Easter 2011

Dakota City School Day

Spring Snow

April 2011, Visiting Dad in the Hospital

Voodoo Flower

Science Fair

Awana Grand Prix

This was the first year NONE of the Wenigers won a trophy in the AWANA Grand Prix! Maybe I colored the judges' opinion of us when I offered them a bribe. Who knows. Jud just saw me typing this and added, "You did too?" No wonder. Those crooked Wenigers. It's like they've formed a union or something.

Trying out the new blog....ah, the learning curve

Ok. I've been avoiding it long enough. I'm such a creature of habit, that once I get used to something, I hate to change. I had the same purse for 3 years and only got rid of it because the strap was being held on by a safety pin. I had the same tennis shoes for six years and only bought new ones because there was absolutely no padding left in the old ones. My husband bought me new boots. I think he was embarrassed to be seen with my ancient ones. :)

So, you can imagine my angst every time Judson gets me a new phone or like now, when I have to learn to use a new blogger. Ugh.

But my fear of falling behind in my scrapbook is worse than my fear of new things, so I'm doing it.

To catch up:

November: We took Mackenzie to Uruguay for her missions trip. I've already done a whole book on that, so no need to say more here.

December: After Missouri in August, Florida in September and Uruguay in November, we decided to stay home for Christmas. Missed seeing my folks, but just did not want to go anywhere else for awhile. We did not do our annual trip out to cut our own Christmas tree. The weather got bad fast after Thanksgiving, and we ended up getting one from a local Boy Scout troop. Not as cool, but it was just too cold to go out into the wilderness.

We went to the Wenigers for Christmas Eve, enjoyed Christmas morning at home, and then went back to the Wenigers in the evening for leftovers. Had a very relaxing time.

January: I turned 42 with very little fanfare. The Wenigers invited us over to celebrate, so I brought along my scrapbooks and made them play a treasure hunt with them. Not sure about them, but I had a blast!

January was busy for the Weniger family. Jud's grandma died, so the immediate family flew out to California for a whirlwind week of packing up her house and her memories and having a funeral. They learned of her death the same day Jared and Meghan had their first baby, Brody Maxwell. The labor went agonizingly long, so he had to be taken by C-section. Also, Carson had a seizure, which is still unexplained.

School is frustrating this year. The girls' specialist schedule covers the morning and afternoon, leaving very little options for field trips. I'm afraid we're not even going to come close to our record-breaking 30 trips last year. Sigh. The extra curricular schedule looks something like this: Monday, piano lessons; Tuesday, gymnastics; Wednesday, MIT and Awana; Thursday, violin lessons. Just wait till sports kick in again.

Duncan is doing well at Paideia. Made the gold and silver honor rolls so far. Complains all the time though about not having any best friends.

February: Mackenzie turns 11! She had such a great time at her swimming party last year, she wanted to do it again. Fine with me. It's the easiest birthday party in the world. No cooking, no cleaning, no games to plan. They just come, swim, eat cake and go home. She had a few girls stay overnight in the hotel, but they didn't stay up too late, on account of all that vigorous swimming! Her cake had frogs on lilly pads this year. Too cute!



March Madness: It's the time of year when Science Fair, Easter dress making and Awana Grand Prix all collide. Mackenzie made a Hair Hygrometer to measure the humidity in the air and Lauren is working on a foxhole radio. The radio is NOT WORKING yet and Jud is pulling out his hair trying to figure out why. Just one week left! Thanks to some extra snowy weather (we've had, what, three blizzards this year!) we were stuck at home on a weekend and managed to get the girls' Easter dresses almost done. We were so ahead of schedule, what with Easter being the very last Sunday in April, I decided to make one for myself! Very psyched about that.

School

Duncan ended his homeschooling days this year and started sixth grade at a public charter high school called Paideia Academy. It was the closest thing to a private school we could find that was also free. The only drawback is that the school is open year-round. That means poor Duncan had to start in August and will go through the middle of June. Spending the few nice days of MN summer in school does not sound too appealing. However, it was the best educational choice in our budget.

He seems to have adapted fine. Had some tough times remembering everything and taking tests/ grades seriously (since I did not keep grades in elementary school). He still hasn't found that great friend he's been looking for since he found one in Mason, his MI bud. I'm afraid Mason set a rather high standard for best friends.

The girls and I continued homeschooling, and, no, we did not start in August. We started in September, but I had a hard time focusing on it knowing our FL vacation was coming up. The FL trip was something of a huge field trip. They saw mangrove swamps, coral reefs, tidal pools, estuaries, marshes and swamps. Not to mention seeing the American tourist in its natural habitat.

Florida, Sept. 2010

Not gonna say too much about our FL vacay, since I spent a good deal of time putting it all down in a photo book. But to sum up, I will say my favorite part was the day we went on a sunset cruise on a catamaran off of Key West. The boat ride, the reggae music, the ocean, not being even remotely cold, and of course the sunset was absolutely amazing. I did notice that I truly came out of my cocoon in FL. Didn't realize how many layers I'd put on in the north. Layers of denial, determination, grit, and good old-fashioned MN survival toughness. Layers, like sweaters, that keep you warm, but make you feel stiff and suffocated. As we drove south and the weather turned hot and humid and the smell of the ocean permeated the senses, the layers melted away and what emerged was a FL girl in a tie dyed sarong and jeweled sandals. My true self. I tied the bandanna around my hair, opened the windows and let the tropical breeze blow in. I buried my face in a huge juicy mango and dug my toes into the warm sand. I tasted the salt water and marveled at how the clouds seem to touch the ocean. I felt every muscle relax and dreams squelched by the necessities of reality, came ebbing back like high tide. Such a wonderful, casual feeling of freedom.

Every once in awhile I have a moment that is so amazing, so orgasmic it's as if time stands still and gives you a chance to look carefully at each detail. When that happens, I do my best to take a mental picture with all of my senses. What am I feeling? What does it smell like?; what does it look like?; what sounds am I hearing? I took one of those mental pictures on the boat that day. Now that I'm back in MN, and I'm walking my daughter home and the north wind is biting into me, making me tug my layers closer and tighter, I pull out that picture and relive the moment. The layers don't seem so stifling when you've got reggae music blaring in your ears and moist, salty air glistening on your face.

I love my husband! (hacked)

My husband is soooooo wonderful for switching my MSN Spaces blog to Blogger. MSN decided they were going to close down their blogging program and switch over to Wordpress. Needless to say, the switchover wasn't as smooth as MSN said it would be, and to add insult to injury, Wordpress doesn't like pictures. I like pictures.
So, my wonderful husband is setting me up with a new Blogging program.
Enjoy!

(unhacked version) The blog I've had for six years went kaput and then made it nearly impossible to transfer anything. It's like losing your diary and photo album at the same time. Luckily I printed each blog at the end of the year, but my pics are now all 0ut of order and not dated properly. I feel like my past is unraveling!

Lauren’s 7th birthday

Lauren's seventh birthday party had a CandyLand theme, and boy did my theme dreamer go crazy. How fun to have not only an overall theme, but individual characters, all with their own costumes and stories. It was a theme dreamer's dream come true!

I roped in all the family. The Meadows even came in from Missouri. This was going to be big and I wanted everyone to be there. And while they were there, they all got to be a character in CandyLand.

What a blast! Watch the slideshow to get the whole story.

Where has the summer gone?

Let’s see…So much has happened this summer, I’ll just do a recap:

June: Duncan and Mackenzie went to Camp Lebanon and had a blast, as always. We found some Monarch butterfly caterpillars up there and brought them back and watched them change.

July: We celebrated the Fourth with the Weniger/Pelach clan. They came and hung out in "our" backyard. We roasted hot dogs and played with Jared’s model airplane and then went over to Lakeville High School to watch the fireworks.

Jud and I took the BBC teens on their first mission trip to Chicago with World Changers. Definitely a life-changing event. Jud put together a video of it, that tells the whole story. 23 people got saved as a result of the ministry. The teens stepped outside their comfort zones and really worked hard. Tara fell in love with the music guy, Michael, a.k.a. Skinny Jeans. He
sang the coolest wake-up song: "Oh, there’s no more time to sleep…"
and he also serenaded Tara for her birthday. I think I have never
laughed so hard! They are such an awesome group. We celebrated at the end of the trip with a stop in Chicago. We did all the touristy things and ate Chicago pizza. Also, as a bonus, they were filming Terminator 3 there and we saw lots of crazy props (like burned out cars and crashed buses).

August: The beginning of August was nuts. I was in the middle of working my tail off preparing for VBS, when my family in MO called to say that my Grandpa had died. He’d had a stroke and never recovered. I had to turn over several unfinished projects and just leave and drive the kids and myself 9 hours down to Neosho for the funeral. I was glad I went, of course. My mom had everything all handled already and since the family is small, there wasn’t a lot of company to prepare for. The funeral was held at the funeral home and the message was preached by the chaplain of the nursing home. The man, Gary, who had led my Grandpa to Christ, sang a song. The burial, though, was really cool. Since he’d served in two wars, he got a full military funeral. Uniformed Navy personnel saluted the flag-covered coffin. There was a gun salute. Then, a ceremonial folding of the flag which was presented with much emotion to my mom. Very cool. They called him an American hero and thanked my mom for her "daddy’s" service. There was not a dry eye in the place. Good-bye Grandpa. See you in heaven!

VBS went fine without me. Several kids accepted Christ. I got in on the last day and got to see them turn Jud into a Pastor’s Pizza. I was very happy to see how folks picked up the slack and made it awesome.

Duncan had his 12th birthday on the last day of VBS. Easy party. He just wanted his friends to stay overnight and play video games and ping pong. In fact, the less involved Mom and Dad were, the better. Then, the next week, he went to Paidea Academy, a year-round charter school in Apple Valley that goes through eighth grade. It’s been a good transition for him. He seems to be adapting well. Having a hard time with all that structure, though. :) and homework. But he’s managing it.



Jud left for a week of Fishing for Men. While he was gone, we had a tornado touch down just a block or two away from us. I was awaken by thunder and by frightened kids in my bed. The internet said it was just a bad thunderstorm, so I thought nothing of it. Until the power went out. We went downstairs and I checked the Internet (using my phone) again. Still, nothing to worry about. Once the storm blew over, then the storm alarm went off. Still, I figured it was nothing. The next morning, as I drove Duncan to school, I realized it had indeed been something. Something bad. It was an EF1 tornado that took out trees, blew out garages and ripped off roofs. No houses were flattened or anything, and amazingly, no one was hurt. Still, it was crazy to see how close it had come to us.

Now that Jud’s back, we’re turning our attention to Lauren’s seventh birthday party and our Florida vacation!

Loving our Garden!

The weather has been perfect for gardening this year. Hot days and rainy nights. Everything has gone wild in the garden! We’ve put up green beans and zucchini. We also got some cheap corn and froze that. We canned dill pickles and sweet pickles and LOTS of tomatoes. We also canned pears from a friend’s pear tree. The girls have been an awesome help this year. We make a great team. One of those days, it was 95 degrees outside. We had to can tomatoes and the house is not air conditioned. No problem. I set up all the fans and got ready. But since we have a gas stove, the fans kept blowing on the flame and the water wouldn’t boil. So, we had to turn off all the fans and just work fast and sweaty. How did those pioneers do it? We rewarded ourselves with a trip to the pool afterwards!

Duncan turns 12

One hot summer

May and June kind of flew by. I had wanted to write many times, but never seemed to be sitting long enough to do it.

May was busy because it was the end of the school year stuff colliding with the beginning of summer stuff. Soccer started. Several games were canceled because of weather. Too cold, too windy, too hot, and raining, raining, raining!

My folks weren’t coming (since they’d gone to FL the month before), and after I rearranged our end of the year program to fit the Wenigers’ schedules, they decided to come…the following week. Oh well, they got to watch it on video. We had fun with our program this year. The kids sang a song about the parts of the brain and Lauren wore a hat that had a plastic brain sticking up out of it. Our play at the end was about when the USA tried to open treaty negotiations with Japan that had been closed to outsiders for 200 years. We did a shadow play for the first half and finished with a classic Japanese "voice-over" drama. Jud did all the voices and they just mouthed nonsense to make it look like one of those old movies. They all had on Japanese costumes and wigs and it ended with a slow motion karate fight. Everybody was laughing! Had to be the best one yet.

Well, my folks came the week after, and brought Emma. We did the usual touristy stuff and had a great time. Jud was in the process of buying a new church van. He scored a great one for a fraction of the price it was listed at and just in time to cart my family all around. Thank you, God!

Toward the end of the visit, Emma was getting sad about leaving. My mom told me Emma really didn’t have much to do in the summer since both her parents work, and that she’d be spending a lot of time at my parent’s house. The kids were having so much fun playing together, I offered to have her stay with us until camp (three weeks off). Her parents agreed and the kids were thrilled. We spent the next couple of weeks trying to show her all of our fun places.She started getting homesick by the end of the second week, so Chris and Mom came up to get her.

Then it was camp and the parade and Backyard Bible Club and of course, lots of trips to the lakes.

During one particularly nice day (sunny but not too hot and breezy but not windy), we started off on our bikes to see how far we could go. By the time we finished, we had passed Jared’s house and ended up at the Mills’ house six miles away. Lauren, the six-year-old on a little kid bike, went the whole way without any complaints. I was pretty impressed! After a short break at the Mills, we headed back. She got a half-mile into the return trip and decided she was not going any further. She actually got off her bike and sat down on the sidewalk with her arms folded in protest. I had to call Jud to come get her. The rest of us finished the trip–12 miles! Not bad for two kids and me on my 100 lb. bike cruiser.

The next day Jud wanted to get out and enjoy the weather, so we ended up canoeing down the Canon River 12 miles. What a workout! The day after that, we just laid around reading library books. :)

Dead Sea Scrolls, or fragments thereof

Just got back from the MN Science Museum which had a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. I was sooooo hyped to see it, but wow, most of it was a HUGE disappointment.

First off, there weren’t any scrolls. Just a few fragments from a few books. Tiny fragments. I enjoyed seeing the fragments, knowing they were super old and being amazed that they were written with such perfect penmanship. But, after I went to the five or six boxes in the circular room, I went to the next room to see the rest, and found myself in the gift shop. I kept saying, "That’s it?!"

We knew when we went that the majority of the exhibit was going to be fluff–a room about the Dead Sea, a room about pottery, a room about ancient writing in general. We tried to go slowly through it and take it all in, but not only was it fluff, it was insulting fluff. Imagine what you might see if an atheistic scientist tried to show you why the Dead Sea Scrolls are important. He just doesn’t get it. It was obvious how clueless they were to the spiritual importance of this discovery and how they were bending over backwards to kiss Muslim butt. Blech.

The insulting parts, other than the overall patronizing tone, was the way they dated everything BCE, as if they have the authority to yank Christ right out of the timeline. What the heck is Common Era anyway? Lame.

And, of course, the room about the Dead Sea started with a video on what the planet looked like millions of years ago. We gave up listening to the head sets and reading the informational placards because it seemed so pointless. We came to see the scrolls. Period.

So, with that frame of mind, we finally entered the last room and–WOW–I could have looked at them for hours, but since there were only a few small fragments, there really wasn’t much to see.

I would like to see a DSS exhibit done by a Christian historian. Maybe they could get the facts and the spirit of it right.

A brief note on the state of our country.

Here’s another entry for posterity’s sake. We (and by we, I mean the morons of this country, myself NOT included) voted in the first black president. Whoopdedoo. His name is Barack Hussein Obama. I’m sure his name will be in all the history books. Just hope they get the facts right. Since he’s been in office, he has proceeded in bullying the Democrats into ramming through all sorts of far left liberal agendas. Most recently, a massively expensive health care bill that forces everyone to buy health care, will bankrupt several businesses and push taxes to the extreme. The bill was so huge, we still don’t know what all is in it. The worst was that they forced it through by doing back-door deals and promising all sorts of goodies to Democrats on the fence. Goodies we’ll be paying for. So, if it’s 2050 and you’re wondering why the land of the free and the home of the brave looks more like Soviet Russia, you can thank Obama and all the morons who voted for him. I actually feel sorry for the black community. If only their hero could have used his power for good and not evil, they might have something to be proud of. Instead, Obama has only reinforced the entitlement-minded, gang-style stereotypes decent blacks were hoping to finally shed. In effect, he’s taken our country backwards and the repercussions are yet unknown.

Field trips and Science Fair

Well, I’m debating on whether or not I want to blog about the science fair. You know how I get so worked up over that thing. Sigh. I’ll put it down for posterity’s sake and try not to slip into ranting. Duncan experimented with lasers. He built a burglar alarm and tested it to see which things would break the beam and set off the alarm. He got an honorable mention ribbon because one judge gave him low marks. The other two gave him near perfect scores. Grrrrrrrrr.

Mackenzie did a super cool project testing the effect of gravity on the root growth of a plant. She had bean seeds sprouting on a spinning record player. She even had a prop to explain statocyte (a type of bean cell). She also got an honorable mention because two judges gave her high scores and the third judge –if you can believe this–gave her super low marks on originality!! The whole thing was completely unique. I would like to challenge her to find it online somewhere. I would like to say a few other things to her too, so it’s probably a good thing that the judges are anonymous.

Lauren watered plants with different plant food and measured them to see which one would grow the tallest. She got a third place ribbon. That one actually seemed reasonable to me. I was really proud of all of them. They worked hard on their projects and even harder on their presentations. Because there were three this year, I didn’t have the time or energy to do field trips for all of them. So, that part I was kind of bummed about. Oh well. Time to shake it off and let it go, right? :)

Field Trips
We are studying Russia, and lucky for us, there’s a big Russian population up here. We had lunch at the Russian Tea House and also visited the Museum of Russian Art. The kids did not care for borscht but did like the nesting dolls.

Now it feels like the race is on to the end of the year. Lots to accomplish before SUMMER!!

Deanna Weniger, campaign manager, sort of

Two weeks ago, I got a call from the former Lakeville City Administrator (whom I’ve met at various Republican conventions). He asked me if I’d like to manage his campaign. I was like, umm, you know I’ve never actually run a campaign before. He assured me there was nothing to it. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Well for two weeks I was "on call." My phone rang constantly and my email was always full. I wrote press releases, did research, wrote a speech, wrote letters, etc. Kind of felt like reporting again, but I did draw from my advertising experience to craft those glowing letters. :)
My candidate would always gush with praise, something I did not really believe was sincere, but what can you do, he’s a politician.
Well, the big day arrived Feb. 27. It was Senate District 36′s convention at which a candidate would be endorsed for the next State Senator. My guy assured me he had a crew and an able family to help him. I believed him. But when I showed up at 8 a.m. and found that I was the ONLY supporter there, I began to get worried. Where was the team? Where was all this help he said he had? Good grief! If I had known I’d get stuck handing out fliers, I would have brought along some teenagers.
The next thing that worried me was how my candidate seemed really nervous and unfocused. He had seem so self-assured before. He’s been around politics forever. He even ran for a school board and won. Why was he acting so weird?
From there, it went from bad to worse, and then to ultimately humiliating.
He had told his "team" (which consisted of some folks he knew, some of which did not seem thrilled to be there) not to come until 10:30–a mere half hour before the speeches! I was shocked! Why the heck weren’t they there at 7 a.m. helping him put up signs?
Well, needless to say, he freaked out when the convention folks voted to up the speeches an hour. He got all paranoid, blaming his opponent for "dirty" politics. Puhleese!
Then, he wanted me to write mean things into the speech for him to say about his opponent. I strongly advised against it.
Finally, after a round of frenzied calls to the "team" a handful of people showed up and the speeches were on. Now, mind you, I had worked probably 6 hours straight on this speech, not to mention hours working with him on revisions.
He told me he was an expository speaker and just wanted bullet points. I didn’t see why he needed a speech writer to write bullet points for him, so I wrote a real speech. Besides, he had about three minutes (because he had three people speak before him, taking up most of the time) which doesn’t give much time for expository speaking.
So, instead of taking my speech and bulleting it himself, he brings the whole thing up there. Fine! If you’ve got it up there, then just read it through! But nooooo, he decides to do his expository thing from the fully formed speech. It bombed like skunk in a camper. It was horrible. It was embarrassing. I wanted to crawl away and die. And I think he actually only "read" about one page of the speech before he was cut off.
So, after that humiliating display, what do you think he did? Blamed his opponent. Called him a (this is great) glib-tongued charlatan. Which means he hates him because he can speak well.
He came in third out of five, packed up his stuff and went home. Not so much as a word to me. Wasn’t even there when the winner invited the other candidates up to congratulate them on the race and to show solidarity in beating the Democrats. The winner did a Ben Stein type call out…"Buehler? Buehler? Buehler?" But "Buehler" had taken his tacky T-shirts with electrical tape covering up the school board words from his last election, and gone home in a huff.
At that point, I peeled my candidate’s sticker off my blouse and tried to blend in.
And did he call or contact me? No. Just an email forwarded from someone else who complimented him on trying. Why would he send that to me? I guess I know why. Because when you make a complete arse of yourself, blame the campaign manager.