Young Scholars' interpretation of Christmas

I meant to post this earlier, but had a lot of technical difficulties when I tried to post the videos. yes, they are user errors, thank goodness John is here to rescue me!

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For a few reasons John and I decided to enroll our kids into a charter school in Pennsylvania. Probably the most valid reason was that since we are just renting we wanted to put the kids into a school that they could stay in next year too so we didn't have to move them, yet again, into a different elementary school. Young Scholars of Central PA or YSCP is the school we found and for the most part really like it. It is very culturally diverse and academically on par or above the countries average standards.  All students take Chinese and Spanish everyday and most of the faculty was born and raised outside of the US for most of their youth... all good things in my book.  But like most schools there are a few things that I don't agree with or appreciate, but for now the scales are tipping on the good end.

Their Christmas program though was a good reminder of just what kind of school we are sending our kids too.  Sadly they are so desperate to work on acadmeics that their cultural programs may be suffering, and as hard as they try to be culturally and religiously diverse and accepting, they have taken any meaning out of Christmas and made it a nothing holiday. Better yet a "winter break".  I was looking forward to songs from different cultures or religions or something with character and meaning, but what we got was pretty vanilla and boring.  The school is still a good school, regardless of how they celebrate but I am no longer certain we'll be staying after we move into our permanent residence.  Though giving up the language classes may be hard, and Weston and Tyler get to take fencing after school so that's pretty cool too!!

Anyway - for your listening pleasure and/or dis pleasure... here are highlights from the Winter/Christmas concert.

I laugh at how out of sync most of the class is, especially Elayna (front and center pink shirt with pink Girraffe!)  What you can't hear is how the entire class is off by a half to an entire beat from the music being played as background accompaniment!

This was just funny... I couldn't understand anything! The parts I did understand were pretty bad! But the kids had fun, and I guess that is what matters..

So John put all the videos together into one, not sure why, but it's done... and he had to mess with fixing it in the fist place since I couldn't load the videos before. So I'm leaving it.

There is a song by Elayna's class, where no one is together or on beat!  The school butchered one of the most beloved songs of Christmas... "We wish you a Merry Christmas" which was performed by each of the groups, and never got any better. All in the name of cultural and religious acceptance. Such a sad commentary on our society today.  Tyler's class and other 2nd grade with their recorders. Yup, practicing hour at home was always fun!!!  I love that the teacher off to the right (Tyler's teacher - LOVE her) is laughing too! And then Weston's class. No one is looking too joyful for such a 'joyful' song!  But they are all grown up and in 5th grade, so I guess they feel too cool to sing in an assembly or something like that. And yup - he's still so little compared to everyone else. I really hope he starts to grow soon, but I just don't see him growing very tall at all. oh well!

So For what it's worth... Merry Christmas. Merry CHRISTmas.  MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!  There is a reason for the season, and I think we should always remember Him even if we don't all want to believe in Christianity.

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Hello 2014

I have no resolutions old or new to reveal or feel guilty about!  I'm looking forward to another year with the hopes of making it through, hopefully with a few points of transition come to an end! On that matter I guess we'll see in due time!

We took a trip to Columbus just before the New Year it was a short but nice visit to see friends and John was able to work with his previous advisor to get some work done on a paper.

The big event of the trip was that Weston got horribly sick and after a week of being sick and taking a trip to the doctor, we decided that it was gluten related. So since then we've cracked down on any gluten consumtption for him and loosened it for Tyler.  So far so good on the new regiment!

And so we welcome in a new year, Here's to 2014!

Elayna and I were driving by their old elementary school and she was so anxious to see the turtle. Apparently her favorite part of the school! So we just had to stop by and get a picture!

State College has a full day for First Night around town. It was ridiculously cold, but we ventured out  anyway and were able to watch some fairly awesome ice sculptures being constructed!  We thought they were awesome! I scored an awesome wool hat so it was a great day for me too!

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Alter Egos!!!

A while back, not sure when, John started calling our kids by their silly names calling them their super hero names.

Weston; Captain Why,  why you ask? Because he has asked Why? about everything since he was 3!!

Tyler; Were Squirrel.  When we moved to Columbus and lived in our little blue house in Upper Arlington, there was a period of time when Tyler was exhausted. Days, weeks, almost months in fact. He was just tired all the time. The area where we lived also had A LOT of trees around and tons of buckeye nuts everywhere. We would find piles and piles of nuts in various locations in the house and Tyler's room especially and soon put two and two together and decided that as soon as the night came and we thought everyone was asleep Tyler would change into a squirrel, like a were-wolf, but a squirrel instead, and go hunting for nuts.  So in the morning there were piles of nuts and a very tired Tyler!  

Elayna; Swisher pants.  Ya, I'm not 100% certain on the origin of this name but I think it came from John calling Elayna swisher because her hair would swish around. Pants.... it just fit for some reason. Her whole 'name' is Lulu Swisher pants! Which Elayna repeatedly tells me as she points out that I missed the LuLu on her shirt.

So with all the talk of Super hero names, John gave he and I the names Mr. and Mrs. Awesome so our whole family could be a super hero family!  We decided it would be fun to make it official and have shirts made up.  I worked on the shirts for a while and being very secretive about it too, so it could be a fun surprise at Christmas. Sadly one day I didn't stick around the computer when I was closing everything down and walked away. I wanted to show the kids something else and was 2 steps behind them when they ran into the office and saw the open page showing the badges. I talked it off as something I was doing for some other time. Luckily though, the kids were really excited about it so I was looking forward to making the shirts even more!  We found cute/fun pants at land's end and I did a color match to them for the shirts.  All in all, it was a success.  Now I just need to make a real shirt for Tyler since he ended up with a short sleeve version until Target could stock the long sleeve shirt I wanted!

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A Horse is a Horse, of Course of Course!

A perk of living in the middle of now where, (State College) PA is that we have farms and fields and open spaces all around us which means that Elayna has been able to live her dream of taking horse lessons.  Except for this nasty winter spell that has caused several lessons to be cancelled because of freezing temps or blizzard conditions, Elayna has gone once a week since September. She prefers to ride larger horses, the small ponies are for "little girls" which she adamantly refuses to be! So Sierra is the nicest teacher and appeases Elayna's need for the larger horses. Except for a few lessons early on, Elayna has ridden the bigger ponies that seem to scare the other girls taking lessons.  Elayna seems to have caught on rather quickly to the grooming and riding, and looks forward to every lesson she gets.  She talks and talks through whole time and seems to keep everyone around laughing at something. There is no question that Elayna loves animals, especially horses. I'm looking forward to the spring again when her lessons are more frequent and not in the little barn.  I loved being able to just sit outside in the beautiful weather and watch Elayna do something she LOVES!

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It's Winter time!!!

I just love this picture!  It snowed for the first time and the kids were so excited that they were ready for school in the shortest time yet and ran outside to play before we had to leave.  I'm trying to remember when it was that I stopped loving the cold, wet snow just because it was awesome and new and cool to play in!?

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