May the Force Be With You

We are big time Star Wars nerds in this family. We rarely shell out for concerts, but when we heard that Star Wars in Concert was coming to town, we knew we had to go and take the boys. What could be cooler than the music of John Williams performed by a large symphony orchestra with a live choir, lasers, smoke and flames, and a huge screen with clips from the movies?

The show did not disappoint. Here are a few shots I took as we looked at the gallery of SW paraphernalia in the concourse. We were glad that we let our kids dress up because Arco Arena was teeming with kids from a galaxy far, far away.


Here's Henry doing his best impression of moody Anakin. Actually, he was a bit hesitant when it came time for a photo op with the Dark Lord--and he wasn't happy when I pushed him into the picture anyway! Mothers--sheesh!


Still making me pay for taking pictures when he doesn't want them. But come on-- Han Solo! Frozen in carbonite! We had to have a shot of this.

It looks like I caught Henry having fun after all! He tried to fool me, but I'm too smart for him.

I have to confess that I got tears in my eyes when the show started and Ian's face just lit up with excitement. Great music always makes me a little emotional anyway, but seeing that look on your son's face is just priceless.

Now Jared and I have a hankering to watch the entire six-episode saga. As often as we watch movies, that may take us months. Movie marathons were much, much easier in our college days.

Fun, fun, fun!

I'm still here. It's been a busy past few months and I've really fallen out of the habit of blogging. Something about having a new baby and then starting the school year-- I haven't had much time to call my own. But I miss you, dear readers. I miss interacting with you and I miss following you on your blogs. I finally just cleared out my Google Reader to start fresh this morning because I had over 600 unread posts and every time I opened it I felt too overwhelmed to read. I have been busy with important things, but I feel that as long as I don't let it consume me, blogging is important, too. We need each other, don't you think?

It has been hard to get my momentum up, too, because I have so much I can write about and yet nothing seems good enough after letting myself get rusty. So I'll just catch you up on some of what we've been doing without trying to cover everything. And hopefully tomorrow I'll feel like blogging again!:)

One of the lines from The Family: A Proclamation to the World that we have studied and memorized as a family is this one:

Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.

We had a summer without many of the "wholesome recreational activities," due to having a new baby and a c-section.

If it hadn't been for the amazing grandparents, our kids would have probably done nothing all summer but watch television. So we have been making up for lost time in the past month or so.

We took an amazing family reunion vacation to Lake Tahoe in mid-September. The weather was perfect, it felt like we had the lake to ourselves, and the kids had a blast with all their cousins from Jared's side of the family.


We had a family outing last week with grandparents to Apple Hill, a favorite destination in the Sierra foothills. We tried out a few new farms there this year, including one with a pond and paddleboat and a big U-pick orchard; a "fudge farm" where we got to do a little tour and see where they grow the nuts and berries that they use in their candy, as well as decorate our own fudge-covered apples; and a visit to our favorite farm for fresh-pressed cider and apple donuts.


Ian and I also went to the pumpkin farm with his kindergarten class this week. The kids whose parents had come got to choose a buddy from the class for the field trip--Ian chose Julian, and I knew why immediately. That's the name of a royal lemur on his favorite cartoon, so Ian thinks Julian is pretty cool.:)


And here is where we are headed with the boys tomorrow afternoon. It should pretty much be a nerd fest. We can't wait!

What "wholesome recreational activities" is your family doing this fall?

The Greatest Show on Earth

The circus is in town!

Our family went to Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus last night. It's only here for a few more days, and if you're in the area, you've got to go. My children had a great time (okay, the 2 year old pretty much made us all miserable after 8:00, but it was past her bedtime. Next time I'll bring a change of clothes for her in case she dumps her entire snow cone out on her dress and tinkles in her panties.) There were clowns, elephants, tigers, acrobats, people shooting out of cannons and walking upside down . . . and lots of magic tricks. The theme this year is magic, which was just up my boys' alley.

We had dinner first with a clown (Bronwen was fascinated), then went down on the floor for the preshow. Anyone with general admission tickets can go down onto the floor before the circus show begins and mingle with the cast. Kimball was chosen to help with a magic trick and won a souvenir DVD for participating. Ian's favorite part was when the acrobats shot out of the cannon. Henry liked the live band and all the dance music. Bronwen loved the "ephalants" and my favorite was the tiger tamer and his entertaining Spanglish. He actually kissed a tiger right on the nose!

If you and your family would like to go to the circus this weekend, here's a deal for you. There are shows at 11:00 am, 3:00 pm, and 7:00 pm thru Sunday. If you buy your tickets on ticketmaster or at the arena, use the code: MOM (on ticketmaster.com enter it in the box marked MC Promotion Box). Or you can call 1-800-745-3000. You can get a package of 4 tickets for $44, and each additional ticket is only $11.

A Visit to Ancient Egypt

If you think I've stopped posting on this blog, you should visit my neglected homeschool blog. On second thought, DON'T! I have been terrible about posting updates and if you took my reports there to be a measure of our schoolwork, you'd be very concerned about my children's education. I'm really considering merging the two blogs again, because perhaps somehow that will feel less overwhelming than keeping up on them both.

In light of that, I thought I'd post about a recent field trip our little Academy took to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California. We really should have gone back in the fall when we were deep into ancient Egypt, but I didn't know about it then. My kids didn't seem to mind the fact that we were learning about ancient India during the school week and looking at Egyptian artifacts on Friday.

The museum is set on some beautiful grounds with gardens with several buildings built in the ancient style. There was a large outdoor Senet game, which we took advantage of at the end of the day, fountains, and plantings. The museum itself was not large, but they had a surprising amount of artifacts. We loved looking at the mummies, sarcophagi, the toys and jewelry of the ancient Egyptians. There was papyrus and a large diorama explaining family life in ancient Egypt, including how Egyptians welcomed a new baby into the world, which was of particular interest to our family.

There was also a fairly large exhibit of artifacts and replicas from other ancient civilizations including Sumeria, Assyria, and Babylon. The boys were excited to see a replica of the Rosetta stone and of the stele of Hammurabi's Code, as well as an artist's 3-D rendition of what the Hanging Gardens of Babylon might have looked like.

The museum also offered a 40 minute planetarium presentation which we tried but ended up leaving. Brownen didn't make it through the introduction and Ian lost interest almost immediately but managed to sit quietly for about 25 minutes of it. I was surprised that Kimball and Henry did so well with it, as I found it to be a rather dry high-school or college level lecture on the Mithraic Mysteries. I would recommend it for kids at least 10 and older who have an interest in the ancient world, otherwise wait until they are teenagers.

Here are a few shots of the kids playing Senet outside before we headed into rush hour traffic to drive home. I wish that I had taken more pictures of the grounds, but that will have to wait for our next visit.

Wordless Wednesday

Our visit to Temple Square a couple of weeks ago. (I found my pictures in a "hidden" folder on my harddrive. Yeah!)

Friday Fun?

One of my favorite parts of Tiger Academy (the kids' favorite parts, as well) is Science Friday. It is one of my favorites because Jared is the teacher and my participation is often not required. (Not that I don't love the other days, but it is so nice to have a break!) It is the boys' favorite because they learn cool stuff and usually go on a field trip. So far, Jared has taken them horseback riding, to see the salmon run at the local fish hatchery, to tour a print shop, and today we took a family outing to the zoo. Yes, even after what happened this week in San Francisco. (Although I did get pretty nervous when the air raid sirens went off for two minutes. It turns out that the city of Sacramento tests their air raid sirens on the last Friday of the month. Seems like someone should have told me, because I was looking for a spot to hide my babies from the tiger on the loose.)
Now this sounds like a great thing to do as a family on a Friday morning, and we told the kids last night about our plan. Jared would first give them a science lesson about kingdom-phyllum-class-order-family-genus-species and then we'd all go together. Neither of us considered checking the weather report before giving our children such exciting news.
So, we bundled up and went to the zoo in the 40 degree rain. I'm sure that if you live in upstate New York, Winnepeg, or Yekaterinburg you don't think that is cold. But we Californians are a bit wimpy about such things. In fact, by the time we got back to the car, I was convinced that my feet hadn't been that cold since I walked the streets of Yekaterinburg (look it up here) in the winter, talking to people about my church. There were about three other families in the entire zoo who were as crazy (or foolish) as we. The kids seemed to have a great time (except Bronwen, who did not enjoy herself beyond the first ten minutes, when I managed to get this picture!). The three one-year-old Sumatran tigers (brothers) thought it was pretty cold too. We found them all huddled up together trying to keep warm. It's funny how you can watch three tigers who are brothers and think that you are seeing your own three sons! Poor little tropical guys, living in such a frigid, foreign environment. Oh well, at least they have each other.
In the hour that we spent there before we headed for the warm car, we got to see our favorites: the tigers, lemurs, and penguins, plus a few others; so I guess it wasn't a total loss. Plus, we get to count today as a school day! That means that some sunny, lovely day in May when you are all huddled over homework with your kids, we'll be at the pool!

Say "Pumpkin!"

Last week was Henry's first kindergarten field trip to the pumpkin farm. It didn't matter that we've been to this particular pumpkin farm multiple times, the excitement level was as high as the mercury on an Arizona summer's day. I knew that there would be zillions of parents going along on this field trip because it was the first, and thought that I might escape being a chaperone, but Henry really wanted me to come and I couldn't say no. For a class of 2o kids there were about 15 parents along, so none of the chaperones had to work very hard.
This particular farm plays to the field trips big time. They have singing chickens doing the Star Spangled Banner (it almost felt sacreligious) and a heavily made up "Mother Goose" as the emcee of the pig races. She told corny jokes (no pun intended) and told us when to laugh, cheer, etc. I found her to be barely tolerable, especially since I have sat through the program a few times before, but the kids seemed to enjoy the show. After the pig races (our pig came in third out of four), we headed over to the train ride. This meant standing in line while we waited for the train. The kids were just sure that we'd miss the train somehow and were very concerned. Here they are watching for the train to pull into the station:Henry and I got to ride with Sammy and his dad (Henry's soccer coach) and I snapped some great shots of Sam pouting. I can't even remember anymore why he was mad at us, but check out that face!After a few minutes, he didn't want to admit that he was having fun, so he turned around, hoping his dad couldn't see:
I sat out the hayride, since I had smuggled Bronwen along and she needed to eat. That proved to be torture because the spot where I sat and waited was just near enough the bakery that the most exquisite smells wafted my direction. At one point I went over and looked carefully at each item before deciding that it wasn't worth the money or the calories. I returned to my bench with a very hot cup of cider, which took me ages to sip because of its temperature, and got me through until the class returned.
Here are a few more of my favorite shots of the day:

Brycen's not my kid, but I can't help but snap his picture when he's around. I just love those sweet little freckles!

Ditto for Eliza. What a doll!
The apple trees line the pumpkin patch.
Henry didn't care for the noise in the train tunnel.
And he wasn't about to do the chicken dance, no matter how much that crazy Mother Goose yelled for everybody to join in! He can spot ridiculous from a mile away.
After a lunch and cider under the apple trees and a few rides down the Coyote Mountain slide, the kids climbed the buses and headed home. Something drew me to the bus logo!

P.S. Days later, I realize that this was my 61st post and can't help mentioning that for Henry's sake!