Month: June 2009

Glen Oaks Graduation

Leilani did not graduate from Glen Oaks, but some of her friends did. The kids were supposed to sit still for 1/2 hour, and Leilani did not. She was the only kid who got up to protest (loudly and persistently) to her teacher that it was boring, and she also got up a second time to protested that she did not get a diploma, even though it was her last day of school… Her friend Isabella held her hand for most of the ceremony to keep her from getting up.

We came early, and she ran around with Paul

The looooong and boring ceremony

Isabella and Kathrine were Leilani’s favorite girlfriends… although she kept calling Annalise Katherine too…

Her teachers in her own class were Miss Julie (in this picture) and Miss Niveen

They had snack afterwards

Let Me Free….

Miss Patricia was her Yoga teacher and Miss Indira was another teacher there.

I think she’ll miss the 2 trees that she climbed on a lot…

We fit in better at her new school… Leilani loves it by now. And we have a learn-to-read at home system now, just in case (although I think they’ll do just fine at her new school). Leilani loves the reading system too. It is part of “The Gentle Revolution” series, and based on Montessori again, but a modernized version. She did not make a lot of progress reading this year, actually almost all her lower case reading went away, I recently watched a video from a year ago, and there she was reading lower case words, and now she is all uppercase – I was kind of disappointed when I tried with her (but the new system has no tests…)

Leilani has been really good this week. I think the big playground and the added activities make all the difference for her. She is really excited to go to her new school. I’ll write more when I’m sure the honeymoon phase is over. I was there for my first day of teaching today, it was mostly enjoyable and fun, and sometimes a little boring out on the playground (I did not get to play with Leilani, but in the area where I was there was a little boy who kept climbing and crying for help… I should have gotten the main teacher to help me I suppose, but instead I kept hovering around him, and he just did the same stuff for 1/2 hour… ), and I felt sorry for some of the school pets.

Little Gym Show Week

Fair in Pacifica

When we went home from the beach we stopped at the fair. We got $20 worth of rides, and Leilani enjoyed it a lot

Sonja got to go on a ride too…

Bye dragon, bye fair…

Juice, Juice, Healthy Juice

Andy writes a post out of order…

Last Sunday, after Leilani’s party, we had almost a full case of children’s juice boxes left over. We took them out of the ice cooler to dry and Leilani was helping me put them away. As we were doing so, Leilani said she could be a juice vendor, I suppose because it looked like we had as many as on a store shelf (a regular store, not Costco where they actually came from).

But with the cooler still full of ice, I immediately thought of an ice cream vendor, like the ones we see every time we go to a park now (thank goodness Leilani knows they sell bad ice cream). I asked Leilani if she wanted to go sell the juice at the park, just like the ice cream vendors, and she immediately asked if she could ring the bell.

So we put the juice back in the cooler, and put the cooler in our scavenged wagon. Everyone contributed to the idea, Leilani got some balloons also left over from the party, Sonja wrote a sign and had the idea to make it a fundraiser for Leilani’s new school, and I found a bell. And then we were off.

Leilani actually walked all the way to the park, only riding on the way home. I practiced with her how to offer the three flavors of juice and tell people the price. When we got to the park, there wasn’t the huge crowds we had seen on Saturday, but it was sunny and lots of kids were at the playground. We walked slowly through, with Leilani ringing the bell. People looked, saw the signs, but nobody came running to buy from us. Fortunately, there were some baseball games further in the park, so we just kept going. By then, I figured Leilani needed to advertise some more and I told her to shout “Juice, juice, healthy juice.” I was willing to organize everything and pull the wagon, but she had to do the selling. But there still weren’t that many people around and nobody bought anything.

After maybe 20 minutes, Leilani got tired of not selling and wanted to play. We parked the cooler in the shade and ran around for a while, playing chase in a quiet part of the park. I had to get Leilani to focus on the juice business again, but we eventually went back through the park. This time there were more people and one of the mothers watching a baseball game bought a juice. It turns out, the lady also writes a blog about living in San Bruno and took Leilani’s picture with the juice wagon as well–look for the San Bruno Life blog link in the list to the right.

But it was too little, too late. Leilani was getting tired, and we still didn’t sell anything on the main playground, I guess everyone expects ice cream and everyone has juice already. Leilani wanted to stop and play, but I thought it was awkward to just leave the cooler there and run around. So we walked home and soon Leilani was riding on top and drinking a juice. I took the picture of her above back at home, holding the first dollar she earned (almost) by herself. I had a juice too, while I was putting the juice away again, so at least we got rid of 3 of them.

I’m not quite sure what Leilani thinks about selling. She had lots of fun, but I could tell she was disappointed we didn’t sell more–but how to make her understand the problem of demand and marketing on her first try? It’s an important skill to learn, for both her and the parents, because starting with her new school, we have about 15 years of fundraising ahead of us.

What is God?

Now that Leilani has pondered the question “What is Death?” for a year and a half, followed by a 3 months break she has a new one: “What is God?” (and “Why do people go to church to pray?” “Is praying the same as blessing?”…)

She has a tendency to repeat questions until she gets a good answer – unfortunately there are questions that have none, at least none that I know… At least I tried to explain what I think I know…

I talked about our “blessings” before on the blog – we usually bless food, the people who prepared it and helped it grow, the rain and he air and the earth and the sun that made it grow, our friends and family, animals, good and happy things… but recently Leilani blesses new things. A few days ago it was “The whole world”… then “The whole world and the Garden where the Shama lives” [the Garden is the inner world where we sometimes do guided meditations] and then “I bless the One” (not a male or female One but a gender-neutral One), she spoke German, and Andy wanted to know what she blessed, and we kind of interrupted the blessing and asked several times to get a clearer answer because it seemed to strange a concept for a 3 year old… we are pretty certain she meant oneness (Einheit or Einssein)