Adventures with Nana and Papa

We really enjoy hosting visitors and playing tourists, it gives us a chance to visit places we love and explore new areas we haven't been. Nana and Papa flew into Boston, which meant we got to drive down there to enjoy a few historical sites before their plane arrived. 

We went to Bunker Hill, where Madie and Finn climbed to the top of the monument. It was great to read and visit some Revolutionary War history right before Independence Day. 

We walked the Freedom Trail to the U.S.S Independence, which is ship from the War of 1812. Although we didn't actually go onto the ship, there was a museum that had a whole bunch of information about the ship right next to it. 

They even had hammocks! The kids commented that they wanted to get some for their rooms. I think it would be cool. 

After we picked up Nana and Papa, we stopped by the temple so Mal and I could do some ordinances, then continued on to our condo we were renting in Killington, VT. Along the way, Finn announced he had to go potty. I pulled off the nearest exit and we found a woodsy area that looked like a trail head. I had Finn lean against a rock and let it rip. He did well, except while readjusting his feet he stepped in his pile a bit. We had some cleaning to do. Nana and Papa helped entertain the kids with equations and spellings for Madie, tablets and iPad's, etc. 

The condo was very comfortable and fit us perfectly. The kids were most excited to sleep there. Before we left for our trip, I asked Finn what he was looking forward to the most. He replied, "Sleeping". He was referring to the bunk beds they were going to sleep in. The idea of sleeping in those sounded so fun to the kids! They were sold on getting bunk beds after spending a couple of nights in those. 

The next morning, we headed to Sharon, VT to visit the birthplace of Joseph Smith. It was a beautiful site, and I learned some new history that I hadn't previously known. The Church owns just over 400 acres of land there, which includes the foundations from other family members. A few of the highlights include riding in the gas powered golf cart through the woods to visit these sites (kids loved the ride), and enjoying the peace of the area. 

After Sharon, we headed up to Ben & Jerry's for a factory tour. The drive through Vermont was very beautiful. The mountains were so green and pretty. It was fun to visit Ben and Jerry's. They had a literal graveyard of old retired flavors, tombstones and all. The tour was okay. It was interesting to hear their process. They had some free samples at the end. It was worth doing it. 

We visited the Cold Hollow Cider Mill afterwards, and it was so good! Great donuts, apple cider, and other Vermont-y goods. 

You can't go to Vermont without visiting covered bridges! We passed two on our way home. 

Sugarbush Farm. 

Just to break the drive home a bit, we drove through the White Mountains. They were beautiful! We stopped by the Maine Wildlife Park to catch to wildlife as well. This park was a very pleasant surprise. Great views of the animals, and quite the diversity. The kids loved seeing all the animals. I think their favorites were the eagles, and the bears. 

Madie and Finn loved using the park maps to try and figure out where we were, and leading us to where we should go next. Madie was very proud to show us her map. 

Great to be back home for the 4th of July weekend! We made the most of it by going to the beach and lakes plenty. Here, Papa tagged along with Petranella to play in the water. The kids played in sand, and made small ponds to walk in. They also chased the waves for a bit. 

The next day, we ran to Echo Lake. That water was cold! I was trying to help Madie get over her fear of swimming in lakes. She was so insistent that she needed a wall to push off (like the YMCA pool). When I was young, I actually learned to swim best in shallow water, and pushing off the bottom with comfort in knowing I could put my feet down whenever I felt I needed to. She eventually got it on the 4th of July when we went to Lake Wood. 

Madie was the first to lay down here in the sand....then Petya plopped down right next to big sister. Then Finn joined in. 

I'm glad I could at least get their faces. 

A nice stroll around Bar Harbor after some Ben and Bills ice cream. 

On Sunday, we went to Thuya Gardens for a short hike and walk around the garden. 

I couldn't believe how much candy the kids got from the 4th of July parade! It was like Halloween. It seemed that just about every float was throwing out candy. It was a great parade, and seemed a bit more robust this year than I remember previous years. Perhaps because it is the centennial year for Acadia? 

Nana and Nella. 

Posing at Lake Wood. 

My little Lost Boy. I love watching Finn play in the water and try to catch critters with his hands. 

The fireworks show was incredible. We played cards leading up to it, trying to kill time. Finn was wired the moment we were there. It was one of those moments I wish we had a cage for him, because he was about as wild as an animal. He was bouncing around, jumping, spinning, running...so much energy! The kids did pretty well for the fireworks. Finn wanted his ears covered at first, but soon removed his hands and enjoyed the show. 

Papa is now officially on Petranella's ear lobe watch list. 

Papa hired Madie to be his piano teacher before heading home. Madie showed him some scales, notes, and gave him some assignments to work on in Arizona. For his good work, she gave him a blue star. 

Madie finishes first grade

Madie has successfully completed first grade. She really liked her teacher, Ms. S. In a report card today, she found out she will have Ms. Sp. for second grade. Here are some of the transcribed items from her report card:

Reading

• Strengths: Madie is reading independently at level 24, which is the expectation for about mid-year second grade. She reads with expression and meaning, paying close attention to what is happening in the story. She can both answer literal questions about the text and infer from subtle clues. She can retell the story in broad strokes and remember small details. I celebrate Madie's skills and how much she has learned this year. 
• Challenges: In second grade, Madie will continue to learn how to write books. She can talk very sophisticatedly about what she has read, but we need to help her capture her thinking in her writing. Please make sure that Madie reads every day this summer to maintain all the progress she has made this year. 
• She exceeds expectations for comprehending fictional stories

Writing

• Strengths: Madie writes imaginative and creative series books about fictional characters. She invents funny and interesting problems for her characters and imitates the styles of authors that she has read. Her use of dialogue, details, and "sparkly" words make her stories come to life. Madie's spelling and phonics are also strong, and she is experimenting with different kinds of punctuation to convey meaning. 
• Challenges: I hope Madie will continue to tell and write stories over the summer. Her work this year exemplifies the connection between reading and writing: her strong reading skills support her ability to write compelling stories. I am truly impressed with Madie's writing, and look forward to reading more of it as she grows.
• She exceeds expectations in Message/content

Mathematics

• Strengths: Madie is a thoughtful and confident mathematician. She is a creative and sophisticated problem solver, and is flexible about choosing the most efficient strategy to suit a particular problem. She is solidifying her understanding of place value, and can efficiently add and subtract numbers on the decade (for example: 20+4 or 70-20). She can interpret graphs and tell time, and is working on identifying coins and adding them together. 
• Challenges: Sometimes, Madie thinks she knows a math fact, and so she tries to reason about it, but since she has the fact wrong, her reasoning goes astray. For example, she might say 8+5=14, because 8+4=13. This summer, keep practicing the basic facts, and have her double check by counting on or back to make sure that she knows what she thinks she knows. 

Social Studies

• Narrative: Madie was engaging in learning about migrant farm workers and how we can help. She posed thoughtful questions and ideas during our discussion. Madie's connections and insights definitely raised the level of our class discussions. She wrote part of her group's presentation and shared it with other classes with poise and confidence. She was also able to answer challenging questions that the older students had. Great work!
• Exceeds expectations in Social studies content

Learning Habits and Skills

• She consistently worked independently, seeks help when needed, shows respect for others, accepts responsibility for self and belongings, strives for quality work, actively works well with others, actively works well with others, listens responsively, and expresses oneself effectively.
• Strengths: Madie is such a conscientious and mature young person. She cares deeply about doing the right thing, both in the sense of following the rules and being a good friend and student, but also in a moral sense. She is also a very sophisticated thinker and her thoughtful ideas and questions help us all think and understand better. And for all that, Madie has a great sense of fun, and knows exactly how to be silly when it's appropriate. She has been a joy to teach and I will miss her next year. 

Areas of Focus

• Madie is an incredibly well-adjusted and mature child. I don't anticipate that she will have any challenges as she transitions to second grade. 

Great work, Madie!

Happy Birthday Mr. Finn!

Our little man is officially four years old. We hosted a friends of Finn party last Saturday at our house. The original plan was to celebrate at the Northeast Harbor playground, but it was threatening rain. We called an audible at the last minute, and just invited everyone over. Surprisingly, the parks around here don't really have pavilions like they do out west. It would be nice to have that, considering how fast the weather can change here. Anyways, Mal made an Italian butter cream cake, which she wasn't satisfied with (she nailed it a week later for our family celebration). Finn seemed fine with hosting it at our house, mostly because we had just gotten our chickens. He was so eager to show everyone. He had been telling everyone and anyone, wherever he was, that we just got chickens. He is one proud farmer. 

I love this photo. Finn got a spyglass for his birthday. Madie was showing him how to use it. The conversation went a little bit like this: "Okay, what you need to do is close one eye, and look in with the other. Here, let me show you." 

Mal, Finn, and BW look at aunt Alexa's gift to Finn. 

On Monday when Mal went grocery shopping, she asked Finn what he wanted for his birthday breakfast. Finn said he wanted cereal, Captain Crunch to be exact. We don't normally buy that kind of cereal, so it was a special treat. He ate it for breakfast and lunch, until it was soon gone. I got up with him to get breakfast early on Thursday morning and asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted cereal. I looked in the cupboard...it was empty. "Finn, I'm sorry buddy. Your cereal is all gone." The saddest look came over him. He sulked his shoulders and looked at the ground. Yeah, he really likes that cereal. 

Since late last year, Finn has been asking me to take him fishing. I'm not sure what started this thirst for fishing, but he has been consistently wanting to go. Every year, I take off the day of or the day near the birthday of everyone in my family to do something fun for/with them. For Finn, I hatched an idea. A camping and fishing trip! He loves camping, and has been wanting to go fishing. This will be perfect! On Friday, we packed the car and got ready to go. We had to run a few errands in Ellsworth before we headed to Donnell Pond. After we ran all of our errands, we headed to Finelli's for pizza before our trip. He said, "We are still going camping, right?" He was worried we weren't going to have time to go camping with all the time we were spending on errands. "Of course we are going camping still! I just thought it would be fun to take you out for pizza before our trip!" And Finelli's is always a good choice. New York pizza, right in Ellsworth, Maine. 

After pizza, we headed to Donnell Pond. We were actually able to launch from the Daltons camp, which shaved off a few minutes to our trip. I loaded up the canoe, woke up Finn to get in the canoe. I would estimate the distance from their camp to Redmans Beach is about 1.5 miles. It was pretty choppy getting there, especially when we got into the middle of the lake. When we got to the beach, there was an employee there cleaning up the latrines. Other than that, we had the entire beach to ourselves! That's actually what I was hoping for. Complete privacy, nobody to mind. Just play, and enjoy. 

Since it was overcast when we got there, it was a little chilly. Finn liked to sit on his chair and wrap his towel around himself like a blanket. 

We packed swords, dump trucks, baseball/bat, fishing poles...you name it! And we did all of those in a circuit that we did 5-6 times before dinner. 

And the food! S'mores, hot dogs, and muffins. Those are a few of Finn's favorite things. 

Although we didn't catch anything, we got to practice casting and using the equipment. Hopefully we'll be frying fish by the end of the summer. 

The sun came out in the evening, and it finally warmed up! The bugs weren't too bad either. It could have been much worse. 

We hung out in the tent for a while, playing Go-Fish, and playing "What's your favorite...". A few questions into the latter, I decided I needed to start writing these down! Here is what I got: 

What's your favorite....

1. Color: green
2. Pizza: pepperoni
3. Ice cream: blueberry
4. Breakfast: Captain Crunch cereal
5. Lunch: Captain Crunch cereal
6. Animal: Crocodile
7. Movie/Show: Octonauts 
8. Shirt: Dog shirt
9. Thing to do in the snow: Snowball fight
10. Thing to do at the beach: Camping
11. Thing to do on the water: Throwing rocks
12. Thing about camping: Sleeping in the tent with Dad, playing "little" games
13. Place to camp: Donnell Pond
14. Drink: Water, "...because it's so healthy!"
15. Thing to do outside: Look at the chickens and pretend games
16. Thing you want to do this summer: Learn to swim under water
17. Fun place to go: Playland Adventures
18. Thing about Elvis: "Snuggling with him. I miss him because he is all alone by himself at home."
19. Place to go on an airplane: Nana and Papa's (he was a stow-away in Mal's belly when we visited Saipan...)
20. Thing about Nana and Papa's: The cold tub (hot tub that isn't heated). "I like it when you and Mumma go to the temple and I stay with Nana and Papa."
21. Transportation: airplanes
22. Best friend: Logan
23. Thing about Primary: Treats, "...but raisins are not some sort of treat."
24. Thing about Family Home Evening: Treats
25. Book: Calvin and Hobbes
26. Sport: Basketball, baseball, soccer
27. Vegetable: Carrots
28. Fruit: Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries
29. Camping food: Muffins
30. Bird: Bald eagle
31. Time of year: Summer
32. Instrument to learn: Violin
33. Toy: Wooden boat 

When Finn started to stir in the morning, I leaned over and said "Finn, today you are four years old!" He had been asking pretty much every day "Is today my birthday?" He replied to me, "Ugggghhhhhpppphhhh, I got a hair in my mouth." Nicely put, Finn. We got up, ate some blueberry muffins, played some baseball, then broke camp. We headed out with our fishing poles, ready to reel. What an adventure! When we were paddling near some boulders, there were some boulders that barely breached the surface, and looked like alligator heads. Finn pointed to them with a really worried look on his face. "Dad, what are those?!" Leading up to this trip, he seemed concerned about sharks, alligators, and crocodiles being in the water. We reviewed again and again how they would probably die in Maine, because they don't like the snow. I suppose you can't help but think about it with a young imagination. 

Later that day, we had some family celebrations. Finn opened presents, and we had cake and ice cream after dinner. 

Finn trying out his sun glasses...he was looking at everything through his new sunglasses from Grammy and Grampy!

And he loved his lava lava. 

This has been in our closet since Christmas. We were going to return it, then tried to re-sell it. Finn's had his eye on it for months. The other day, I just said, "Let's just give it to him." This was his reaction!

For the win!

And we topped off the day with some amazing cake that Mal made. Happy Birthday, Finn!

We have chickens

We did it! We finished the coop and run. We did it with mostly scrap materials as well. The kids love checking for eggs and feeding them too. Soon enough, they will be cleaning the coop. There are eight in total.

Nell

Petranella is far and away our busiest baby. Madie and Finn were both early talkers--they listened to what people said and it always marveled me to listen to them--at 17 or 18 months--start to mimic the influxes of our voices and even piece together two-word sentences.

Nell isn't so much that way--don't get me wrong, she chats it up all day long with anyone who'll stay around long enough. But the mimicry isn't there. Nonetheless, she observes her siblings closely as far as the things they do. She doesn't necessarily follow suit, per se, but rather, these observations put ideas in her head. One morning, Finn pushed a chair up to the counter to help me with some cooking (one of his favorite activities). Petya had never done this before, though she has climbed up on many chairs and stools that were already at the counter when her older brother or sister took off to the bathroom. This particular morning, I had been up a lot the night before--I can't remember why now, but kids is a safe bet--and told Finn I was going into my room to rest for a few minutes after breakfast. I had cleaned up the kitchen and was lying with my eyes closed (but very much awake--go figure) on my bed. I heard a chair being pulled across the floor in the kitchen and I thought it was probably Petya pulling it out from the table to climb up. No big deal--I had cleared all but a couple of plastic cups from the table and from it she could reach nothing. She mostly liked to sit on her knees and slide herself forward and backward across it; unless, of course, there was something more interesting up there. 

Nell observes me through a magnifying lens.

After a while I decided 10 minutes of "rest" wasn't worth wondering what all the silence in the kitchen was about, so I got up and went out to find Nellie had pulled a chair from the far end of the table to a counter, upon which I had set a mug and an almost-empty honey bottle to let the last bit of honey drain. Before I had lain down, I had checked and seen 2 inches of honey in the bottom of the mug with not much left in the bottle. Now I found approximately an inch spread over the chair, counter, and Petya's face and only about 1/2 an inch in the bottom of the mug. I'm guessing the last 1/2 inch was somewhere between her sticky fist and her esophagus.

Watching Madie learn a dance in gymnastics.

Despite her climbing upon everything and her early toddlerhood being filled with bloody noses, bashed heads, broken dishes, and a lot of maternal anxiety, Petya has finally developed some sense of caution. Yes, she does go up and down the steep, slippery stairs to our playroom on her own--and facing forward no less--but she has learned to take it slow, that sometimes it's safer to do it alone than with a well-meaning older sibling's help, and that if she feels unsafe at all, turning around and going down backward will get her there in relatively the same time and with fewer bruises. Still, I have not witnessed many panicked expressions on her face. (Except for that time she messed in the tub. THAT was a panicked expression, accompanied by truly terrified screaming.) 

Petya accompanied me to the grown-up section of the library one day. Here she is checking out a book on French cuisine.

This isn't to say we don't keep a watch on her--on the contrary, although she has developed caution for some circumstances, she continues to display an age-appropriate lack of respect for the dangers of others. As a case, take animals. Nell loves animals. Much more than either of my other two at this age. I remember walking with Madie and any time we saw a dog, I would try to point it out. Complete disinterest. Finn was a similar story. Not Nell. Any animal, be it the woodpecker that comes to our feeder every day or a crow at the park; the neighbor's dog she's seen and pet a hundred times or a cat crossing the road--if it catches Petya's eye (and trust me, it will catch her eye), she points it out. "'Ook! 'Ook! 'Ook!" over and over until I do and respond. Because of this, we do have to watch her around strange dogs and cats. Unless we hold on, she will run right up to them. 

For the record: they are also worth being abandoned for. 

"Come, Petya. Let's go. Nell, come on. Petranella. I'm leaving, Nellie. Nell! Come on, now! Bye bye." 

Enjoying a blueberry smoothie.

Of course, she does speak some recognizable words. Most of her chatter is gibberish, but she clearly says Mumma and Dada, and even a couple friends' names, like Anna and Caroline (although I think I'm the only one who can tell she's saying Caroline--it's a big name!). And she says, "Pop! Pop!" when we sing a child's song, "Popcorn Popping." She says look, watch, and dog, all fairly clearly, and please. 

And tonight I got her very first, "I-uh-you."