Hard to believe, but Miss Eve, now Everly, is graduating this year. We had her senior pictures taken last weekend. We went to a waterfall we found over the summer. She wanted the woodland fairy vibe and she wanted to splash in the water, so it seemed like the best place. Her friend Simon joined us to get his pictures done as well. We had fun and I’m excited to get the professional pictures back! In the meantime, here are a few that Alan and I took. :)
Welcome to Back to School season! This year we had a pretty staggered start to the school year. E started yesterday, R started last week, and L started a few days before that. I did not start at all, however I did celebrate my one year anniversary at the Howe Library yesterday.
I’ve been missing the drama of the start of school a little bit. Not the stress that goes along with the drama, but a school is such a big, strong community and over the years you build your place within it. When you leave, the community goes on. Obviously. This year there is drama at the district level and a mold contamination in my (old) building that’s required multiple classrooms to move, multiple grades to start a week later, and teachers are scrambling. I hear there’s a class room stationed in the library. I miss the drama, but also happy I’m not in it. Weird how two things can be true at once.
Anyway, the kids are all back at school and doing well. <3
Lex graduated this weekend!! He’s such an amazing young man. It has been amazing watching him grow from a tiny baby to a stubborn toddler to an anxious tween to a thriving teen. He wore the robe and the silly hat, he wore the FRC tassle I got for him. He wore the “hood” that he earned for rocking his Honors Program. He earned a few scholarships and a diploma. If the weather had been better, graduation would have been outside and we would have gotten to see him in one final band performance as well, but with the weather so iffy and so much rain all around, they moved graduation indoors and cancelled the bad. Sad. It was a great ceremony anyway!
We had had a little tiny party at our house after graduation. Alan’s new wife made cake (she’s a professional baker) and cookies, and I got pizza for the crew. We had a champagne toast with a goofy speech by me. LOL. It was a really great night all around!
My family rented a lake house nearby to combine graduation with our annual lake week. The weather didn’t fully cooperate, but it was a great house and location, and I was happy to be able to wrap up work, graduation, and all the other stuff while also spending some time at the lake with the family.
On Saturday we invited the D&D group that all three kids are a part of over to the lake house for swimming and gaming. It was only 60° but that didn’t stop the teens from getting in the lake!
It was a big, eventful weekend with lots of planning and prep. I’d like to say that now we rest, but truthfully now we are hard at work prepping for our Norway trip, Eve’s Rotary trip, and Lex’s college adventure. We have a big summer ahead of us, kicked off by an awesome graduation weekend.
I think I’ve fallen behind on blog posts about Eve. Oops! She’s got big things going on too!
We found out that she’s going to Göteborg (aka Gothenburg) in August. She’ll stay with a family who lives in an apartment right in the city. They have three kids: a son who is grown and out of the house, a daughter in her last year of schools, and a daughter who’ll be doing Rotary Exchange in Chile. They have a cat and a dog and a “weekend house” by the water. Eve is pretty psyched about all of this. Rotary in Sweden did a great job reading her application and finding her a good fit. She’ll be attending a trade school (that’s how it works there) with a focus on animal care. She’s thrilled about that. And today we learned that she’ll attend a week-long orientation camp with other exchange students after she arrives. She’ll have a week with the host family, then a week at camp, then school will start. They want her there by August 1st!
Last week she had a video call with her Rotary Exchange coordinator, the person who will be her Rotary contact over there. Today she did a video call with her host parents. She has been texting with the daughter of MY host sister, and with a young woman who helps with the Rotary Exchange program in Sweden. I’m amazed at how different her experience will be, thanks to advances in technology. I’m sure there will be pros and cons to it, but right now we’re experiencing a whole lot of pros!
She spent last weekend at an Outbound Rotary Exchange event where she got to hang out with other outbound students and some inbound students in the area. It was a big house on a lake in NH and she had a great time with the other kids.
Eve is an entirely different person this year. For the past few years she has *hated* school and spent her time with some mentally toxic people. This year she has a much better, much more positive friend group, she’s taking classes that she enjoys, she’s made some connections with teachers, and overall is a much happier human being. When we first started talking about Rotary Exchange it was, in part, because she was so miserable at school. I’m hoping that she’ll be able to enjoy this upcoming year in Sweden, then return home to the same group of friends and positive school relationships. I’m sure they’ll be some bumps in the road, but I’m so happy with how much better she is doing this year! I can’t wait to experience this foreign exchange adventure with her, from the comfort of my couch. :)
Tonight was Senior Awards Night where they gave out 75 different awards, often to multiple people. It was long and my hands hurt from clapping, but we had fun. Lex got a handful of recognitions:
Not too shabby for little Lex. I was impressed with the variety of awards given. They didn’t all go to athletes or college bound scholars. A lot of them did, of course, but there were also lots of awards for everyone else as well.
This week was Lex’s last concert at Hartford! He has come such a long way from his first concert so long ago. At this concert he programmed the lights and taught Eve to run them. He played with the concert band and the jazz band, he accompanied the Concert Choir and Chamber Choirs with some of their songs, and he won two awards! He got kudos and recognition and had a blast.
After the concert they had an ice cream social and all the kids stayed to socialize. It was another really nice night that left me smiling from ear to ear.
Side story: I got a new phone this week and have been setting up all the apps and stuff again. Google has been giving me a whole new series of “recommended photos” and “memories” and whatnot. I clicked through one today with a bunch of pictures of me with other people. In every picture I think I looked really good, but I remember hating the pictures back in the day. I reminded myself of that when I look at the two pictures of me above. I hate everything about how I look in those pictures, but 60yr old me might disagree. We’ll see. In the meantime, it was an awesome night I’ll stay focused on my amazing son and how proud I am to know him.
This is really a school post, but I’m proud of it so I’m putting it here too. I did a project with the kids at schools that was creative and fun and took forever and was a little nerve wracking, but ultimately awesome!
I read a cool book called Someone Builds the Dream, one of this year’s state book award nominees. As a related project, I taught the 3rd and 4th graders how to use Tinkercad, a 3D modeling program. They each go to design their own project and have it printed. I wanted the little kids to do a project too, so I had them draw something cool, then I had the 3rd and 4th graders model their drawings in Tinkercad and print them.
At school we have lodges, small groups of mixed grade kids with a single teacher or two. Lodges meet several times a month and do a variety of activities. We stick with the same lodges year after year so the kids can build relationships with each other, and so that all students have a relationship with a teacher (or two) that is consistent year after year. For my 3D printing project I had the 3rd and 4th graders model the designs of their younger lodge buddies.
It took many weeks for the big kids to do the modeling and for me to print everything. Kids asked about it frequently and I kept telling them soon, soon. This past week the day finally came. I gave each lodge teacher a ziploc bag with the 3D prints for all of the kids in their lodges, and the related drawings done by the younger kids. I also printed an #Otters4ever tag for the 5th graders so they weren’t left out (they don’t have library class this year 
). I was nervous that kids wouldn’t be happy with their prints, that they weren’t a close enough match to their drawings, or the wrong color, or whatever. The projects were not perfect and I am a perfectionist.
The kids in my lodge loved their projects! I stood in the hall at the end of lodge time as all the kids returned to their classes and saw so many kids proudly showing off their work to classmate and friends. So many came up to me and said thank you. Teachers sent me raving emails throughout the day, and one lodge even took the time to write thank you notes. Many teachers said they skipped the usual lodge plans and just let the kids talk about their projects.
“I want to give a HUGE shout out to Tessa for this project. It was AWESOME. The kids receiving the items were so excited and happy. One of my favorite moments came with a first grader yelling, “IT’S GOLD!!!!!!!! How did you know?!” But even more rewarding was watching the third and fourth graders pride in their work. I have a particular member of my lodge who almost always contributes with random comments that take us off track. When my second grader asked who made her design he answered, “I did. I made it purple because that was the color of your drawing.” I can’t tell you how much of a win that was! Thank you Tessa for all of your hard work on this project. My bucket was filled.”
– DBS Teacher
I was happy and very relieved that it all went well! It was one of those projects that I’m so happy I did and so happy it’s done. 
We saw the very best ever high school variety show this evening. It had jokes and songs, some good and some terrible, and jazz band performances, and technical issues (so many!), and audience participation — it was fantastic! ?
They were having a lot of issues with the music accompaniment for several of the acts, but the high schoolers were awesome at getting through it. The best was when our favorite amazing performer (not in our family) who is kind and funny and we’ve known since kindergarten. She’s short and sang a song called Short which totally dissed on short people. She played it up amazingly, especially half way through when her music stopped. She made a joke about her song being cut short, then proceeded to finish it without the music. She was funny and fantastic.
The flip side was another girl who was wearing lingerie, including garters, and sang a loud angsty song while practically making out with the mic and repeatedly flipping her hair in an awkward trying-to-be-sexy way. It was painful to watch.
The MC (master of ceremonies, and which apparently none of my teens knew what MC stood for) was also very funny.
The best part of the show, of course, was the jazz band, specifically the song that Lex arranged! He loves the video game Portal and the music in it. He took one of the songs and arranged it for his jazz band. At the Jazz Festival last month they learned that other local schools have singers accompanying the jazz band for many of the songs, so Lex thought it would be fun to do that in his song too. It was fantastic and the applause at the end made my heart full.
Enjoy!
Have I mentioned that my girlie won Student of the Month for ELA? Her teacher said she is an enthusiastic, creative writer, always eager to share with peers. “She is a shining example of what it means to be a writer.” 
Another AMAZING high school musical is on the books! Lex ran the lights, while Eve and her bestie, Simon, ran the spot lights. Our old neighbors, Macy and Asher, stole the show! Well lit, of course, by my children. :)
They both had a great time and the show was fantastic.