Hawk pictures and more!

Here are the pictures of our hawking experience...

Pretty cool, huh!

The rest of the week was good too, but this was the highlight.

Wednesday Freja had her 2nd "real" piano lesson. She had been taking pretty informal lessons from our neighbor girl for a year or so. At least on the weeks it happened to be convenient for all the parties involved. But, the girl moved away and that ended awhile ago. Last year about this time I "won" a silent auction bid for piano lessons at a music academy but I was saving them until Freja was a bit older so that she would benefit the most from them. I think it paid off because she is doing very well despite not having anything to practice on.

Last week we had a guy out to tune our piano that we got off of freecycle a couple of years ago, and he basically told us it wasn't worth paying him to do that. The piano was a piece of junk. So we unloaded it on Freecycle to some other sucker at the beginning of the week. Today we went to Music-Go-Round and picked up a 1980's electronic piano for a song (ha ha!)! Freja has been practicing now this week but she doesn't want to play the songs in the book, she wants to play her own songs that she is making up. Hmmm...that's a tough one, let her explore the music and come up with her own songs, or sit there and force her to play Row, Row, Row, Your Boat. Well, I told her if she wanted to play her own songs that was fine, but first she would have to figure out how to write them down. Until she can do that she will have to use her practice time for the songs her teacher told her to practice and save the creative playing for her free time. She pouted a bit until I told her that if she didn't want to do what the teacher said I would let Naomi take the classes instead. Wow, she played every song on the list in about 10 minutes.

Friday Freja and I finished up a great week of school. We had been studying France this week. Freja loves France because it is the home of all things Fancy (at least that what she learned from Fancy Nancy). Friday afternoon after we had finished we went to help out in Naomi's classroom. It was fun to see what Naomi is up to! She has made lots of friends and really didn't pay much attention to Freja and I at all. She just went about her business and had a grand old time painting. We also took a mini-field trip to the outdoor classroom where they ate their snack and observed the changing fall colors. We helped with the projects, and the distribution of snacks. Freja can be so bossy with her sister, but she was very patient, kind, and helpful with all the kids.

Today we met up with our friend Kathy at the Chester Bowl Fall Festival. We had a great time browsing the vendors booths, eating blooming onions, cheese curds, and carmel apples. The girls especially loved the pony ride and face painting. Afterward the girls went to Dennis and Kathy's for the afternoon while Dusty and I went and looked at some of his job sites and just hung out together. Afterward we went back over to their house and had pizza and a grand old time just chit chatting. We probably stayed about 1/2 an hour too long because by the end of the night the girls had gotten their second wind and were bouncing off the walls. We bounced them out the door and home into bed just in time to avoid the up-to-late melt downs.