School Dance

They had a fall dance at school for Rebekah. We made it a daddy-daughter dance so that I could work on my homework. Rebekah had a fun time with her friends.

What does the fox say??

a new road

Looks like we are going to get a new road out front. 

They are almost done with all the heavy equipment in the park. They are just doing landscaping now. 

 See that orange fence? Yeah, we still have a hole in our yard from when they tunneled the electric lines. I think my shrubs are dead now. 

It will be nice when this is all done and things can be quiet again. The last few weeks were hard. They had a steamroller to smooth out the road into the park. It shook the whole house. I couldn't stand the constant vibration and had to find an excuse to go out.

CAR trip to Baltimore

After learning about the CAR National project last month we took a field trip to Baltimore. 

We met at Fort McHenry where the Star-spangled Banner flew over the fort during the War of 1812. If you have not been to see the film at the visitors center...you should go. It is a very moving experience. 

This is an actual bomb that hit Fort McHenry but did not explode. 

Check out the fingerprints from the brick maker.

Then we went to the Flag House where Mary Pickersgill sewed the flag. 

 The flag on the wall shows how big the original flag was. 

I learned something interesting about the flag. The order was for each stripe to be 24 inches wide. However, the wool bunting only came 18 inches wide. So she had to cut and stitch together each stripe to make it 24 inches. That is a lot of sewing. 

Making the grade

They just had the award ceremony for 4th Quarter report cards. Emma made it the whole year with straight A's. Great job!!

Shelburne Glebe

I had a DAR meeting today. We took a tour of the Shelburne Glebe. It's a home built before the American Revolution with beautiful gardens. I enjoyed leaning the history of the home.

CAR Meeting

We had a C.A.R. meeting to learn about our State and National projects.

Rebekah presented information on Mary Pickersgill and our NSCAR project. She also talked about Ferry Farm and our VSCAR project. 

Emma talked about the Star-Spangled Banner and Francis Scott Key. 

Here is Emma swearing in our new members.

Park holes, playground, and frog

We walked around to check out the progress in the park. Emma found these huge holes and jumped right in! This is where they a building a picnic pavilion. 

Construction keeps moving along. The construction company has agreed with the town to only work Mon-Fri 7:00 am to 5:00 pm. That way the weekends are quiet. It's fine when school is in because we are all up before 7:00 am. However, construction on this park started right when school got out for the summer. That was a bit of a challenge for us. I have been lucky to sleep in until 7:30 before I am awoken by the noise. I'm glad that school is back in so I am not woken up by the work.

The playground equipment got delivered and they have been slowly putting it together. The company who made the playground equipment sent their own guys to assemble the playground. They did not know about the agreed upon work hours. They started before 6 am on Sat and Sun.  

 A few days later I woke up to this in my yard. They are tunneling under our driveway to run a power line from the box in our yard over to the picnic pavilion. They pulled out a few of my shrubs.  

 That night we found this toad on our driveway as we were pulling in. Thankfully, we did not run over him. He hopped off into the grass in time. He was about the size of my fist.