Baseball!

WOW, what a week

The week started off bad with Caitlynn getting over the nasty stomach virus that blew through our house. Wednesday her class presented the Fairy Tale Garden. The kids learned about fairy tales and each wrote one of their own. I helped Ms. Skinner to make their stories into books, thank goodness there's only 18 kids in the class. Then Wednesday the class put on a few plays for the parents which were all parodies of classic fairy tales like Rafunzel. They were absolutely hysterical! The whole classroom was decorated with leaves, vines and garden lights and there was tons of food all with cute fairytale names like 3 pigs in a blanket and tooth fairy pudding.

Thursday was Dave and Elijah putting the finishing touches on his Lightning McQueen car for the Cub Scout pinewood derby Friday night. They did a really great job on the car. Friday was the races and it was insane. Picture about 50 boys 1st-4th grade in one room excited about racing their cars, talk about LOUD! Elijah was so happy, each car raced 4 times, his came in 1st twice, 2nd one and 3rd once, never last place. Go Elijah and Dad!

Saturday Caitlynn had a baseball game followed by a Birthday to attend. The whole team showed up at the Agat field ready to play, the kids were warming up, parent volunteers were ready to help out, everything was under control until we realized that there was no team showing up to play us. The game was supposed to start at 11am, at 11:10 the baseball commissioner shows up and tells us the game has been changed to Merizo field at the south end of the island, nothing like trying to coral the kids back into the car so we could haul tail to get there as fast a possible. I felt bad for the other team that had to wait on us to get there that whole time, it wasn't their fault. Unfortunately the communication has been terrible this baseball season, fields and times change every week and no one find out til the last minute. Since we started the game late and were farther away we got to Sabrina's birthday party much late than expected, but the kids still enjoyed it. We left the house at 10am that morning and didn't get home til just after 5pm. Needless to say I was NOT in the mood to cook dinner, we let Elijah pick where we'd go to dinner and he chose Pizza Hut, nice and close and casual.

Yesterday was another insane day. We lest the house for church at 8:30 am, everything was great at church, nothing out of the ordinary. Then we had to meet Sabrina's mom to drop off Caitlynn because they invited her to go to Tarza with them. After that we were off to Hannah & Elijah's game. We found out Saturday night that it had been changes to the Yona field, fantastic that's not far from church at all, plenty of time to get changed, grab a bite to eat and head over right? Well it would've been if I hadn't forgotten their cleats! So we had to rush home, grad the cleats, something to eat and rush back up to the field. The game started at 1pm and we literally were pulling into the parking lot at 12:59, nothing like last minute. Even better almost no one showed up for the game if Hannah & Elijah hadn't made it we would've had to forfeit because there weren't enough players. They played really well, Hannah was on 3rd and Elijah at short stop. He had about 50% of the balls get hit to him, so he didn't have time to get bored. When we got home I started a layout and threw together a homemade chicken noodle soup while we waited for Caitlynn to get home.

The layout I was working on was for the Scrap Street Stars contest at www.scrapstreet.com, my alltime favorite message board, I think it's the only one I've ever been a member of for almost 2 years. The challenge was to scrap you IT. Can you guess what my IT was? What totally consumes my life these days? Did you say Baseball? How did you guess? It's done and posted on the site, I'll upload it here when I get a chance along with the photos from the last week.

Here's to a much calmer week this week, I can dream right?

Hannah's a busy bee

I have been such a bad blogger, between baseball and all the other activities we've had going on, I just haven't had time.

The children at our school had the most awesome experience a few weeks back. Petey and Corey from the Missoula Children came to our school for a week. Every class pre-k through 8th grade had a theater workshop, anything from drama to theater makeup. But the biggest part of their visit was the play they would put on with 60 of our students. Monday afternoon right after school anyone who was interested gathered in the cafeteria for auditions. I know what you're thinking, auditions, scary right? Wrong! Not these auditions. All the children lined up around the cafeteria in height order, then they all went around and said their name and age. After that they went around and said it again, but in an excited voice, and this went on and on. Throughout the process they were moving the kids into different order based on what they saw. Then they sat down all the K-2nd graders, while the older kids continued their auditions. By this point it was pretty clear which kids were going to get the parts, because they were being asked to do additional things. Once they were done with the big kids they came back to the little ones. Their audition was even more of a game, when she said 1 they would throw their hands in the air and say tada. 2 was something like jump, 3 spin around, 4 blow kisses, 5 bow etc. Lucky for Hannah & Elijah, this was very similar to a drill they did in soccer this past season so they were very good at it. When that was done Petey and Corey went around and got the names and numbers of all the children that they chose for parts, the whole process took almost 2 hours. Hannah was among the lucky and got the part of a bee, the only part the K-2nd graders could get. Sadly for Caitlynn and Elijah they were not chosen, it didn't bother Elijah in the least bit, I was actually surprised that he tried out at all. Caitlynn on the other hand was heart broken, she had her heart set on being in the play and had a good cry when she wasn't picked. But she got over it quickly, since she's in 2 other plays in her class, another one in her gifted class and 1 the whole 3rd grade is putting on.

After a short break, the children with the main roles started rehearsal for another 2 hours. Lucky for Hannah being a bee only required two afternoons of rehearsal so she could come home. It had been a long emotional couple of hours and we all needed a bit of down time.

The most amazing part of all this is that in 20 hours of rehearsal time, the 60 kids that were chosen to participate, learned their lines, songs and moves; and were ready to perform it for all of us. That Friday evening and Saturday afternoon we were treated to an amazing performance of Rumpelstiltskin

Joy

I did it!

I finally took some photos in manual mode on my camera, I'm so proud of myself! After what seemed like forever, two weeks, the book I ordered Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson arrived this week and I haven't been able to put it down! I still need a ton of work of course, but to be able to make my own settings and have the picture not turnout black was a total improvement for me. Thursday I went to Plaza de Espana and played around a bit. Here's a couple of photos I took, keep in mind I wasn't too worried about composure, just exposure.

Photos from photography Thursday

Unfortunately when I went out a few weeks ago my mirror and sensor were dirty, so most of my shots were hopeless. In the water shot it actually made a pretty cool smudgy background, not that I'd reccommend getting your sensor dirty on purpose! The sky in the flag shot is awful, but I like the effect the sun had on the flag.

Brand New Life

here's the calendar page I made with my bird photo.

photography thursday

So I went out last thursday and planned to take pictures of Caitlynn as catcher during her baseball practice. Instead she told me about the bird nest she'd found the day before during Hannah & Elijah's practice. Of course the momma bird was not happy having me around so I got a few shots as quickly as I could and left them alone.