We had the first Irish Dance Performance of the new season today at the Monroe Street Festival. It was a beautiful day and it was nice to see the girls dance in wigs and dresses. I hadn’t seen them perform in quite some time and was quite impressed with their fluidity and confidence.
Lilly: When I grow up and have enough money from working for National Geographic, I’m going to visit every continent.
Maeve: Like Europe?
Lilly: Europe, Antarctica…
Maeve: Antarctica?!? What would you wear?
Lilly: I don’t know. A coat…
Maeve: Come ON! Antarctica is colder than winter.
All right… Finally. Here are some brand-spankin’-new photos. You got yer Summer pictures and you got yer back-to-school pictures. Have at ‘em.
Lilly’s friend Savannah invited her to go the DeForest Norskies high school football game. After she got picked up, Maeve and I went to the store to buy snacks (pizza, snack mix, popcorn, ice cream) and grabbed a video (Flushed Away). We watched the movie and ate our snacks on the couch. As I was putting her to bed, she said in a rather wistful voice, “that was a good night.” When Lilly got home an hour later, she regaled us with tales of crazy high-schoolers and a whole lot of junk food. Now she wants to go to a Badgers game. *sigh* Maybe with Grampy?
In an uncharacteristically spontaneous move, we booked a hotel in Appleton Saturday and hit the road within an hour. The original plan was to go to the Menasha Jazz Festival and Turtle Festival, but once we got up there, we realized there was a lot more going on. After checking into our hotel, we walked two blocks to a really great children’s museum. The visit ended in a long multimedia art session. Afterwards we walked about a mile to a recommended pizza restaurant and pigged out.
The next morning, we strolled around the Lawrence University campus. We couldn’t help but think that this might be a good place for the girls. Though Lilly keeps insisting that she wants to go to Journalism school in New York. Next up was a pretty awesome planetarium show in Menasha at the UW Fox River Center. It was geared towards kids and featured an animation of a roller coaster that made all of us dizzy. From there, we went to Oshkosh and spent some time at Menominee Park at the huge playground, tiny zoo, and miniature railroad. Then we hit the road and made it home from the whirlwind trip by 8pm.
First day of school: Lilly in grade four and Maeve in grade one! Lilly has been worried about her teacher because apparently the scuttlebutt is that she is very mean. We had a number of talks about giving her a chance and that maybe she’s just strict and her class last year was ill-behaved. Lilly tried to be optimistic but she had a lot of trepidation as she got on the bus. After the first day, Mrs. B was deemed nice, though she was still worried about day #2. After the second day, she was still deemed nice. After two weeks, Lilly decided that she was “strict but fair.”
Maeve’s teacher appears to be well-liked by everyone and Maeve is flourishing. She wrote “school is fun” on a piece of paper the other day and seems to quite enjoy doing her homework. In fact, after one week, Maeve got moved to the advanced-readers table. At the school open house, Mrs. S told us that Maeve has had none of the fooling-around behaviors that were sometimes a problem last year in kindergarten.