Monday, December 14, 2009

The run up to the holidays



It is amazing how fast things can move. You think you are going to sit down and write a blog post about everything going on before Thanksgiving and suddenly it is mid-December.

Lexi's school had a really cool project where every sixth grader dressed up as some sort of historical character and presented a wax museum. Each student had to create a poster about their character, write a report, and memorize a little speech about the character. Then on the night of the wax museum, the students would stand like a statue until someone stepped on the "button" on the floor in front of them. Also from time-to-time, all of the students would sing a song together. Lexi selected Aphrodite as her character and did a real nice job. See a video of her speech and singing the song below.

Then Dawn was making a push to finish up her major project for class. She has enjoyed her class on nutritional health, but she is very glad the final exam is tomorrow.

We enjoyed a quiet Thanksgiving and quickly put up our Christmas decorations. The house looks nice and I hope to get some pictures of the house and tree as soon as I stop fighting with my camera. Because my camera is not capable of adjusting all of the settings I need, nor does it have the range I need, I keep taking pictures that are unusable.

Thanksgiving weekend was also the running of the Arizona Ironman Triathlon. Once again we helped on the run course, but this time we were matched up with a bunch of folks from ASU's Student Recreation Center. We had a lot of fun cheering on and providing food and drinks to everyone from the Ironman Champion to the average person that just wanted finish before the course closed at the seventeen hour mark at midnight.

To keep things moving at a very fast pace, the next day Lindsey and I left for a week of Outdoor Education. Her school provides an opportunity to the eighth grade to spend a week on the Tonto Rim learning about the outdoors. They had some of the best weather that in several years, while it was cold every morning (it got to 19 on the last morning), it was sunny everyday. I went as the "Firegod" since I was in charge of keeping a very large cooking fire going for two days starting at about 6:30am till about 4:00pm.

We began the week by hiking up to a fish hatchery and it was funny seeing the kids stopping all the time to take group pictures on the way up. During the next three days, the students had classes on candle making, foil dinner cooking, rappelling, trust games, mountain boarding and scooters, drama, wilderness survival, the supreme court, and more. The last day, we all took a hike up to the caves to hangout before going back down to the buses to head home.

We were all assigned cabins, and I had double duty as a "cabin dad". There were a lot of competitions between cabins for cleanliness (mine did pretty good), skits, and spirit (mine one this one).

Lindsey had a lot of fun and I did my best to not embarrass her. I took a lot of pictures and instead of embedding them on the web page, here is a link to the online photo album.

As soon as we got back from Outdoor Ed, Lindsey had her Holiday Concerts. I have linked to some video of those below.

Crismon Wax Museum


Rhodes JHS Holiday Concert (part 1 of 2)


Rhodes JHS Holiday Concert (part 2 of 2)

No comments:

Post a Comment