Treasures

This past weekend was filled with some great times with the kids.  Harry's school jazz band qualified for the statewide jazz competition this year and so he spent all day Saturday traveling to Millinocket, Maine, to compete with the other qualifying schools.  Millinocket is about 4 hours away...definitely up in moose country.  He left at 8:00am and we didn't see or hear from him again until 10:30 at night.  He was exhausted and seemed tired and a bit bummed out when he got home, so we tried not to ask too much about who won the competition and focused more on whether or not he had fun with his friends. It turns out that the band got third place overall!  Harry was being sneaky and trying to trick us into thinking they didn't place.  This was really exciting because the Greely jazz band has never placed in this competition before.  Harry had two improvisational solos and thought they both went well.  We wish we could have been there to hear Harry and his friends perform, but the 8 hours of driving scared us away.  We'll get to hear them play locally towards the end of the school year.

While Harry was in Millinocket all day, we had G to ourselves.  Actually, we had to share G with his friends during the day because he arranged back-to-back play time with two of his favorite friends.  When the last friend went home, G set up this very cool Heroscape landscape and we all played a Dungeons and Dragons-like adventure game during dinner and into the night.  

We all picked a group of characters and G told an epic story about how they banded together to fight an evil hoard of giant worms and robots on a precarious fledgling planet adrift in outer space.  

It was very fun, and having the 3D world with actual models of our characters was a neat way to really get into the story.

I was amazed at how Gregory could invent the story as we went and adapt it to our decisions and the fates dealt by the dice.  

On Sunday, we got up bright and early and drove to Arlington to hang out with Charlie and Ceci.  Amy and Tom were out of town celebrating Tom's upcoming birthday, so we got a chance to spoil the kids and have a little party of our own.  The festivities started with a big treasure hunt.  I explained the rules (work together!  It's not a race!  Make sure Ceci gets a chance to do some clues!) but I needn't have bothered with rules.  The kids were GREAT.  They were all super-enthusiastic and focused and worked perfectly as a team.

G and Charlie took turns reading the clues...

Some clues required searching...

Some required puzzle-making...

G carefully explained to Charlie how to solve the cryptoquip puzzle:

For one clue, they had to find 9 small boxes and arrange letters in those boxes into a word:

This was good practice for Easter!

(Sorry about Ceci's hair!! I didn't dare brush it.)

Sometimes, in order to get the next clue, they all had to complete a challenge.  Andy designed a challenge where they were given a target shooting toy, but had to shoot the targets by using a mirror to aim the gun around a corner:

Harry was mostly my helper, but he followed the treasure hunters around and stepped in when they needed assistance:

There was a crossword puzzle clue that, again, revealed some letters that needed to be unscrambled to make a word.  Gregory wrote out the letters and looked stumped:

GRERRRIETOFA

And Charlie said (almost instantly), "refrigerator!"  WOW!

Some of the clues were just pictures and these were for Ceci.  The boys were great about letting her figure them out, and then she'd be off like a shot running to grab the next clue.  I have never seen anyone move so fast!

Some of the clues, like this card puzzle, were tricky and Ceci would get a bit distracted...

But she was ready for action as the boys cracked the final clue, which held the combination to the lock on her bedroom closet!

Treasure!

After the hunt, we had lunch and cake (and cookies...):

We played a little Pokemon bingo with lunch...

And then everyone needed some down time with the electronics.  

After the video game break, we set up an art table and did a few projects.  I had Shrinky Dinks and a few blank necklaces and bracelets for Ceci to use, thinking we could use the Shrinky Dinks to draw some charms and decorations for the jewelry.  In the end, all of the boys (including Andy) got into the Shrinky Dinks, and Charlie even made a really cool bracelet for himself!

Andy made Shrinky Dink sea life...

We also decorated some flower pots for Tom's birthday (shhh!).  Everyone did an amazing job!

Part of Ceci's treasure was a foam castle kit.  We had a lot of fun building this together.  Ceci designed the garden in front of the castle all by herself!

We had to leave at around 6:00 to get home and ready for the week.  I was so impressed by the kids.  Harry was very grown up and helpful, catering to Ceci and joining in all of the activities with a great attitude.  Ceci has so much physical talent (we got a gymnastics show!) but she can also sit still for ages and create beautiful art projects.  G was patient and helpful with the treasure hunt, taking time to explain clues or give little tips.  Charlie was so sweet and enthusiastic about every single thing we did, and his amazing deciphering of  "refrigerator" stole the show.  What a great weekend with four amazing kiddos!

Random Awesomeness

I don't really have a cohesive story to tell with this blog entry, but in the interests of keeping the blog alive, I'll post some random events.  Because I had to be away from work for a week in February, I designed an experiment for my students to do at home.  They were each given two jars of an algae culture, and their jars looked about like this:

They could either add nutrients to one jar, or sea monkeys to one jar, and they were asked to observe the two jars for a week and hypothesize about what would happen.  We got some great results!  

On the right is one of the jars that had nutrients added to it.  The students who had sea monkeys (brine shrimp) in one of their jars got the opposite results (sea monkeys like to eat algae).  It was really fun and I am bursting with ideas for what we can do with this in the future.  Harry and/or G will be all set for the science fair, at least! 

In other news, I asked Andy (on a whim) if he would take down the doors to our closet and build me some shelves for my dolls.  I didn't have anything fancy in mind, but he built me this:

It is perfect!  I am so lucky that I can dream up these crazy ideas and he just smiles and makes them happen.

Pi day was pretty awesome, at least for Gregory and his friends.  I made him a pi pie that was consumed at a speed that I think might be mathematically impossible.   

Thanks in part to a video from Nana and some talking amongst the math friends, I think "tau" is the new pi and G is hard at work designing a tau shirt to flaunt at math competitions.  I think tau day is in June, so I'll have to think of a clever dessert for that.  Maybe "tau-fuh-fa" from China? Maybe not...

Anyway, another awesome thing was that the school had a band concert and for the first time, both kids were in the same concert!  The fifth grade band had their premiere performance (with a killer percussion section, if we do say so ourselves...) followed by the middle school band showing off some very cool numbers:  

The credit for the title of this blog entry goes to our favorite store, Think Geek.  They have a sale each year where they have "Random Tee Shirts of Surprising Awesomeness" for sale cheap.  You tell them your size and they send you a random tee shirt.  Well.  We could not have been more excited about the arrival of these shirts.  Something about the combination of surprise and geekiness made the whole thing irresistible.

We made an event out of the un-packaging of the shirts when they arrived.  Everyone reached into the bag and pulled out a shirt...

 

...and then that person would give the shirt to whoever it belonged to:

The shirts were definitely strange!

We had a lot of fun!  I think my shirts were the best, especially since I got the coveted "rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock" shirt from the Big Bang Theory TV show. Yay!

Most recently, we had a visit from Bapa, who came for a few nights this weekend.  We hiked up Bradbury mountain, went out for dinner at Ricettas, and got spoiled with tons of amazing new books and movies.  We all had an awesome time!

Thanks, Bapa!!

That's it for the awesomeness for now.