Ula's Wedding

Ula is now married.

It was 54 degrees and rainy when the outdoor wedding took place last Thursday, but Ula has always had an affinity for water and a friend told me that rain on your wedding day is good luck.

The father of the groom did an amazing job of making sure that everyone stayed dry, by providing a canopy for the ceremony and several large beach umbrellas for the guests.












May I present, the newly married couple:


My children:


The beautiful bride and the proud mother-of-the-bride:


The next couple to show up to use the stage at Wolfe Park:


The wedding may have been damp and chilly, but the reception at Psycho Suzi's was tropical.



The food and the vegan chocolate cake were excellent!





I made a compilation of the short videos I took during the ceremony and the dancing at the reception, but this video needs to stand alone. This is the father-daughter dance that set the tone for the other fun that was to follow.



Random wedding fun:




Blaze arm wrestling one of the bride's maids:


This was an incredibly long road trip, in a short amount of time. I'm so tired that it's hard to think straight, but I'm very glad we went. We picked up my mother in Illinois and took her with us and I'm glad we did that, too. She kept talking about how much fun the reception was.

May the Fourth Be With You!

It's Star Wars Day.

Thanks to 1 a.m. cookie baking, this is what our lunch looked like today:

Free Comic Book Day 2015

Thanks to free comic book day, we have lots of new reading material. DH went with us this year, which really added to the variety of new comic books be brought home.



In Tallahassee there are three stores that I know of that participate in Free Comic Book Day and each store does it differently. We stopped at two of them today.

The Bookshelf on Monroe St. is the most fun store to go to. Costumed super heroes roam around the store and customers are encouraged to show up in costumes.





Free face painting was also available.



The free comic books are pre-bundled into bags, so you do not have a choice of which comic books you will receive, but the bags are sorted into comics that are appropriate for children and ones that would be better for adults.

Comics and related items were also 25% today.

In addition to comic books, The Bookshelf is a used book store, with a good selection and reasonable prices.



There is a pretty green space right behind the store and a picnic table, where we were able to look through the contents of our bags of comics.



Our second stop was The Cosmic Cat in Railroad Square, which is a very small store that sells only comic books. There was a waiting line to get inside, because the size of the space meant that a limited number of people could fit in the store.



I liked their system of distributing comic books. They had the free comics laid out on shelfs and each person could choose any three.  This would have caused chaos in a larger store, but because this was such a limited number of people at a time, it was very well monitored and titles were being promptly restocked as soon as they started to run low.

To add to the festive atmosphere of Free Comic Book Day, MAYhem Sweets and Treats, the cake pop food truck, sat just outside the door.

When we left Cosmic Cat, Blaze and I took turns with the camera and posing at the sculptures in Railroad Square.





We ended up with three duplicates (not shown), but here are the titles we came home with:

Shakespeare in the Park

It rained most of the day and I decided that the picnic I had planned wasn't going to be possible, but the rain stopped just in time for us to go to Cascades Park for the Southern Shakespeare Festival's free performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, inspired by the 1960s. The sun even peeked out for awhile, just as we were leaving the house.



Before the main show, there was a group of middle and high school students called the Bardlings, who performed scenes from the play. The sound system was not working right and turned off on a couple occasions, but the kids did a great job of continuing the scenes without being distracted.







The 1960's interpretation of a Midsummer Night's Dream was great! A live band played music from the 1960s, that was well suited to the scenes and characters, and was a lot of fun to listen to.

Titania sings "Respect":


Blaze was laughing so hard during some of the play, that I felt compelled to hush him, for the sake of the people around us.



On the way home, we talked about how things would have been different if Blaze's older siblings had seen this version as their first play.

 A Midsummer Night's Dream was the first play I ever took my older children to. Miko was 3 and Ula was 5. We were spending the winter in Palestine, Illinois and I took them to Lincoln Trail College to watch a performance. A harpist played before and during the play and it made a huge impression on the children. I was the audience for many short plays that the children put on that winter, but every single one started with the playing of the lap harp.

Happy Easter!

I hope everyone had a good Easter weekend!
We've been having beautiful weather.


This year's Easter egg dying:

I painted and decorated this large plastic egg for Blaze:

Blaze's Easter treats, along with the plate shown in the next photograph:


Sunday afternoon tea:


As you can see from Blaze's clothes, we did not get dressed up and go anywhere for Easter. We had a nice relaxing day at home.

Civil Rights in the Sunshine State

 

After the homeschool International Fair on Friday, we walked over to the Museum of Florida History. Most of the museum was closed for remodeling, but the special exhibit that we were there to see was still open. Civil Rights in the Sunshine State shows the struggle for civil rights here in Florida. There were photographs, artifacts, and videos. There was also a scavenger hunt for students, to make the exhibit more engaging.





















Entry into the museum and the exhibit is free. The exhibit will be at the museum until April 5.

The Tallahassee Homeschool International Fair

Blaze finished his project about the Vietnam War yesterday.



Today, he presented it at the International Fair at the Leon County Public Library.





The board included photographs that my uncle had sent home during the war and some that DH's father had taken.

The t.v. on the right, was made from a cereal box. It held Blaze's Kindle, which was playing actual news coverage of the war. The paper to the left of the t.v. (which is hard to read, since the pencil writing doesn't show up well in photographs) says that 90% of all American households had television by 1960. The paper just below the t.v. talks about how television news affected popular opinion by bringing the horrors of war into our living rooms.

The rest of the children at the International Fair did a wide range subjects and presented them in a variety of ways. Some had boards like Blaze, some gave Power Point presentations, some even had food to share with the group.





























I'm very happy with how Blaze's display looked and am proud of him for all the writing he has done for it (writing is not easy for Blaze).