The Other Cross Family

For Memorial Day we got to visit Mike's older brother Tim and his family in Iowa. Eliza was graduating from high school and we wanted to be there to support her. Plus, they have lived there for like 10 yrs and we have never gone to visit. It was about time! So we all piled into the car and drove forever. That is another blog post in itself! Here, we will just talk about the time we spent there.
Eliza was very busy doing high school senior stuff, so we didn't see her too much except for the important stuff which was what mattered. We did get to spend some time with Amanda. Her room was a fun place for Becca to hide from the dog and for Lenna to book shop. Andrew was impressed with her drumming in the high school band- they talked about their drum sets and how he hopes to play drums in the band as well. Lenna enjoyed tagging along on a shopping trip to the mall with Amanda, Aunt Tammy, and Heather. She found out she can shop in the juniors dept (so much cooler than little girls!) and even talked Aunt Tammy into buying everyone a book to read on the ride home. Andrew really loved playing with their dog and spent a lot of time throwing a ball for her to fetch, over and over and over again! Rebecca is still scared of dogs and the poor girl spent the summer sitting with her feet up on her chair. It seems everyone we visited this summer had a dog or two for her to run from.
The kids especially enjoyed going to the graduation. We didn't get to go to Zan's last year because you had to have a ticket, so this was their first time. It was such a fun ceremony! There are definite advantages to having less than 20 people in your graduating class! They were talked about by name in speeches from teachers and each other, the passing out of diplomas took about 15 minutes, and then they had time and resources leftover to do a fun slide show of pictures of the kids from K to 12th grade and all the things they did together!
At least, I think that is what they did. Elizabeth started crying and flopping and trying to run around just after they walked in (past her bed time, darn time zones) so I spent the entire time walking the empty halls and listening through open doors. But the kids thought is was awesome and have high hopes for their own graduation ceremonies in a few years. Hopefully GA will deliver, although with a class size of 500 or more, I am not too sure it will be quite so personal!
Lenna also started planning her own graduation party as soon as she saw what a wonderful job Aunt Steph did for Eliza. A slide show, tables of photos and awards and school memories, lots of yummy food, and fun decorations and a dance floor. I think their favorite part was the brownie ice cream sundae bar!
It was great to be able to see our family members that we don't cross paths with very often (living on opposite sides of the country makes it hard) and are excited to see them at the upcoming family reunion.

Cookies

How to make cookies, By Becca, age 3.

1. Drop some eggs in the bowl, try not to crush the shells too small or mom won't be able to get them out.
2. Mash them up with the whisker until the yellow mixes up with the clear. Don't taste it, or mom will make you spit and wash your hands.
3. Get a new bowl and plop in the butter sticks. Taste when no one is looking. Mom likes the little finger prints in it.
4. Dump in lots of sugar, the white sandy kind and the brown sticky kind. This part is good for tasting.
5. Cover your ears while mom uses the beaters, but don't leave the room so you can have one to lick when she is done.
6. Plop in the eggs. Taste first, because now mom wont let you anymore. Help stir the slimy stuff with the good stuff.
7. Keep stirring while mom puts in lots of spoons of white stuff. Don't taste, most of them are yucky.
8. Help scoop and dump in the flour. Not too high or it will make dust. Stick your hands in the canister while she is busy wiping the dust off. It is fun to squeeze and pat and makes the floor really slippery for ice skating.
9. Help stir until your arms get tired, then let mom do it. Play in the four dust until she is done.
10. Help drop in the chocolate chips. See how many you can grab and stick in your mouth before they disappear into the cookie dough.
11. Watch mom scoop balls onto the flat pans.
12. Wait, and wait, and wait some more. Keep looking through the oven window to see if they are done.
13. Yell really loud when the timer rings so your mom doesn't forget to take them out. Wait longer for them to not burn your fingers.
14. Eat with milk.

End of School Activities

We moved our kids across five states exactly one month before the school year ended. Completely against every good advice book we read that told us to leave them in until the end of the year to avoid the trauma of having to change classes. But I figured I could pull a "mom knows best" card on this one. Here is why.

1.We needed to be together as a family. I am a lousy single parent. We needed to all live together in the same state and to have daddy in our lives. Involuntary separation is one this, but doing it when you have the option not to seems silly.
2. Summer is a lonely time when  no one knows you are there. We don't have a lot of kids in our neighborhood, so play dates have to be planned with at least a phone call. if no one knew we were back and no one had our number, and we had no way to get in touch with anyone, no one would get to play. The few weeks they had in the new school gave them just enough time to make some friends and trade phone numbers so we could play over the summer. Its also a good way to get noticed- no one notices the new kid on the first day of school. But everyone knows the new kid who comes in the middle. People are interested in meeting and befriending the new kid.
3. My kids are smart. They won't suffer academically from having to change curriculum or text books or miss a few end of year lessons. It was easy for them to just jump right in here.
3. No one is at the school during the summer. At least where we live, you can't get a single person on the phone until the few days before school starts. If your kids need special services, like nursing or gifted testing or special class placement, you won't get it. You will show up in the middle of the start of school rush, be put off until things calm down, and told to test with the rest of the school mid-year for next years stuff. So your kid gets to suffer all year because no one knew they were coming. We had three weeks to make appointments, take placement tests, meet with the nursing staff, and make our case for whatever services we wanted for the upcoming year and it worked fine. And it just three weeks they had to go without those services in the new school instead of a semester or two.
4. We got an to start summer vacation a month earlier here. It would have seemed wrong to go to school there until mid-June, then start school here the first of August, after only a 6 week break. Moving got them out of school mid May, so we could have more of a summer break.

So after we decided to move, it was a bit of a whirl wind. Most kids would start to slack off because they know they are leaving, but not mine. In fact, I was encouraging Lenna to let homework slide and do other stuff like packing her room the last week she was there because I already had the transfer papers filled out with her current grades, but she refused. I guess I am proud and not annoyed, sort of.

Anyway, the night before we moved my kids were at the school showing off their science fair projects. Lenna worked with a partner to do a taste test experiment on their class, trying to decide if the kids could tell the difference between regular, low fat, and sugar free ice cream. Her classmates were happy to help with their part and subject themselves to eating three different kinds of ice cream in the name of scientific research. In case you were wondering, the low fat stuff bombed but they liked the sugar free stuff just fine.
Andrew really wanted to make a scale model of the solar system. His project was titled, "If the sun was the size of a pizza, how big would the other planets be?" We made a little display with string showing how far the distances would be, and used some household objects as planets. Earth is a pea, btw, and Jupiter is half a tennis ball. Here they are with their displays.




We also arrived at our new school just in time for all of the end of year fun. Andrew was cast as a flipping beetle in the school play with a whole two days to learn his part. Lenna went to one gifted lesson and then was able to participate in the end of year celebration dressed as a Greek goddess. For her part she learned to tell her mother to make spanikopita and we all tried Greek yogurt and baklava. Then they went on a field trip or two, had field day, class parties, and were finished with first and fourth grade!

Because they finished so early, they were able to skype chat with their classrooms back in MD to say goodbye. I love technology, and technology-focused schools that have web cams and smart screens and other things in place that let kids talk to each other from five states away.