Father's Day Weekend

I don't recall celebrating Father's Day (or Mother's) growing up. Perhaps Hallmark wasn't big in India back then. But my lovely family has given me an awesome gift for Father's Day nevertheless. You have to stare of the picture below to see it.

See - I'm not in the picture. And though you can't tell by staring at it, I didn't take the picture either. Since Thursday the rest of the fam has been in Florida. A few fun filled days at Aaron's. And then on to the happiest place on earth. Armed with maps and apps, they are doing it for the next five days from morning to darkness. Dressed in some sort of happy uniform. Go, y'all!

Meanwhile I spend quality time with the chainsaw and other yard work implements. There are at least ten trees that are either down or need to be taken down and in the weekend I worked through about half of them. No kids. No dogs. Just my dad. Almost bliss.

Summer Holidays

The kids' seasonal holidays finally caught up with their namesake season. By dint of careful non-planning we got to spend last Tuesday with Evan and last Wednesday with Vivian. Here's what each did. Evan is sitting cross-legged with Travis outside Red Black gym. And Vivian is standing in line at Amy's ice cream (while Jo and I sat outside)

I know. It looks like one of them got screwed, no? Turns out that it all ended well because on Tuesday evening Evan got dropped off at Grandma's and he and Carol ate cereal and watched Sponge Bob and woke up at the crack of dawn the next day and drove off to Florida with the cousins and Nicolle and Michelle.

Friends

Somewhere in the chaos of leaving after the spring concert I managed to get a couple of photos of Vivian with her friends.

A short story about the lad. When we met A many months ago at the twins' birthday party he went red when Vivian said hello to him. And then for the rest of the afternoon he shadowed Vivian. I asked her and she said that A really liked her. Yesterday I met A's mother at school. She said that Vivian would always have a special place in their family. When A started school he didn't mix with the other students. He'd cry when he came home everyday. Then Vivian started talking to him. And things got better.

Spring Concert

The Magellan Spring concert was this morning. Vivian's class sang a Spanish song about the earth and sun that I couldn't understand. And there she is out front in the middle dancing bollywood style. That's what I call a global education.

Then the whole student body came together to sing the school song. Vivian is in the extreme right sitting on the second step in the white t-shirt. The school gets together and sings a school song about once a semester and it's a big deal. We sang our school song at HPS once a week and this brought back good memories of my shcool days and what we called PP2 (pre-primary 2), the grade before first grade.

Here's a photo pf most of Vivian's class. I sat down with Vivian and put everyone's name down so we don't have to squint and gaze at the photo many years from now and guess.

L-R, bottom to top: Emme, Audrey M, Ethan, Cesar (or Tenoc), Audrey R, Mateo, Tenoc (or Cesar), Highsmith, Vivian, Sampson, Morgan, Christopher, Chelsea, Alina, Sage, Andrew, Sam, Luke, Evan, and Isabella. Teachers: Ms. Tatiana, Ms. Missy, & Ms. Carmen.