Victor's Winter concert

Victor's school had their Winter concert yesterday. This is Victor singing and performing actions with his class. Again, a shot grabbed from a video, so again I apologize for the poor resolution.

Anyway, he had this grin through both songs: he absolutely loves this stuff.

He always has. See, on the left is Victor from last year's winter concert: doesn't he look happy? He sure likes those bells in his hand. Oh, that picture's not so good, how about this one on the right.

Wait, in that last picture, what is happening to his bells? Oh no, the string broke!

His bells went everywhere.

This is what Victor looked like for the rest of that song last year.

Poor guy. He was heartbroken over losing his bells and didn't know what to do.

Luckily, no such disasters this year, no bells were harmed (well, no bells were involved), no disasters occurred, and Victor and his class put in a great performance.

Posted by Mark

Anna's Winter concert

Anna's school had their Winter Concert today. This is Anna in “Santa's Helpers” with all the rest of the kindergarteners (other kindergarteners not shown to avoid no-photo-permission issues). This bit was cut from a far-away video, I apologize for the poor resolution.

The girls had sticks to clack together, the boys had bells.

The MCs were quite impressive; during the troubleshooting of a technical glitch with a projector during one of the sets they volleyed age-appropriate jokes between the two of them (a boy and a girl) to kill the time. I can't recall the last time I saw a technical glitch so effectively covered. I guess what major business presentations need is more fourth-graders.

Anna was very forward-focused in the audience during the rest of the concert. It was strange to see Anna so serious-looking; this is not her typical mode at home. You can see that some kids are facing backward here: Anna never turned around.

Her typical mode at home is more like the silly-mode she went into as soon as she saw me when heading back with her class to their spot in the audience, just after I said “Hi Anna” loud enough to attract her attention.

Now, this is the Anna I know!

Note that she was not actually close enough to talk or interact with me, she just started making silly on the spot when she saw me.

Posted by Mark

New bedroom for Anna, new blog for us all

The sense of achievement of finally getting Anna into her own room has given me the impetus to finally write the first post of this blog too! We've been talking about this for months but hadn't gotten to actually clearing out Lyne's old office and moving Anna in, out of the room she was sharing with Victor. This shot is taken a couple of hours after bedtime; she's well asleep.

Of course, most of the achievement was Lyne's, as she was the one who did most of the work this afternoon while I was busy, disassembling her desk to bring it downstairs and then reassembling it there, and disassembling the kid's beds to reconfigure them into a bunk bed (the bed in this room becoming Victor's).

Of course we ended up running really late, way past bedtime. This is always dangerous as the kids tend to meltdown, and tonight was no exception. Lyne had picked up a few accessories in the morning at Ikea, a car rug for Victor and a heart rug for Anna. Victor wanted a heart rug too, not the car rug! In the end it was established that nobody was getting the heart rug tonight.

Why “Wafflebear”? Well, this here is Wafflebear. It has seemed to us that he must have gotten into an accident with a waffle iron, hence his name. He's been keeping us company for some time, I believe it may be since before Victor was born. With all he's been through, how could we say no?

Posted by Mark