Last night of baseball

Go team Zengeler Cleaners!

Back to Katie's Wedding

Clara got the new experience of having her nails painted last weekend. She was very serious about it. When I first mentioned that she would get to have her nails done she told me she wanted blue polish. I said Katie might not want that choice, so she said maybe purple. Katie had chosen a nice pale pink, though, and Clara was happy with it.

 After nails we met up with the boys in the Fun City arcade. Henry played air hockey with Uncle Will.

 Clara and Anders did some driving.

 And then we went back to our room to get dressed for the rehearsal and dinner. The kids modeled Pete's ties.

 Clara was excited to practice her job at the church.

 She and her compatriot, Samantha, did a very nice job.

 I'm still trying to gather pictures from the actual wedding. If anyone has some to share, please email me!

Aftermath

I have so many other things to post about, but I'm still interested in sharing pictures from the storm. I took these pictures from my car today, with my phone. Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all, which was a good thing because traffic was still tied up all over town with lights out. 

This picture was taken on Maple, across from the jr. high. It shows the branches waiting for cleanup. (It also shows the reflection of my ipass.)

 Here's another picture taken on Maple. This huge tree was broken in the backyards about a block away from our house. There were another couple on the same block just as big.

 Even closer to our house, just around the corner, this power line has been down. I suspect the huge tree in the last picture (a couple houses down from this one) landed on the wires and snapped this pole.

Our power never went out, thankfully. But the library is closed for the 3rd day in a row and some friends and neighbors are just getting their power back.

Update

 Tom Skilling (local weatherman extraordinaire) says that what we had last night may have qualified as a "gustnado". ( From the Tribune's 'weather center': "There are five general types of straight line winds.  Downburst, microburst, gust front, bow echo and derecho.  Of those five, downburst and gust front winds were depicted on radar between 8PM and 9PM over the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago.
There remains the possibility these winds spun up a brief gustnado. A gustando is not considered a tornado, and develops in a much different way from the classic supercell tornado.")It sounds like we had 60-80 mph winds.
About 300 flights were cancelled, so Tom went to get Emily and Alex and they got back here around 1AM. They left again early this morning, took a train down to Midway. Just got word that they are safely at the airport.
After dropping them off at the train station the kids and I drove around to survey the local damage. There were a few large trees down and lots of branches. Also several places where power is still out, so some businesses are closed, defeating my plan to enjoy our damage tour with Starbucks in hand.

Watch? Warning?

I can never remember which one is a watch and which is a warning, but we had the bad one tonight. In the 6 years that we've lived in Northbrook I've never heard the actual tornado sirens go off until tonight. The kids had been in bed, but could tell that Pete and I were agitated, so they weren't sleeping yet. I let them come sit on the couch, then started to throw pillows into the hallway, thinking I'd close all the bedroom doors and we'd be away from the windows, but when the sirens actually went off I grabbed the kids and told Pete we were going to the neighbor's. He tried to say we weren't going out in that weather, but I think I was already out the door. He grabbed Franklin and we ran across the street. Our friends Oscar and Kelley had their 2 kids in their sub-level semi-basement laundry room, as well as Kelley's sister and two friends. I called Helena who said the kids were asleep, so Pete and Oscar went to help her get them over to the basement too. We ended up with 8 adults, 7 children and Franklin in the room. We also had at least 4 iphones and one ipad.

 Anyway- long story short- we were all fine. There appear to be some trees down in the area. Emily and Alex were supposed to be flying back to Utah, but I guess no planes are leaving tonight, so Tom will probably be going to get them pretty soon. It obviously wasn't as severe as other storms around the country recently, but with all of those on the mind I wasn't willing to mess with being tentative or feeling embarrassed.

And now both kids are sleeping in our bed.

Belated

My favorite picture of my top two dads. 

I hope they both felt how much they are loved yesterday and all days.

Weekend in Burlington

I have a few pictures, but this post will be text only. The sad fact is that we are pretty certain our sweet little blue camera is gone. One of us must have set it down somewhere in the FunCity arcade this morning and it must have been picked up by someone who didn't feel the need to turn it in. We've searched, called, called other people, had other people search....and it's just not showing up. I'm very sad about several of the photos and videos that we lost. So, rather than describing the weekend and Katie's wedding, I'm going to describe a few of my favorite photos while I can still picture them in my head.
The first was Clara, just after getting her hair done at the salon. She still had on her lavender top, but her hair was all flower-girled up. Lots of curls in back (with lots of hairspray....another photo I've just remembered shows Clara covering her face while the stylist sprays her with lots of hairspray) a tiny tiara on top and two little flower clips. She has her back to the camera, so you can see all of her pretty hair, but she's peeking back at me in the mirror, so you can see her sweet face too.
At the church Katie, already in her wedding gown, helped straighten Clara's big pink bow on the back of her dress. Neither of them were looking at the camera.
A short video caught Clara testing out how well her flower girl dress would twirl.
Another video was taken while the entire bridal party was posing for a group photo. Clara and her compatriot flower girl, Sam, were holding hands together in front and Clara was waving her bouquet to get the gnats away.
At the ceremony I caught a quick shot of Clara and Sam walking across the front of the church. The composition isn't great, but you can see how proud of herself Clara is by the expression on her face.
In between the ceremony and the reception we tried to get the kids to nap. We had taken off Clara's dress, but she still had on her white lacy socks, her Hello Kitty underpants and her fancy hair when she sat down on the bed to read a book.
Mom took a couple of pretty good pictures of Pete, Henry, Clara and I sitting at our table. We also had a couple of me and Clara and of Pete and Henry. It's not too often that we get nice whole-family shots. 
The kids were very excited to dance at the party. I got all 4 cousins to stand still for a brief moment and snapped several shots, trying to get them all to look at once. The best, I thought, was (from left to right) Eleanor, Henry, Anders and Clara. Henry is already all sweaty-headed and is crouching down to the height of the other kids. Eleanor is looking at the camera with a little smile and Anders has his tongue sticking out too the side. Eleanor's dress was full of bright flowers. Anders was in a green shirt with a little dinosaur tie.
I'm not sure I can capture it in words, but I was hoping to frame a beautiful picture of Henry and Clara sitting together on the dance floor. Clara's white dress was fluffed out around her legs and Henry was looking up with a sweet smile.
Later in the night, when Henry fell asleep across two chairs, I took a picture of him sleeping with the dancing in the background.
One of the last shots I took this morning was of Anders and Henry together playing Guitar Hero. They each had the 'guitars' strapped around their necks and they were giving me their best rocking out faces.
I have a slim little bit of hope that somehow the camera might still show up. Hopefully someone picked it up and just got lazy about turning it in to lost and found. They'll probably get tired of hearing from me over the next few days.

Moving On

This was Henry's last week of kindergarten. It's impossible to wrap my head around how quickly it's gone. On Monday they had a trip to the park. Cari and I teach together the last week of school, so I was able to slip away and take some pictures. The room moms brought ice cream. It was so hot that it was hard for them to eat it before it melted completely.

One of the other moms asked me if Henry had been playing in the water. I had to explain that he's just a sweater.

Here he is with his teacher, Mrs. K and his classroom aide, Mrs. Hendle. They were a great team!

When I got home from work that night I found the kids in the backyard like this.

Wednesday was the actual last day. They had a moving--up-to-first-grade celebration. Again, I was thankful for my ideal work situation as it was easy for me to slip away.

Mrs. K showed a slideshow of pictures from throughout the year. It was accompanied by music such as You've Got A Friend In Me (from Toy Story) which made me cry.

Then I cried some more when the kids sang a cute little song to the tune of New York, New York. "I'm gonna be a part of it, First Grade! First Grade!"

Henry was so proud.

Mrs. K and Mrs. Hendle had put together memory books of many of their special projects, photos and pieces of work- all in a nice binder. The kids were so excited to look through them.

Here he is again. I'm so amazed by this guy.

The other side of my life this week has been getting my own classroom packed up for the big summer project. We had to have everything boxed by eleven PM last night. Cari and I did pretty well and we out by 7 PM. I took these pictures this morning before the kids came in for their final 20 minute day of school. This shot is from behind our desk. The cabinets on the right in this photo, and the wardrobe by the door will be pulled out and replaced with movable cabinetry, which we'll probably put along that far wall. When Clara looked at this picture the first thing she noticed was that the t.v. was taken down. She wants to know where they'll watch t.v. when they visit Mama's room now, and where they'll have their snacks!?!?

This is a picture from the opposite corner. You can kind of tell what a miserable stormy day it was outside. It was a little sad to dismiss the kids out into the rain, when all they wanted to do was run off to the pool or beach. Cari and I didn't count, but from these pictures I think I can determine that we packed up at least 55 boxes of stuff. We threw plenty away and gave many things away as well. On our last full day, yesterday, we let the kids "shop" through a bunch of the random crap we had left. I'm sure their parents were delighted when they came home with Mardi Gras beads, plastic sunglasses, fish-shaped bowls, junky toys and old magazines!

I already know that as soon as I blink I'll be posting pictures of this room at the end of the summer, with its new paint job, new carpeting and furniture and we'll be getting ready to head back to school! 

CopyCat

It's been very busy times at school. We have a big building project going on. The 'wing' that my classroom is in isn't having construction, exactly, but we are having all of our cabinetry pulled out, plumbing work done (we have a sink in the classroom), new carpeting put in and painting done. Next year we'll have new furniture too. So this year- before the last day of school, which is Thursday, we have to have every last paperclip packed up. In addition to the regular end-of-year work, report cards and whatnot, it's been a lot of work. 

In the meantime, though, we had a nice visit last weekend from Kevin and Beth. They were up from Belize for a family wedding. They spent Saturday night with us and we had a fun time hanging out. Max was staying with his grandparents, so we didn't get to see him this time.

 After their visit I developed a cold that stuck around and really drug me down for several days. That was a bummer. I'm starting to feel better, but we did decide to stay home instead of heading to Iowa City for the weekend as we had been planning. It sounds like we missed a really good Arts Fest. But we took the opportunity to work on a project. We got the idea from Carrie's friend Samantha, who made a couple of these for her girls.

 Pete and Henry did the sawing and drilling while Clara and I went to Sharon's to use the sewing machine. I told Sharon about my fear of sewing and she set me right up and made me do most of the work myself. The hems are a little wonky, but I'm hoping nobody will be looking too closely.

That's it from us for now! 3 more days of kindergarten for Henry!! You'll hear from me again after that, probably.