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Catch up time. We have been slacking on letter writing,
so
here is an overview of what has happened. About a month or
so ago, the kids had a piano recital. Terra has been teaching the
kids piano lessons this past either year or semester (I don't
remember), but at the conclusion of the school year they had a piano
recital. This involved getting dressed up and heading over to the
church to listen to them. |
| Terra has also been teaching the Ciminski's as well (Katie
&
Justin). The piano recital required that each of them play a song
on the piano and then play one on the organ. Terra has been
teaching them to not be afraid of the organ as it is basically an
electric piano. |
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The piano recital happened on a day when AJ and Dad were both
out
to help finish the trailer. That is a story in itself as we keep
working on the trailer to "finish" it and it keeps requiring another
day or so to be completely "done". Everyone did well at playing the instruments, and Kyle even played a song on the piano that he made up himself. Kyle really has a knack for playing (probably thanks to Terra) and could learn to become quite the accomplished musician if he so chooses. |
| Both dad and I took a break from trailer fun and went over to
watch
them play. AJ decided to keep on working on the trailer. We
were installing a winch and building a box on the tongue to house the
winch we installed. We built the mounts and enclosed it
all. As always it took longer than it should have. When we
were finished with it the winch would not work. It would move out
but not in. AJ was pretty frustrated at it. We finally
took out all of the cable and then wound it up backwards. AJ took
it back and come to find out the control box that came with it was
bad. After replacing it - the winch is back to fully functional. |
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A week or
two later we headed out to Oracle on a Saturday to let the kids hang
out with their grandparents. During that visit we headed up to
the famous kite flying hill at the west end of town and flew a kite
that we had brought out. |
| AJ and Brittany joined us for both the trip out there and the
kite flying experience. As it was getting late, we didn't try to
put the kites out a mile (or even close). In fact we didn't use
the high lift delta shaped kites, but rather used a kite that Terra and
I had lying around. It was fun to fly, but the winds were
variable and we had to rapidly pull the string in a few times to keep
from dropping the kite in the brush around the hill. |
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The kids
had a good time flying the kite. They seemed to enjoy getting it
out and then holding on the string to keep it up. They never
dropped the string and managed keep the kite air born every time they
took control of the reigns. |
| Here is a view of the kite that we flew. It is a three
dimensional shape with three columns and four rows of diamond
shapes. If flew easy enough, but as you can see in this photo,
the main structure is bent from the wind and I suspect that this would
not work for the mile long kite fly. |
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As part of our visit, Ethen
& Terra wanted to make some bread. Ethen is very
impressionable and had come across a "watermelon bread" and wanted to
try to make some, so he and Terra gave it a try. I didn't pay too
much attention to what they did, but I believe they took some bread
dough, colored part of it red, part green and the rest was left
un-colored. Once the three colors were ready to bake, the red was
the center, then the white and finally the green was wrapped around the
white. Once the multi colored loaf was cooked and sliced, it
resembled watermelon. They even added some raisins to the red
dough. The final product looked odd but tasted good enough when
buttered. |
| In some other news, Ethen's
Webelos scout den was doing some studying of different types of
plants. Part of those plants studied were cactus. One of
the cactus was a night blooming Cereus. It just happened that
there was one such plant located about a block from our home.
Every night for about 2 weeks someone from the den would go over and
check on it to see if it bloomed yet. Finally one night it did,
and we drove over to take a look at it. It is an odd looking
cactus that looks like a very small octillio cactus with small
spines, and the blooms are considerably larger than the plant.
This cactus only blooms one night and then the blooms die, so we wanted
to catch the blooms in full glory. |
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After checking on the cactus
Terra wanted a photo of our trip to document the adventure. As
you can tell from the picture, we had to wake Kyle up to go, Ethen
was pretty impressed (although the photo doesn't catch that emotion),
but Rachel and Terra were pretty excited to see
such a cactus. Ethen would ride his bike over to look at the
cactus night after night to check on its progress. I know there
was not much detail presented, but I
guess that is what happens when time passes between events and stories
describing the events. |