Wednesday: Happy Birthday

It was my birthday today!  Rather low key, but excellent all the same.

It started by working on my Christmas tree.  Isaac and I made all the pieces of the trunk (with Dad's help).  There are still lots of things to do, but it is moving forward!

After lunch Isaac and I went rock climbing.  The weather was beautiful and the garage doors were open at Scrapyard, so it felt nice.  That being said, the set on the walls seems especially hard right now and there were a lot of beginners on the same routes that I wanted to climb, so I didn't climb for too long.

Then I dropped Isaac off at home and brought Joshua to get groceries.  It was his "get out of the house" for the day.  While not an exciting "get out of the house", it is pretty fun to get groceries with him.  We also got school supplies, although we were able to shop our own school supplies for most of the items.

Ben picked up Tai for dinner and it was exactly what I wanted.  We got extra ragoons because it was my birthday.

We started Ark Nova for our evening game, but Isaac was crazy tired so we ended a bit early.  Oh well...we'll still finish the game over the next few days.

vacation Thursday, part 2 (June 11): Aarhous

The biggest attraction at this art museum is the rainbow glass bridge at the top.  It was starting to look like it was going to rain soon, so we did that first.  It was fun to walk around and see how the city looked through different colors and how the different colors interacted.  One of the kids also realized that when you closed your eyes, the color you saw was purple (instead of black).  There were some purplish lights on the ground that we then found which must have been impacting our eyes more than expected.

This video is a bit long, but gives a great idea of what we saw.  I also included a bunch of pictures, but they only give single moments and this is definitely a multi-moment experiance.

It was just starting to rain, so the kids and I quickly went into the inner courtyard.  The video goes in a circle pretty quickly.

Then, since it was an art museum, we looked at the art.  Some of the art was interesting, some of it wasn't.  I think we went a bit too slowly at the beginning and were somewhat done by the end, but it's always exciting to see what the next room is going to include.

Kitchen totem with Blue Funnel by Rose Eken.  (This is how my kitchen feels sometimes.)

A funeral.  Motif from Northern Zealand by Jorgen Soone.  This caught everyone's attention because there is a ghost in it.

Pretty blues

There were a few other pieces of art that caught my attention, but so that this post doesn't get too long I'm going to skip them.

Boy by Ron Mueck

Ben was especially captivated by this piece and took several videos of it from different camera heights.  It's interesting to see how the camera placement changed when and how the colors showed up.

Hmm...I think this is going to be a three-part day.  Stay tuned!

Tuesday: the day

 Joshua took a pretty picture of the sunrise.

Isaac and I tried to go rock climbing this morning but M/T/W mornings are only open if workers are there and they weren't there.  It was a bit disappointing but we'll go tomorrow.

We had lunch with Dad and Pat.  The food was delicious and we were able to sit outside because it was cloudy and not too hot.

Isaac and I went to high school registration after that.  It went better than I was expecting, and I was expecting it to go pretty well.  His picture turned out great on the first try.  I had done all my on-line homework, so all the fees were paid and papers signed.  He picked up his schedule and Chromebook and we could have left then, about fifteen minutes after we started.  It wasn't busy at all.

However, since neither of us has ever been throughout the high school, we decided to find his classrooms.  We'll do it again in a week, but after walking it today it will be important to do it twice.  Oh my goodness.  The number of times Isaac brought us to the wrong classroom was hilarious.  He always got the right building, the correct floor, and the correct last digit of his room, but could not get the tens digit correct.  There was a lot of "here it is!"  and I would say, "I thought you said room ###."

That being said, besides being in two different buildings the high schools felt smaller than I was expecting.  Yes, they are large.  But no, Isaac is not going to run a marathon between classes to get to the right spot all the time.  In fact, two classrooms are kitty-korner from each other.

The other good news is that he has intro to art on his schedule!  He has to take that before he can take any other art class, and we were told it can be hard to get into.  Also, he has his PE class as one of his classes in the fall semester so he should have a slightly easier semester.

I had a ton of raspberries to pick tonight.  I was supposed to have picked yesterday, but the day got away from me.  

And finally, some Aunt gave the boys a ton of little yellow ducks to hide around the house.  It's been so much fun finding them.  The boys are old enough that they hid them really well so we're only finding a few at a day.  I took a picture of two of them below, not realizing that at the top of the picture you can see another one hiding...I found that one later in the day.

Monday: fraction waffles

At the beginning of summer Joshua found an activity in a book called "fraction waffles" that he wanted to do.  Let's be honest - it was mostly a way to eat waffles.  We finally got around to it today.  

I made them fraction their waffles.  "You have four toppings and sixteen squares.  How many holes will have the same topping?"  "How can you divide the waffle?  What is a different way?  What is a different way?"  They answered, while rolling their eyes at me.

Then they changed the game, as normal.  They put the waffle on a coordinate system and I had to tell them which square to eat.  This worked well for the first part but devolved when we realized that (0,0) was the bottom left point and that when I said (0,4) they ate a corner but bottom left square should have been (0,0) and the coordinates should only go to 3.

(I tried an AI picture.  It worked about as well as me giving waffle coordinates.  So...I guess an accurate representation?)

Isaac then had me give his waffle coordinates in polar coordinates.  That worked a little bit better, as we defined the center as (0,0) and the inner squares as a length of one and the outer squares as a length of 2.

vacation Thursday, part 1 (June 11): Aarhous

Today we took a day trip to the second largest city in Denmark, Aarhous.  (Pronounced Our-hoose, where hoose rhymes with goose.)

Ben was in charge of driving.  Driving in Denmark is very similar to driving in the US, so for the most part it wasn't a big deal.  I did find it interesting that the lane lines make noise as you drive over them (like the solid road edge lines in the US), but no one else seemed to care.  The scenery was pretty, but once again not all that different from a country drive here.

We were both a bit nervous about parking.  We (and by we I mean Ben) did some research and knew were parking was and had a plan, but there are always some unknowns.  Anyway, we got to the first place no problem but then Ben was having trouble getting the app to pay for the parking to work.  I ended up trying too and was able get it work!  So, long story is that I ended up having a Denmark number and Ben had his normal US number.  This really worked nicely, because sometimes we needed to have a Denmark number and sometimes we needed to be able to access our normal phone number.  It isn't how we planned it (and Ben didn't really have a phone number for the first few days of the trip), but in the end it worked well.

We went to a botanical garden first and it was a very nice one!  There were some outside gardens leading up to the main building, some greenhouses with warm temperature plants, and then we went to some more outside gardens.

In the greenhouses, it started with a warm but not too bad room.  Then we went into a hotter room.  Then we went into a really hot but dry room.  We finished up in a tropical rain forest.  There was a tower to the top and it was amazing how much hotter it was at the top than the bottom!  Isaac was looking for the largest leaves he could find, and kept finding larger and larger ones until the tropical rain forest.  Those were at least the same size as him.

First big leaves

Banana leaves (behind platform)

I know the people are blurry in this picture (and Ben took a second were we aren't), but I kind of like the blurry.

Also, we learned that the vegetable ivory palm bloomed the day before for the first time in 40 years!  Cheryl was by some people who mentioned something about 40, but didn't really understand until we saw the sign.  We saw them again in the outside gardens and it gave us a little something to chat about.  (Normally these plants bloom more more frequently and can produce 15-20kg per year, but the gardens had transplanted it here 40 years ago and it just hadn't bloomed.)

There were also butterflies in the tropical rain forest.  Most of them were a black with white dots, but we saw a sign that said we might be lucky enough to spot the glass wing butterfly and we did!  The wings were mostly clear.

We took a brief restroom break.  Normally I don't mention the bathrooms because they are pretty normal.  These bathrooms were all decorated individually to match a biome of the world.  I had rainforest one time and bamboo forest another time.  Some biomes were decorated more interestingly than others - the bamboo forest had several bamboo sticks going from floor to ceiling.

We headed out to the outdoor gardens after this.  On our way out we encountered one of our first drinking fountains...they were around, but few and far between.  We walked around for a bit and then Isaac had to go to the bathroom so Joshua and Ben went too.  Cheryl and I enjoyed our walk around the rest of the circle and saw lots of pretty flowers.

We ate lunch at the gardens - bread with meat and bread with jam.

Then we switched parking lots to go to the art museum.  This parking lot used the same app as the previous one, so that was exciting.  This time it acted differently because it was a large parking garage, and it just tracked how long we were there.  It was a little weird and nice all at the same time.

On our way to the art museum I excitedly mentioned that the crosswalks had vikings instead of normal walk people and no one seemed to believe/understand me, so life moved on.  They saw them later when we were walking back so we could all get excited then.