First Impressions of Siena...

Our friends joined us for breakfast at our hotel, then we all took a train down to Siena, in the heart of Tuscany, where we were staying together for four nights. While we had visited Steve and Carolyn several times since we moved, the four kids hadn’t actually all been together since November 2005. Not surprisingly, the kids bonded instantly and had a lot of fun together. Also not surprisingly, we took a lot of photos of them.

Off to Tuscany...

Just a few hours after school got out for the year, us girls headed to the airport to fly to Florence. Jimmy had to work and was unable to come along to meet up with Carolyn, Steve, Samantha and Zach, close friends from North Carolina who were travelling around Europe for a month. We were supposed to arrive at 10:30 p.m., but our flight didn’t even depart until midnight; it was very weird seeing Schiphol shut down all around us as ours was the last departing flight for the night. Although we didn’t arrive at Hotel Alba Palace until 2:30 a.m., we were very pleased to see we were staying in such a beautiful and historic room.

The Lion King...

For months, the girls attended Showstoppers, an after school club, and complained about working on The Lion King. Luckily, the hard work paid off when the group performed at the school’s year-end concert. In addition to the amazing singing and dancing, the make-up, costumes and lighting were also fantastic. We stupidly left our video camera behind, but Jimmy managed to capture this video on his iPad; it doesn’t really do the performance justice, but you’ll get the gist.

Some kids wore masks, but both of ours had facepaint instead. Time ran out before Ashlynn was completed, but you can see it didn’t matter. Both girls looked great and did an awesome job dancing.

One cool aspect of this club is that it was for all grades of the school. Ashlynn doesn’t usually have much of a chance to mix with the older students, so this was a nice chance to bond with some of the Year 12 and 13 (Junior and Senior) girls.

Kelly made a great zebra

Biology Trip to Switzerland...

For activity week at the beginning of July, Year 10 (9th grade) journeyed to Montreux, Switzerland. Ironically, my father was there at the same time to play with the Stanford Jazz Band at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Despite several teachers trying to figure out how to get Veronica into town so she could see him, it didn’t work out.

Since this was a biology trip, the kids conducted a variety of experiments in different climatic conditions including a river, meadow, mountain and glacier.

They took a gondola up the mountain and then a chairlift down to Glacier 3000, named for its location at 3,000 meters (9,850 feet). This trip was a lot of work compared to previous school trips, but Veronica still really enjoyed it.

Great Way to Travel...

Ashlynn was so excited about her overnight field trip to De Kaag, a nearby lake. Rather than go by bus, they traveled by boat from a dock near the school. How cool is that! You can see that the drawbridge on the Vliet had to be raised.

Ashlynn was all smiles upon her return the next evening. They spent the night in a hostel and spent the two days doing water sports. Her favorites were learning how to water ski and going on a 5-person sailboat.

Photographer Veronica...

Veronica really has gotten into photography and had a great time coaxing the kids into all kinds of interesting poses. Four nights later, she came with us into The Hague to photograph the Y13 (Senior) Ball until after 1 a.m. on a school night! 

Here is the video that she put together for the Y13 Ball. The Bye Bye Blue video is especially cool as it’s a time lapse that lasts just 1.5 minutes (Jimmy and Veronica had set up a camera to take one photo per minute during the event).

Another Dance, Another Photo Studio...

Despite neither girl attending this year’s Bye Bye Blue Dance, Jimmy still volunteered to take squish pics. And, shockingly, his father arrived from Atlanta to help out again and spend the weekend with us. Jimmy’s new and improved hanging system for the backdrop was still complicated, but it worked out great.

Ashlynn came by after Ultimate Frisbee to help out and Andrew even stopped by after his trumpet lesson and helped place mats under the giant fabric.

While Jimmy and Veronica took turns photographing the groups, I roamed around and took candid shots.