No, not for the kids! It's been a bit of a spring cleaning blog break for me. We have been so busy cleaning out, organizing and getting rid of the dust and cobwebs of winter. The weather has been wonderfully springy too. It's hard when I know the cold and dreary weather will be back before spring comes for sure. Here in Central Oregon we can have winter-like weather well into June and I have been told many times that a few years ago it actually hailed here on July 4th. That's why it's so hard to spend these beautiful days indoors cleaning up. Unfortunately, I learned long ago to trust my cleaning instinct when it appears, because it won't last long. Besides, we've got a bunch of trips planned in the coming month. Now that we are (mostly) done, it feels great to enjoy the house when it's lightened up like this.
We have had other activities besides cleaning. Actually, I count 6 different plays (including Chloe's) we've gone to in the past two weeks. I don't know why everyone in town has their plays in the same two week period, but they all sounded so good, it was impossible to pass them up. They were: Choose Your Own Adventure (and the audience did choose- they said there were over 20 different versions of the play possible- very fun!), Holes, Grease, Sound of Music, Fractured Fairy Tales and Chloe's play- The Legend of Don Quixote. These were all performed by either high school theater groups or local children's theater groups.
Don Quixote deserves a whole post to itself, so look for that soon. The others were great fun, but I think my favorite was Grease. It's been a while since I'd seen the movie, Chloe barely remembers it and Ryan not at all. So, I have it ordered from Netflix. I've got the music running through my head now, so I may have to get the soundtrack too! Ryan was so taken with it all that he really wanted to talk to the actor who played Danny. He told us to stay where we were and he went up to him and said how much he liked the play. That is amazing! Ryan is usually pretty shy, but he was apparently compelled to do it and, luckily, had an enthusiastic reception.
Last Saturday we had the Artist Trading Card trade at the Mirror Pond Gallery downtown. That's were I took the photo above. We had a bit of trouble at first because they didn't follow the conventions that we've always had at in-person trades. When we got there most of Chloe's cards were gone. She had assumed they would trade person to person so she was very upset. Luckily, the artist who had taken them was still there and Chloe did manage to trade one on one with her. She quickly told everyone how it should be done (there's an unschooler for you!) and then we had a nice time trading with the co-op artists. We both got some really nice cards.
Here is Chloe with the cards before the trade. She had 8 hanging in the exhibition.
We also had some fun this week with the prizes that Chloe won for her Campfire candy sales. They got several things including trophies and little prizes (Ryan loves his trophies!) and Chloe got some bigger prizes because she sold 360 boxes of candy. She gave 60 of those boxes to Ryan so that he could get the trophy, but, as it turned out, our club won the prize for the most boxes sold and so all the kids got an even bigger trophy than the one that Ryan was coveting. Anyway, she also got a splatter paint kit and a marshmallow launcher.
The splatter paint kit was fun, but the marshmallow launcher was HUGE hit! At first Chloe made the full size, then, when Ryan wanted to play too, she shortened hers to make one for him with the extra pieces. These would be so easy to make with some bits of PVC pipe from the hardware store. After playing around with it for a while Chloe figured out how to make the pom poms (what we used instead of marshmallows) fly the best. They are still having tons of fun.
By the way, you have no idea how many tries it took to get a photo of the pom poms in the air!
