riding program at least one day a week at our barn very soon.

And now for a collection of Elizabeth pictures. She will be one next week!! (June 5th) My baby is growing up!! (Sniff, sniff.)



What's this? A bow on the floor? Wonder how it got there...

Oh well, guess I'll eat it.



I love it when someone leaves clothes on the floor! Amelia's shirt is very versatile. It can be a hat...

Or a cape.

Bye!

Elizabeth is trying to crawl, but still prefers scooting along on her rear. She pulls up to her knees but hasn't figured out how to stand yet. When I try to put her down on her feet she lifts them up so she ends up sitting. I guess she figures if I don't want to tote her 22 pounds around then there must be a good reason and she doesn't want to either!

Let's see, what else has been going on? Sunday we had a Memorial Day picnic after church. No pictures, so that's boring. Everyday this week has been pretty low key too. Amelia spent Sunday night with Ruth, after we stayed way too late playing cards at the Davidsons. (Well, responsible parents who get their kids to bed at regularly scheduled (early) hour would say it was way too late. We were just living life like usual.) We've had meals in the Dining Hall this week, which I can truthfully say is AWESOME! I love it when we're walking in to a meal and one of the kids asks what we're having and I can say, "I have no idea!" That means I didn't have to think of it, buy the groceries for it, or cook it. I am a kept woman in the summer. Except for the laundry thing.

And now for the moment you've all been waiting for. (What is it? YOU know. You've been waiting for it, haven't you?)

The blob tower, complete with it's very own blob:

Isn't it cool?

We went out to watch some of the staff who arrived early give it a try, but they were still working on getting it anchored. They found out earlier in the week that if it's not anchored it log rolls you off.

Then it started raining. It's been raining a lot lately, even out of the (mostly) clear blue sky.

Shannon confers with Winston about the finer points of blobbing, and the fact that it's raining again.



I don't think they were actually helping at this point, but they thought they were.

We've had the privilege of seeing a lot of these lately. Today there was a freak shower complete with fat rain coming down really hard while it was sunny. I saw lightning while the sun was out. It was weird. Afterwards there was a beautiful rainbow and I went through the colors with the kids- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Shannon is such a man's man he surprises me when he says things like, "Why isn't there magenta?"

The staff were feeling ambitious again last night after dinner, and decided to brave the chill of the lake and the approaching darkness with some blobbing. So off I went to get the camera again (and it rained again!), and I had to witness this:

The blob actually ate someone.

Cannonball!

Whee!!

This is going to be bad. It's nearly impossible to control the motion of your body through the air once you are launched. She lost both of her shoes but then went back for more. Guess it wasn't that bad after all. (She did hold her nose the next time!)

He actually did a flip. This is the end of rotation. I give this blob dismount a 9.3.

Tomorrow offically kicks off staff training week, then kids arrive on the 7th. Goodbye, world, we are about to disappear until mid-July! Come on out to camp if you want to see some first hand fun. We're praying that God uses camp to really change some lives this summer. We are so very blessed to get a front row seat to witness God in action.

I'll get some pictures and blog again soon. Not sure how soon....soon is relative, I guess.

In the meantime, I leave you with some quotes from my children from the past couple of weeks. Actually they're all from Shannon, come to think of it.

Shannon came to the table last week pretending he was a police officer. He stayed in character through lunch, which was leftover chili. He is not a fan of beans lately, and while picking them out with his spoon looked at me seriously and said, "My officer friends don't eat the beans."

The kids had taken all the cusions off the couch upstairs and made tunnels with them, the coffee table, and some blankets. Shannon popped out his head and said they were groundhogs. It was lunch time so I asked them to straighten up some mess they had made in the room. He was blaming it on groundhogs to avoid having to clean, so I pointed out that he was a groundhog. I asked about a pile of movies that had been left out and he said, "Oh, a groundhog made that mess but then he died." Clever little feller, ain't he?

Another morning he was walking one of Amelia's Barbie's along Avery's bed rail, singing, "I've been walking on the RAIL road."

And for the last one, he told us his friend Lyndsi had her fossils out. (Tonsils and ear tubes, to be more specific.)

I'm off to bed! Feeding horses at 6:30 comes early.

PS- We now have two Jeeps. More on that to come.