Griffin signed up to play volleyball this fall. It’s his first formal sport. He’s a few weeks into the season now and has played his first two games. The picture below shows him serving. This serve got him on a roll: he scored three of four points in the subsequent serves, pulling the Spartans into the lead. They ultimately lost the match, but it was great to watch. When the game ended, I asked Griffin how it went and he said, “That was SO much fun!”
Griffin, Maggie, and Oliver have been experimenting with stop-motion animation with legos. This is a sample of one of their works-in-progress.
As the school year kicks off, I’ve been spending more time on my laptop, and I keep running across files that I intended to post over the past year. (It was a very busy year!)
Attached below is a scanned copy of Griffin’s handwritten admission “essay” that he filled out last January when he first applied to St. Paul Academy (where I teach). I love it that he filled it out on his own without any input from Sarah or me. It’s a great snapshot of his thinking in the middle of a his sixth grade year. At this point, he hadn’t been at an in-person school for ten months.
You can view it below or click the download link below to view it in a larger window.
I found this screenshot while cleaning up my computer today. It’s from a Roy virtual get-together on March 14, 2021. Some of us were having fun with virtual backgrounds.
It’s odd to think that in the five+ months since this shot was taken, two of the three Roy-boy families have moved into new homes.
Griffin is joining me at SPA (St. Paul Academy) for seventh grade. We will be driving to school together each day in our electric car. Although I don’t teach him, I will see him around school regularly. We are both quite excited.
On our final night at Camp Du Nord, Griffin and I played a tremendous game of Yahtzee, with five yahtzees between the two of us!
Or at least our family band.
Griffin and Sarah returned this evening from their separate adventures up north. Sarah was preparing for trail crews at three different forest service sites (as part of her job with Mobilize Green). Griffin was backpacking on Isle Royale where he had a ton of fun and apparently fed every bloodsucker on the island (by the look of his legs).
We’ll add more details in the coming days. I’m just glad we managed to locate pillows and sheets for everybody.
Griffin is off on a two week backpacking adventure at Camp Widjiwagan. Sarah drove up with him yesterday to drop him off. He’ll spend a few days in a cabin before heading off with a small group to Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
It a whirlwind start to the summer. The last day of school was Friday. Saturday he went to camp. When he returns, we’ll be living in a new house!
Life was a whirlwind in April with spring break, the long-awaited start of in-person school for Griffin and Maggie, three birthdays (plus Piper’s), a cabin visit, and much that I’m forgetting. Lacking the time to write everything up in detail, here’s a selection of photos to remind us of these many events.
Bonus! Two videos.
A highly unusual event occurred last night while reading Treasure Island aloud with Griffin and Maggie. We came across this passage:
Among the fallen rocks the breakers spouted and bellowed; loud reverberations, heavy sprays flying and falling, succeeded one another from second to second; and I saw myself, if I ventured nearer, dashed to death upon the rough shore or spending my strength in vain to scale the beetling crags.
Like many other passages, there were some words here that the kids didn’t know, but I was also perplexed by the adjective, beetling. We guessed from the context that it might mean steep or slippery or only climbable by beetles. I pulled out my phone and looked it up on my trusty Merriam-Webster app:
The example sentence is the very sentence we had read! We were all quite astonished by the coincidence.
