More of the school stuff….

After that day at the pond, the boys had to learn to use the new microscope purchased for this school year.  We had SO much fun finding the bacterium!!!!


I’m totally going to miss having them here.  I have been homeschooling since 2000, when we pulled Tyler out of public school at the end of first grade.  This has been an enjoyable time of my life, one I was looking forward to seeing through to completion.  However, that isn’t what is going to happen.  I can only pray and hope that this is what Tyler needs.  I ask that each of you pray with me.
Seth and Emily made Eagle Lapbooks during this first unit of the year.  That was great fun.


On Friday of this past week, Seth and Emily did their first chemistry experiment.  We are making crystals.  I currently have 7 petry dishes on my window ledge growing crystals. They are really excited about them.  we got the stuff to complete the experiment from Home Science Tools online. 
Tomorrow we start a new unit…we’ll be talking quite a bit about the Temple that Jesus knew.  We are *supposed* to build a model of it but I bought books and a DVD instead.  It was next to impossible to get the items needed to make it here without spending an arm and a leg for postage. 
Hope to chat soon….

Our Boys @ age 7

Someone asked me tonight if Seth looked like the other boys.  In her opinion he looks different.  HMMMM….I think there’s a family resemblance but I also think all of my kids look different.

TYLER June 2000


GARRET Jan 2002

SETH September 2009


You decide. 

Just another day in….

Paradise?  I don’t think so.  You’ll have to excuse me, I am cranky today.  5:45 a.m. doesn’t agree with me as a wake-up time.  I woke up, needing to pray however and did so.  Then went back to sleep, and woke again to pray some more.  I then was up for the day because I had to take Emily to a doctor’s appointment.  Nothing serious.  She’s been allergic to oranges-we’ve known this info since she was 16 months old.  The allergist who verified it said she would likely outgrow it by her 3rd birthday.  We were busy with moving and stuff at that time…so we just got around to getting a referral to an allergist.  Landstuhl wouldn’t see her, so had to take her to a German doctor in Ramstein-Miesenbach. Nice lady… HOWEVER, I was disappointed to find out we couldn’t have Emily tested today due to her getting 5 immunizations yesterday afternoon.  The doctor, who didn’t introduce herself and so I haven’t a CLUE what her name is…LOL, said Emily’s immune system would be too compromised.  Another appointment in two weeks. I’ll update you then…if I don’t forget.  LOL
So…we bought Tyler a cell phone and one card for his minutes.  We were frustrated with trying to figure out where he was all the time.  He didn’t WANT a phone.  He fussed about it.  And what do you think happened?  HE SPENDS EVERY WAKING MINUTE ON THE SILLY THING….BAHAHHAHAHA

Another one our children, looks exactly like his father.  Even more so than Tyler.  Hard to believe I know…but I can see me in Tyler.  I can’t in Seth.  Seth got my nose and my feet.  And welll….he might have picked up something else in the process.  See I like organization.  You can’t tell it by my computer desk:

But I promise…my closets and drawers and cabinets are organized, things are filed away in places.  My computer desk is the place where everyone DUMPS things.  It looks better now.  Anyway…back to Seth.  He has inherited my tendency to be organized.  I am SO glad ONE child has…the rest of them have NOT.  LOL. 
The other day, I noticed Seth’s shoes in the  bottom of his closet were all in jumbles. I didn’t have time that second to fix them and thought to myself, “I’ll get to it later”.  Two days later, I decided to fix them and THIS is what I found:


Nope..no one told him to.  He did it all on his own.  LOL.  I ROTFLOL when I saw it and ran to get my camera.  Pat told me that evening that the night before Seth was telling him that he HAD TO FIX HIS CLOSET to have a clean room.  No one has ever told him that before either.  giggle
OK, one more thing…a LO to share….



And one more:

The Tower!

I can tell you that I am absolutely glad I did the tour and climbed this tower.  Would I do it again?  NOT ON YOUR LIFE!  293 stairs up a narrow, marble staircase (SLIPPERY!!!) and I am afraid of heights.  LOL!!  But I wanted my kids to see this phenomenon for themselves! 
The outside of the tower is absolutely beautiful as you can see from my pictures.  The inside is dark, narrow and slippery…scary slippery!  LOL.  I almost fell several times. 
Do you know why the tower leans????  Here’s a quote from the official website-in English:
The inclination
The problem of the inclination is the one that over the centuries has most fascinated and intrigued visitors, art lovers and experts and that has made this monument so famous all over the world.
All this is also due to the fact that the reasons for the inclination of the building are still fairly mysterious.
The experts have discussed for a long time, especially in the last century, whether such inclination might be due to the static problems of the building while it was built, in other words whether the incline of the Tower was an effect that the builder had deliberately wanted to achieve or if conversely it was the consequence of an unpredictable or otherwise progressive subsidence of the ground.
In the last century, the increasingly accurate measurements of the building and the surveys of the subsurface conducted with a wide range of devices, combined with historical and archival surveys, have shed some light on the matter. The Tower was presumably initially designed as a straight building; however, it must have begun to subside right from the first stages of the building work. The subsidence was due to the special morphological features of the ground, composed of several layers of clayey materials and silt, run through by groundwater levels at about one metre deep. These conclusions can be drawn from an observation of the soil, and the corrections made to every floor of the building. What is certain, based on the scarce information we have, is that over the centuries the oscillation of the building was minimal, since it must have eventually settled on the ground. This situation is corroborated by the accurate survey conducted in 1817 by two English experts, Cresy and Taylor. A few years later, in 1838, some event must have occurred which must have abruptly accelerated the oscillatory motion of the building, bringing back the need to carry out some decisive protective work. On that date, based on historical and aesthetic needs, it was decided that the bottom of the tower had to be cleared of the mantle of soil that had been hiding it for centuries. This work, that caused the Tower to lose its balance, involved the demolition of the buildings and constructions that stood next to the Tower and above all the draining of the brackish water that always surrounded the entrance of the building. The subsequent measurements showed that the inclination of the Tower had increased by approximately 20 centimetres: in the 267 years between Giorgio Vasari’s surveys in 1550 and those of the two Englishmen in 1817, the inclination had increased by just five centimetres. The leaning movement kept accelerating for a few years after the work of 1838, then decreased again to about one millimetre a year. During the XX century, better information and improved technical instruments, along with the support of governmental and safety authorities, led to a proliferation of studies, surveys and even special projects.
I took the following photo from one of the windows on my way up:

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get this photo to lighten more than this without completely washing out the background:

Finally got to the top:

BTW, we were only able to take the older children into the tower.  I am eternally grateful for this.  I think I would have had a heart attack if Seth and Emily had been up there with me.  It’s dangerous.  Seriously.




Looking down the inside of the tower you are supposed to be able to see straight down, but they were doing renovations and so we couldn’t.  Here’s the bell.





This next picture….look really close at the hedge, if you can see the orange shirt, that is Pat.

NO?  Try this: orange-Pat, yellow-Seth, Pink-Em



After the beach and dinner that night, we walked up to see the tower at night.



Cathedral

Baptistery:

I have my dh to thank for the night photos.  He did these without a tripod or they would have been crystal clear! Next post is of the beach near Camp Darby.

Arriving in Italy

First off, I know that you are all waiting on pictures and stuff.  I’ve been busy with unpacking and laundry and daily tasks so that I can leave again tomorrow for London.  (I am so excited although getting nervous about leaving my babies behind)
So here’s a map of Pisa.  I tried to trace a route with the pencil in paint for you to see where we walked from but I stink at that function.  LOL

So I have circled in red the airport where we arrived.  The black circle is our hostel.  Look for Corso Italia and that is the main street we walked every single day. Other points of interest are the train station (green circle), the bus station (blue circle), and the Place of Miracles (purple circle).  Pat says that it’s not quite 3 km from the airport to the hostel.  HOWEVER we walked that with 7 carry on bags and 5 children, two of which needed carried at times.  The carry bags weren’t too heavy.  I know mine weighed 14lbs and Pat’s was right at 20lbs.  The others were around those weights with one being about 7lbs.  On the way to the hostel, it was late afternoon so very HOT (90 degrees) and I not only carried my bag but I carried Emily on my back about half way.  We walked to the bus station every single day.  More than once.  LOL!!!
Upon arrival, I was very surprised at how dirty Pisa is.  Germany isn’t dirty like this, NOT even Stuttgart which is also a large city.  The worst thing was the smell of raw sewage.  EWWWWW!!!  So anyway….back to the details everyone has asked for.
We were early for check-in so we asked to leave our bags to get some lunch as we were pretty hungry, hot and tired after our walk from the airport.  (and who knew that tennis shoes gave blisters-gulp).  Once we had lunch we could check-in to the hostel and get cleaned up.  Here’s a picture of Courtney claiming her sleeping area, top bunk of the bed where Pat and I slept.

We went for a walk after this….This is a picture of the square just outside our hostel…where the locals partied every single night.  ;-)

Taken from our bedroom window.  The magazine and newspaper stand.

We walked back down to the bus stop (blue circle on the map).  We needed to go to Camp Darby (US military base nearby and our sole reason for staying in Pisa…so we had something familiar conveniently nearby…as you know from my Day 1 post, this didn’t turn out to be too convenient).  On our way we found this neat building they were reconstructing.



LOOK!  Pinnochio has a stand for his TV….

I didn’t realize this picture was so gory until AFTER I snapped it.  ICK!


Emily’s ride of  choice….

Old building near the bus station (the orangish building in the corner).

This sign tells the bus route we purchased…or thought we had.  I don’t think we ever got the right tickets…although this did eventually get us close to Darby.

Camp Darby was located near the town of Tirrenia….on the back side of it. We didn’t know that at the time.  Our second trip out there went a whole lot more smoothly.  More on that later.
Seth sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the bus to arrive.  He was tickled to ride a real bus, although he was really HOPING for a double decker bus.

Garret and Tyler also waiting on the bus ride…no  they are not unhappy children…they just think that it’s uncool to smile in pictures (just like their father).


That’s almost all the pictures I took of our first day in Italy.  If you want to read (or re-read our first day you can go HERE .
This is after we returned from our hairy scary ordeal… (and that expression is “FINE, I’ll smile but you can’t make me look at the  camera too”.   he’s rather handsome when he’s smiling and doesn’t look all intimidating.