Matthew had a Mother's Day tea in his class this week...
I didn't want to be intrusive with my camera but I did get a few quick pictures of him in the classroom...
And we came home to these in our driveway...
... 40 bags of soil and compost for our new raised beds which will contain tomatoes, peas, carrots, zuch, and herbs. And also these hand-me-down perennials...
Some pictures from the May Day celebration at school...
Bagpipes always make me weepy...
The early childhood May Day was significantly smaller scale but equally sweet...
Mrs Carolyn made crowns for everyone and Danny got the extra...
He was so proud...
Friday, May 4, 2012
Dear Joe,
Thank you for a very special night. The music was beautiful and I always love an excuse for dressing up...
I swear I didn't tell them to look dotingly at dandelions, they were just doing that when I came outside.
These are the pictures from "The Big Spring Concert" All the students from The Ann Arbor Suzuki Institute preformed. There were mini cellos...
And a whole lot of violins...
You are on the left in front, standing, wearing the black tie. You really appreciated the opportunity to play in such a beautiful space.
Matthew hated his bow-tie but was a champ...
Danny did such a good job. The violins didn't go on until the very end, so it was a long wait...
The bass players were quite moving...
We see the kids at school lugging their basses down the hall and I have always thought, "Oh Lord, please don't let any of my boys choose bass." But I'm a total convert. It's a beautiful instrument and it makes such a peaceful, surprisingly quiet, ethereal sound. I think I was also so moved by this piece because of the age of the students. It's impressive to see the little virtuosos, but it's a completely different thing to see adolescents playing up on stage with poise and confidence during such an awkward time of life and being so completely successful and creating something beautiful. We're lucky to have access to The Ann Arbor Suzuki Institute of Music and I can't say enough about how excellent Joe's teacher is.
Cute baby alert...
He mostly slept, but he did wake up for a while and try to eat my scarf...
I wanted to get some portrait type pictures of you and your brothers but we ran out of time before the concert started because I tried to also squeeze in a haircut for you and then my camera ran out of batteries at the very end. But it was worth it because your hairs really needed to be "de-domed" and I think it came out very well, significantly less poofy...
I took you to this place and after the stylist finished (I'll throw in here that she only charged TWELVE DOLLARS!) she gave you a little calculator as a prize. Now, I didn't realize this until you got this calculator, but for some reason you had no idea what a calculator was. Imagine getting all the way through first grade not knowing what a calculator is. IT BLEW YOUR MIND. "You mean I can just put the numbers in here and it GIVES ME THE ANSWERS???" Plus, as you dramatically pointed out, "it's SOLAR POWERED." It is now a prized possession and has a honored spot on the bedroom shelf. After you showed it to Danny he said, "I want to get my haircut dere. But WIFOUT my two brudders." He wants a calculator soooo bad now. Maybe Santa will bring him one.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
A flock of white throated sparrows came to our backyard. Mattie and I sat on the back door step and watched them eat dandelion seeds. We could hear them singing "poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody" all afternoon. Here they are in the grass with their little stripy heads...
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Chris got the bike he's been dreaming of for four years...
How can you not love a man whose dream it is to have a bike that fits all his kids on the back? Or who immediately jumps in the fray when he gets home from work? Or who prefers cloth diapers, knows how to make a baby laugh, makes fingernail cutting hilarious and gets all his days off scheduled together so you can go meet your new nephew, leaving him behind with three kiddos?
We are on day one of a twenty-four day strech of work. We'll miss ya, babe.
Here are two Lotte Reiniger shadow puppet stop-motion movies I found on YouTube that inspired me to do a shadow puppet play for Danny's party...
An earlier video of Cinderella...
And Jack and the Beanstalk...
For Jack, his mother and the ogre puppets, I took some screen shots from this video, enlarged them at the printers and traced to make the puppets. I happen to know a shadow puppet expert who I consulted and she gave me advice on materials. They were cut using an exacto knife from dura-lar (thin plastic sheeting) covered with black contact paper. The other puppets I drew myself and that is why they weren't as good. I did like how the cow came out though...
She was made out of a few different pieces because I ran out of black contact paper.
Chris and I made the screen with a queen sized Ikea flat sheet
and a frame that we already had (we used to use it for the gate to the
garden, so there was chicken wire that needed to be removed.) We
stretched the sheet over the frame and stapled it down, then Jenni and I
painted it with acrylic paint.
I loved how Lotte Reiniger depicted the growing beanstalk and the detail of the seed sprout, so I tried to do that with my beanstalk too, because that is after all, how beans grow. I cut the bean-stalk out, removed the "negative image" and stuck the "positive image" (which was what was left on the sheet after I cut out the stalk) on some green gels that I got from Dick Blick dot com, then cut around the edges to free the puppet from the green gel. Does that make sense? It does when you look at the puppet. Then, during the play, we put a blue gel over the light bulb so the screen turned blue, it looked so good! Unfortunately you can't tell about the blue from the picture...
If I could do it again, I would use a thicker sheet of Dura-lar since my puppets were pretty big (the ogre was two feet tall and I used 0.05 thickness.) I think thicker would have made them easier to manipulate, less floppy-ish. I would also rehearse all the way through AT LEAST ONCE, which we couldn't seem to find the time to do. We only got half way though the story when we did a practice run and the second half of the performance suffered for it.
Still, I think the kids enjoyed it...
And people laughed when the hen laid her golden egg...
I had planned to pin the sets to the screen, but that proved too tricky so we just taped them to a dowel and made them into their own puppet...
I'd like to get better at this art form, and maybe make some puppets that are articulated. Wouldn't it be fun to have a small business doing shadow puppet plays for kid birthday parties?
