Ballet in Portland

We had a wonderful opportunity to see a full scale ballet in Portland put on by the Metro Portland Ballet Company. The ballet was Alice in Wonderland. It was very well done. I love seeing a story told entirely by dance. It took my kids a while to realize that there wasn't going to be any words. Once they got used to that, they enjoyed it and had an easy time following the story.
It was a great show for the entire family. If I had known it would be this entertaining, I would have brought my younger children as well. There were about 50 children involved in the ballet, and it was adorable to see everything from 3 year olds to teenagers play key parts in all the scenes.
The Queen of Hearts was MARVELOUS...she was just perfect for the part. When we got home, all the kids celebrated our day out with watching the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. They appreciated the story much more after the ballet!
The concert hall was beautiful. We were seated way up high on the balcony.
A few weeks earlier, Mary took the older kids to see the Eugene Ballet Company perform a full ballet of The Diary of Anne Frank. It was not as suitable for younger children.

What a blessing to have a variety of cultural experiences so close by to enjoy and learn from!

Gilbert House Field Trip

Our favorite local museum is definitely the Gilbert House!!! We also have this lovely foot bridge over the Willamette that we enjoy crossing on the rare winter days where we get some decent weather!


One day for homeschool, we went to a wonderful percussion concert and heard a talented musician perform for us on the Marimba. Afterwards, we celebrated the birthday of AC Gilbert at the Gilbert House!

Boys Club February

For our Boys club in February we studied two great sailors: Nathaniel Bowditch and Captain James Cook. We learned all kinds of amazing stories and facts. We had a really great month of water experiments, navigation skill games, simulations, skits, and crafts. We designed our own model sailboats, as well as making these edible boats for snacks. The kids got very creative with their sails.

In March, we studied the naturalist Joseph Banks and toured our Dallas Botanical Gardens. We learned how to throw a boomerang, too. Last week we had a wonderful show at the Planetarium to celebrate all the explorers we've learned about who relied on navigating by the stars. It was a wonderful field trip!!

Boys Club Winter Field Trip

For the last Boys Club in January, we had an all-day field trip!

First we went to the Jensens Arctic Museum. We had a wonderful tour. The lady there in charge of the museum is so patient with children and is a good teacher. We had studied arctic and antarctic explorers, and so I think the boys were really prepared to enjoy the museum. The boys really got into the Inuit yo-yo's!

After our tour, we paused for a picnic lunch. It was so cold outside we were freezing, so we huddled in our cars away from the wind.

Next we went to the Polk County Museum. It is quite a treasure of local history. I can't believe I've never gone before. We stayed for about 2 hrs, the kids all had a wonderful time.

The girls favorite part was the dress up clothes in the pioneer section.

Don't they look like they just walked off the set for Little house on the Prairie?

The older kids favorite part was this old type writer. They all fought over getting turns with it!

Here the boys are all doing a matching game, matching the words of kitchen implements with the real thing. Which one was the toaster? They had a hard time figuring that one out!

Preston is a regular cowboy!

And here are a bunch of 12 yr olds playing with the cars and trucks...makes me smile!

After the museum, we got all our wiggles out on the swingsets at the Rickreall polk county fairground. I even got some book reading done while they played!

Samantha smiles!

Gilbert House

The Gilbert House Children's museum has a great Theater room. Dorathy organized all the kids and gave them costumes and then put on a play for us called "The Great Explorer".

Julianna was SO happy to participate.

Dorathy whispered the lines she wanted them to say whenever they forgot.

Tour of the Capitol

One of the best things about Boys Club is that I am planning field trips that I've always wanted to go on. One of those is touring the Capitol. Silly Sanford here went a little crazy, chewing on this statue's toes. This precipitated our "respect" talk. After this incident, the boys were wonderfully well-behaved and had a great experience.

We loaded up our 15 passenger van (using every seat!) and even got free parking in front of the building. We had a great long leisurely 2 hour tour with a very fine gentleman who knew the answer to almost every question we threw at him! I'm sad we didn't get to climb up to the dome, but we'll have to go in the Summer to be allowed to do that.

Each kid had the chance to sit in the Governor's chair! Since Sanford wants to rule the world, so he was pretty thrilled. (just kidding)

Dorathy is confident she'd make a great first Woman President. She's always thought women should rule the world. ;)

Christopher is a laid-back, sweet-natured tyrant. Whenever Christopher gets upset about something wrong in the world, or hears about disturbing things in the Media, he always says to me "If I were President, I'd never let blank-itty-blank happen!!! I'd make a law, I'd make a rule, I'd change that!" I usually have to gently point out that if he DID, he'd be tyrant. It's not the leader's job to solve most of those kinds of problems, it's the parent's job to teach the kids better in the first place before they grow up! The leader just needs to protect people's god-given rights. He gets pretty frustrated with that answer.

Dorathy stands at the podium to make a speech.

We recently read a book about Patrick Henry, so here she is loudly acted out Henry's famous soliloquy. "Give me LIBERTY or give me DEATH!"

Sitting around the conference table and chilling.

In the Balcony.

Most of my pictures of the inside of our beautiful capitol building didn't turn out too well. This was the best of the lot. The paintings were fabulous. The kids want to come back to the capitol when congress is in session and watch from the balcony. We'll try to attend Apple Pie Day when all homeschoolers are invited to the capitol for the day.