Chloe’s preschool pal is a new big sister, and we got to meet the sweet new baby today because, of course, their mom is on baby duty 24/7!
These two are super sweet together. They have the same interests–cooking and baking with sand toys, or anything else available, tire swings, and snergelly slides. They are both pretty amiable with other kids and pretty good at sharing! It was one of the most relaxing play dates we’ve had, with pretty much no conflicts. The hardest part was saying goodbye!
Cameron wasn’t feeling very well the other night, so we made soba noodles in broth for dinner. The kids just love these simple flavors! Chloe has been dabbling with chopsticks for I don’t know how long, but I noticed just how good she is getting at using them!!
All About Theater is still happening so I’m still picking up Chloe at 2:30pm and hanging out with her until the big kids get out of rehearsal at 4:30pm. We’ve gone to the library (twice — once we went when it was closed and just played on the play structure), the Ugly Mug, Blue Ball Park and, yesterday, Jade Street Park (after a stop at the Ugly Mug!).
I could get used to this. The girl has character (all of them do, actually). Yesterday, we played “baby”, one of her favorite pretend games. We alternated roles. Here’s a vid of her going off to work. I got lots of kisses blown my way, though they weren’t captured in this video clip. This video clip, by the way, was generated by an app called Magisto! It just automagically made a video of the pictures and video I had on my phone. I’m not quite sure if I’ll always be ok with an app like this, but for now, enjoy:
We’ve got the kids in an All About Theater production of The Little Mermaid this summer! The awesome thing is that all 3 of them can be in the same production (we got approval from the director to let Dylan stay with Cameron and Chloe since it is the first production for all of them). They are going to a pre-theater camp for “extra dance and singing training” and then they rehearse from 12:30-4:30pm. Well, Chloe ends at 2:30pm, so I have been spending each afternoon with her. It’s been very sweet although I do worry that this will make the transition back to preschool a bit rough!
So far, we have gone to Blue Ball park twice, gone grocery shopping (a big mistake to go home and put the perishables in the fridge as the traffic is absolutely hideous! It took 30 minutes to travel about 5 miles!), and today, we hit the nearby coffee shop for some Italian soda and stories (and fish-tank gazing).
Meanwhile, the production is going fast. They auditioned from Day 1 (Monday) through Wednesday and we got their roles on Thursday. Cameron was a little disappointed to not be one of the mersisters, but all of the mersisters are big girls, 7-9 year olds! We were so proud of her. She went to rehearsal knowing she didn’t get the part she really wanted (we told her she needed to “level up” in theater as it takes time to get used to singing and dancing and speaking lines on stage), but she asked the director if there were understudies. We were so proud of her for speaking up! We know it’s difficult for her (I shan’t project too much, but she is often very reserved!), but this meant enough to her that she did muster up enough courage to speak up!
Anyway, it’s been an exciting and eventful week. Tom has been dropping them off in the morning so I can squeeze in my work hours before getting Chloe at 2pm. This couldn’t be possible without both of us sharing the load.
The day of Cameron’s graduation ceremony was busy. I volunteered in the classroom, helping sort books, file away finished work to take home, etc., and then I left to join Chloe for her strawberry-picking field trip. She’s adorable. Yes, she is.
I was surprised at just how much restraint she exercised in not eating the strawberries she picked! But, when it came time to leave, she was a bit dismayed that we weren’t taking that big ol’ basket home with us!
After strawberry-picking, she didn’t want to go back to school and, since I was already running late in picking up Cameron (luckily, I told Cameron I might be late getting back to school), I just took her with me back to the school. It has been so hectic lately, Chloe and I have missed several of our morning playdates…and I feel it. She seems clingier than normal and I think that is why. I’ll be happy when we get in to a summer schedule groove (and I hope that we will!) where our time spent will be of higher-quality!!
This past Wednesday, Cameron’s class had an absolutely adorable graduation ceremony at the school. The day came upon us in a hurry–there were so many end-of-year field trips, celebrations, and performances sprinkled in with the every day work deadlines, the backlog of household chores, and the weekly school-volunteering!
It has been exhausting (and continues to be), but it has also been joyful and exciting. Cameron has clearly grown up a lot this past year. Not only is she stretching out and getting leaner, but she is also getting better at managing her emotions and is more compassionate and able to compromise.
Academically, she met every single metric at 100% (save for second-language development). She is reading 2 levels below the benchmark for the end of first grade and her math skills are excellent; she is already pretty good at doubling numbers, counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s, and doing simple single-digit addition. Beyond that, she’s speaking Spanish. I mean, really speaking Spanish. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear her ask questions about class work in Spanish instead of English–I can’t even fully understand what she says.
She has much to work on over the summer — we are required to read, write and speak in Spanish with her and to her every day during the summer — but there is no doubt that she has gotten a very good start to developing her bilingualism! It is very exciting and impressive!
It has been a joy to see her hard work paying off (and she has amazing teachers to boot)! She had a fantastic time at the ceremony. After singing a couple of very cute songs (one saying goodbye to Kindergarten and another about 3 hugs a day) and getting their promotion certificates, all of the kids ran around and played. It was so great to see her connecting with her peers! A few more pictures below:
Teacher Shanna is the other Dos Alas Kindergarten teacher and, the way the program works is that the primary teacher speaks to the class only in Spanish and, once a week (I think), the teachers swap classrooms and do a lesson in English. It works out to about 90% Spanish – 10% English (incidentally, all of Cameron’s homework was in Spanish). So Teacher Shanna was Cameron’s English teacher–another amazing teacher/person. We are really hitting the teacher jackpot at this school!
We are looking forward to all that first grade will bring! It will be a whole new adventure!
Here is our sensitive and wonderful 9-year old guy, blowing out candles for his second bday celebration! He didn’t want a party this year, so it was all low-key and spontaneous actually.
Since he didn’t want a party, we asked him what special activity he’d like to do instead and he chose mini-golf at the Boardwalk with K., T., and Maya and K. and T. spent the night as well!
Anyone needing tips on putting can get them from Cameron!
After mini-golf, we had a snack and headed out towards the Boardwalk…of course, in our planning, we completely forgot to account for the Memorial Day weekend crowd and it was crowded out there! Tom literally got the second to last parking spot in the lot way on the far end of the Boardwalk! Soooo, although we had initially thought we could do some rides after golfing, we quickly killed that plan.
Luckily, the kids were content to head out to the sand for just some free play. It was pretty sweet to watch them.
And, we were reunited with Chloe, A. and Tom who did not get to mini-golf because 1) we started without the guys while they were out hunting for parking and 2) Chloe couldn’t bear the noise inside Neptune’s Kingdom (our 3rd sensitive little thing!).
Dylan chose Thai food for dinner after which we mowed through yet another batch of yummy mint chocolate cupcakes! (I hope all of his wishes come true)…!
Dylan’s actual bday was on a Wednesday and it was during state testing at school…and he was still feeling sick from last Thursday! But, I came back from my morning run with Jenny with goodies from Emily’s (as is often the case)–chocolate loaf and some sourdough bread. We slapped some candles on the chocolate loaf (which turned out to be trick candles!) and sang happy bday first thing in the morning.
Tom made up the batch of cupcakes this year and I hurried them over to his classroom after school. It turns out they were in music class–a good thing since there were only 24 and with 23 in the class and 2 teacher aides, there wouldn’t have been enough for everyone! And, of course, nobody was absent because of testing. I caught the kids on their way out of music, though, and they all happily grabbed one. Sadly, not a single cupcake left for Chloe or Cameron, but Dylan kindly offered to share his with Cameron!
It was a perfect day for a 26.2 mile run and boy was I happy to see my family at the end of it! Dylan was still not feeling 100% (I had picked him up early from school on Thursday) and Chloe was off eating a snack, but here’s my big girl!
Dylan went on yet another field trip, this time to Ranch Day at Wilder Ranch. He was still not feeling 100% (poor guy), but we went anyway. For this one, the kids got to gear up in old-timey clothes and do some old-timey chores. They washed clothes in wash basins, sent them through the wringer and hung ’em on clotheslines, milked fake cows, took a hay ride, did some blacksmithing, played some old-timey kids games (bubbles, stilts, wooden horsey things, hoop rolling, and jumprope) and helped make soup, cornbread and molasses cookies for lunch (I’d heard about the field trip from other moms with kids at other schools so I knew about the cornbread and we made a batch in advance for Dylan–the soup was vegan, but with so many unwashed hands cutting the veggies and prepping the food, I wasn’t eager to eat it!).
Oh yeah, and they ground corn for chicken feed.
Maya was actually in a different group, but we saw her at snack time and I managed to get a picture of the two of them together.
The hayride took us out to where the kids fed alfalfa to the horses. We live in such a beautiful place and, although it was a little windy that day, it was still gorgeous out there.
The Wilders sold dairy–premium butter, actually–for a dollar a pound (pretty pricey back in the mid-1800’s when the plebes bought butter for just 25 cents a pound!) and shipped it directly to San Francisco from boats they harbored right there at the beach!
Here’s Dylan shaping a piece of iron into a shape…he later won a class raffle and got to take it home!
He also got to crank a drill bit into a piece of wood…Clearly he is not so much into “hard” work.
Wilder’s son studied electrical engineering at Stanford, so while this workshop was mostly powered by a pretty powerful water-powered belt and gears system, the Wilders were pretty proud of the fact that they actually had a working generator and this thing in the picture above (which I’ve now forgotten).
Overall, it was one of the best field trips ever. It’s too bad Dylan was still feeling low-energy!!
Dylan was a mechanic in their class production of “Vacation on Mars,” a musical about the solar system (incidentally, Dylan and the rest of his class have learned a phenomenal amount about the Solar System! And, since I chaperoned on a couple of solar system-related field trips, I did, too! So much fun!).
He really enjoyed the production and took practicing his lines and songs (and the dress rehearsals) very seriously! He’s such a diligient fella!!
Hands down, my favorite part of the show was his robot dance (video clip to come).
Dylan told me he had a bit of stage fright up there, but he did great–said his lines on cue and he didn’t forget a single one!
There were two performances on show day. Tom and Chloe attended the first show (I was in Cameron’s classroom still doing my volunteering stint), but I got to pull Cameron out of class so she could watch the second show with me! Dylan said that seeing all of us at the shows was one of the 3 good things about his day that day. Warms my heart!
