New House, early stages

Here are the long-awaited, much anticipated pictures (and videos!) of our new house at 1500 E. Thomas Rd. in Wheaton, IL.

Here are some minute-long videos that I took with my new digital camera of the upstairs and downstairs for those that want the tour. :) Sorry if you get motion-sick after watching them!

Upstairs


Downstairs

These are pictures of our new house either before we moved in or just after.

Jillian by the front door from upstairs view.

Elliott getting into trouble, playing with the toliet, in our master bath (small, but MASTER!)

Brooks and Elliott check out the kid's tub in the mirror; kid's bathroom has double sinks. Yay!

Master bedroom. Salem blue

Jillian's room--precious pink


Elliott's room--it's a boy!

Brooks mowing the lawn for the first time--front yard.

Neighbors in our living room for Jillian's birthday; view from kitchen

Same: living room, but you can see the fireplace.


BIG kitchen, complete with many guests to show just how big it is. :)

You can't see the stainless steel appliances, except for the frigde to the left, but you can see outside!

The most recent picture: the new table and chairs. Paint color is green crystal. Loving this room!

I'm finding that my style is country yet modern. Not quite Martha Stewart...more like Martha Stewart on a budget while trying to be a little green and not throw away something good just because it doesn't match perfectly or something. Nonetheless, love the table! Linda says it has formica on the top--good for families with small children. :)

I'll try to put up the newer pictures soon. We are hoping to go to the Brookfield Zoo today with the kids on Labor Day.

Orff Level I Fun!

After spending two weeks downtown for my Orff Level 1 class, I thought I'd share a few photos. I LOVED it and am thinking about doing Level 2 in the future, but not next year--I have too many other classes to take for my graduate program! Yes, I officially started at VanderCook over the summer. Next year, I will take classes "full time" (more like undergraduate scheduling) for about 6 or 7 weeks. It will be a very busy time, but at least it will be stuff I can use for my job! :)

We did a lot of fun group activities, and at the end of the day we had "Special Topic". We started with the "drumming guy". Here's a group on African drums.

Here's a poem from Dr. Suess that we read and put fun instrument parts to.

Recorder class: we learned about pentatonic scales and playing them on recorder and notating them (or not!)


Here was a really cool poster for a cool silly noise activity in recorder class.

Here are some students playing "metals" on drum day.


This is notation for a xylophone piece we performed called Hiya.

Here's the drum guy showing a real African xylophone.

And a real djembe, and some real African rhythms on the board behind him.

This is my friend, Valerie, who took Intro to Orff with me in March. She's really great! She played tenor recorder in our recorder ensemble.

Brooks came out to see our "sharing day" (aka performance)

I was so happy to see him and share with him!