June 2019 – Family Highlights

Highlights

• Evan graduates from preschool
• Evan turns 5!
• Family trip to see the Sequoias

This month was packed with a lot of big moments. We helped Evan celebrate the end of his preschool career and his turning 5! He also played in his first piano recital. The month was made complete with a great visit from Gran and Grandpa.  We also took a family road trip to Sequoia National Park. In sports, swim lessons, football and a basketball season all started!

Piano Recital
June started with the arrival of Gran and Grandpa. We did a quick celebration of Mama’s birthday from the day before, then started what was a mini marathon of events. The first was Mama’s studio recital for her voice and piano students. And for the third year in a row, Calan was on the program to play piano. This year was extra special as his still just barely 4-year-old brother joined him in the performance. The two played their cute duet together. Truly precious to say the least. Calan played several pieces including one he’s been playing for the past few months “Free As the Wind”, a classical piece, and then a song Dada wrote back in college, that he transcribed and made as his own. 

Summer School…
After taking a break, the boys started their “summer school” routines on June 10. In music, Calan continued to play piano and restarted violin again after a small break. He incorporated a little more improvising in both. In science, we had fun watching the caterpillars Evan got for his birthday get bigger in their little habitat. They would begin emerging a couple weeks later, with only a couple really surviving. Evan also caught a bug in a new bug catcher contraption he got as a present for his birthday. Calan is still doing Prodigy math, and is about 39% of the way through the 6th grade level. 

Trip to Sequoia National Park
Our family road trip this summer turned out to be a winner. Thanks to Mama’s careful planning, it was a trip that was perfect for our crew’s speed at the moment and something the boys just loved: being outdoors and exploring. Also, being relatively close to home was a huge plus.

We left on Father’s Day (6/16) after packing up our rental car from the Toyota dealership. We took our time heading to the Central Valley where we would stay in Tulare. We made stops at the honey bee farm between Fillmore and Piru and a rest area along the way to Tulare. The kids had been to the honey farm before, and it was too much fun trying out different flavors of honey. We also ate our lunch there; munching on sandwiches Mama packed while ducking into the shade as best we could to get out of the hot, early summer sun. Frequent stops and stretches were good since Dada was nursing a slipped disc and couldn’t sit for too long.

We made it the Comfort Suites in Tulare in the late afternoon. The boys were in their usual excited mode when arriving someplace new, especially a hotel. Once settled, we ventured over The Habit for dinner. The Habit would be our go-to place for nightly dinners for the week. It was relatively cheap and offered the boys safe and agreeable dinner choices.

Over the next four days we ventured up the mountain from Tulare into the park where the boys thoroughly enjoyed taking in the gigantic trees, looking for and spotting animals and swimming in Lake Kaweah and the hotel pool. Each day we set out a plan on where to go and what to explore in the park. Most of where we went in the park was about an hour and fifteen minutes away from the hotel, so it wasn’t too bad. It was definitely worth the money saved versus staying closer! The car rides were filled with anticipation of what we’ll see with a soundtrack of good music playing through the speakers (the boys eventually identifying their favorite songs in the playlist such as “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”)

The trip experience was great, prompting many requests of doing a similar trip again soon. Some big impressions from the trip included seeing the largest tree on Earth in General Sherman, the first time swimming in a real lake, and a treacherous drive of 10 minutes or so when we took a wrong turn onto a side road leading down to a camp. The problem was the road was just wide enough for one car, twisting along the face of a large hill, with a steep, rocky incline on one side and drop-off of more than hundred feet on the other with no guard rails. Of course before we could get to where we needed to turn around, a truck came from the opposite direction. Needless to say, it was a very tense moment figuring out how to get by each other. Of course we survived and have a little story to remember and associate with our vacation.