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!
Yahtzee!
Tag Archives: Griffin
The Band’s Back Together
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’s Adventure Begins
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!
April Updates
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.
Beetling Crags
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.
A Bit of Hope
As mentioned in prior posts, Oliver was in preschool this year for a few months at the beginning of the year. Now he is back at an outdoor preschool for three mornings a week.
Griffin and Maggie, however, have been in full distance-learning since last March. They’re used to it now, but it has been a major blow. A normal day in their Montessori school would involve 6-7 hours of constant interaction. Working with classmates, moving around the classroom, attending mini-lessons from the teacher, playing at recess, lunch, the school bus, etc.
Now they’ve got Zoom meetings, independent work, and an occasional minecraft game with their friends. I’m not knocking the school; they’re doing a great job. But the social gulf between this year and last is enormous.
It is with joy, therefore, that we dove into a program at their school where individual classes come to campus once-a-week for a few hours of all-outdoor social time. Maggie had her first day yesterday and Griffin went in this morning. (We only have a picture of Griffin at this point.) Hopefully this is the first step on the long road to normalcy.
The Hallway Museum
Finally got some of the kids’ artwork hung in our basement work space. The kids are calling it the Hallway Museum 
Many of these pieces were done with @createveryday the past couple of years. They really make the space bright and cheerful 
Griffin’s First Piano Recital
Griffin has been taking weekly piano lessons at the Walker West Music Academy since February of 2019. He had a few lessons in person and then, as the state locked down for COVID-19 in mid-March, started doing them remotely via Skype. He had his first recital yesterday evening; it was a virtual event where he played “Oh! Susanna.” One fun element of the virtual format was that friends and relatives from around the country could attend. We hope that he will get a chance to do more of these. See below for a trimmed video of Griffin’s portion of the recital. Listen for Oliver who makes an unintended cameo part-way through.
The full recital is available on YouTube. The audio gets a bit funky due to the streaming, but it’s fun to see all the different kids at different levels of skill.
Halloween 2020
Our COVID Halloween wasn’t as bad as we might have expected. Indeed, at one point today, the kids exclaimed, “This is the best Halloween ever!” A few weeks ago we reluctantly told the kids that we weren’t comfortable going trick-or-treating this year. But, since Halloween was on a Saturday, we could spend the whole day doing Halloween activities. To our surprised delight, the kids were like, “Yeah! Let’s plan a schedule!” And they did. Starting with pumpkin pancakes in the morning. Then making piñatas, hanging lights in the yard, making rice crispy treat monsters, building a fire in the backyard, having our bubble-friends over, eating dinner, smashing piñatas, and finally watching the Over the Garden Wall animated series in the backyard curled up in blankets around the fire.
It might have been my favorite Halloween too…
The Day After School Ended
Hi there. Today was an awesome day! We woke up at 7:30. We did our video games. Then we had an awesome breakfast of waffles, eggs, sausage, and raspberries. After that we went to SPA (my dad’s school) and my dad went into the building while we played in our hammocks. Then my dad went home with Oliver and made a picnic lunch. Then they came back and we had made a caterpillar home! Then we rolled down the big hill and went home 🏡.
