Thursday, April 30, 2009

SPEEDY RETURNS!

This is our vagabond turtle, Speedy!  He lives under our house.  He has lived there for about 5 years, and only comes out to see us when the weather is nice ... like in the Spring and the Fall.


Speedy usually doesn't hang out for more than a day....  he leaves as quickly as he comes!! But we are always delighted to see him!!  We gave him a quick shower and a few pieces of cut-up green apple.




Matthew is like Dr. Doolittle, all animals love him!

Friday, April 10, 2009

KITE DAY!


As the leader of the new "Helping Hands" group at Lakewood this year, I had the privilege of organizing some fun events and fundraisers for our school.  This was one of them, "Kite Day" which we did at a local Dallas park.  It was a blustery day in April..... just perfect for flying a kite!





Here is our kite!!  We had it up in the air for a very long time, it was soooo fun!!




Matthew's friend Bob had a verrry cool kite!!












Jackson and Robbie just came to play and have fun with their sisters!





It was a very fun day, and all day long I had the song in my head from Mary Poppins .... "Let's go fly a kite.... up to the highest heights ...."

Sunday, April 5, 2009

MATTY PLAYS THE CUPPIANO

This was Matthew's talent act, at our school's Talent Show Fundraiser. We knew there would be several kids playing the piano in the talent show, so he wanted to do something special and out-of-the ordinary! He came up with the idea of playing cups (which we named the "cup piano" or cuppiano) after being inspired by a youtube video of someone playing a short song of jingle bells.

He auditioned by playing Jingle Bellswith 5 tall drinking-glasses, with 5 different levels of water, which he had tuned to the real piano until he got the "levels" right. He used two plastic cooking spoons to hit the notes. The talent show crew loved it, and put him in the show, but they asked him to play two songs instead of one. UH-OH!!! We needed a lot more cups!!! We dug out every wine glass we had, plus purchased a box of big water goblets from walmart, and ended up with a very nice lineup of 12 wine glasses with different levels of water.

Once we had more notes, Matthew decided to cut out the original jingle bells song ... and instead worked out the notes to play the very sweet tunes of Amazing Grace, and Carol of the Bells. It was a very cool Talent Show!!