Dear Clara @claraeleanor - Tumblr Blog

Celebrating the longest day of the year.

keep dancing

At parent-teacher conferences last week, your teacher told us she knows everything is going well with you when you’re dancing. Your feet are constantly tapping when you’re at your desk or standing in line. When you’re not dancing, that means something is bothering you.

It was a helpful insight. So now I try to remember that when I hear you constantly tapping around the house, which is usually from when you wake up until you go to bed. That means all is right (and that I shouldn’t be annoyed by the constant tapping — it’s a good thing.)

Last week you helped out with a campus photo shoot. You were instructed to walk down the stairs, and instead you instinctively danced down them. This perfectly captured your dancing mood.

All is right in the world when you’re dancing, which is a gene you get from mom.

I’m excited for your big competition this weekend. There will be crazy early mornings, a lot of stress and probably a few meltdowns (from all of us). But it will be worth it if it makes you happy.

All is right as long as your feet are moving. Keep dancing.

Field trip!

Yesterday we had a field trip with Mrs. Jester's class to the Audobon Center (and I came along as the lone parent chaperone). We've been there many times, but we still learned a lot of new things. The topic was rocks and soil, which you are learning about in school.

After learning about the differences between sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks, we hiked to the beach and categorized the three natural rocks, plus looked for man-made rocks like cement and bricks (there's a surprisingly large amount of those rocks on the beach). I had no idea that there were so many sedimentary rocks with fossils in them at the beach! We learned about the glaciers that swept away tons of topsoil (including the dinosaur layers) to reveal ancient rocks that were once at the bottom of a sea/ocean. Right here in Wisconsin. Crazy.

The swarms of mosquitoes threatened to eat us alive the whole time, but that didn't stop us from making sand from rocks, making sand dance with a magnet and inspecting soil. Who knew that soil had so much bacteria, fungi and "organic matter" (dead animals and poop) in it? You said your favorite part was making the sand "dance" by using a magnet and attracting the mineral magnetite.

This morning you were in a great mood from the field trip while we were walking to school, and you declared that when you grow up you were going to be a geologist -- along with an artist, dancer, doctor and a few others things. You're going to be busy. :)

Hopefully when it's a little cooler (it was 76 degrees for our hike!) and the mosquitoes die down we'll do another fall hike. Maybe at Lion's Den for the first time. And we'll try out our Deer Ears, Owl Eyes and Snake Tongue.