Friday Folder Funnies

I love going through the kids's Friday Folders from school (except that it results in more piles of paper that have to be sorted, saved and recycled).  Here are a few cute finds from this week's work:

Spelling sentence: Look at the cute chick.

My Invention (accompanied by detailed plans): Tape holder that you nail to the wall (that includes something called the "rip platform.")

Kindergarden journal entry: "My gronop toot grod in."  Familiar with creative spelling?  Translates: My grownup tooth grew in. :)

Spelling sentence: I like my big red lip.

Art project: Giant heart illustrated with a little girl and table full of presents with the caption: "Love is macen presints." Translates: Love is making presents.

 History lesson: George Washington rode horses.  And he was the first president.

Bullet Points

Well, there was no winner to my relatively uninspiring little contest! :)  She first tried to sweet talk me into sharing my Coke Zero, and then she decided to take matters into her own hands.  She was not successful in getting the cap off, but she sure tried and I sure got lots of pictures of it!  Does she look pleased with her find, or what?

On to my random thoughts for the day, in the form of bullet points.

• I heard lots of murmuring about how crazy it was that it snowed one morning last week.  BUT, you may remember that it snowed last March, too, so not so crazy.  Rella enjoyed it by blowing bubbles in the snow (not reflected in the pictures, but she has a great hat!)

• Today was preschool class picture day, but I didn't remember until I got to school.  We were late because Rella was pretty sure she didn't want to go, and when we got there something seemed odd.  All the kids were dressed to the nines.  Rella was dressed more to the sevens.  Cute playdress and leggings and matching Keens (which are ADORABLE on tiny feet!), but she also had a scrappy ponytail to hide her frizzy bed-head and milk on her face from breakfast.  Posed school pictures are really not my style, and I have a million better pictures of the kids, but for some reason I'm a sucker for them.  I fear that one day the kids will get after me because they don't have pictures from their early school days.  Ridiculous, but I'm still a sucker.  We'll see how these turn out.
• I have a terrible memory for getting things done until the last minute, when it's often too late.  I never remember to schedule haircuts, dental appointments, return emails, schedule dog grooming (we're dangerously close to the stage where velcro shoes will stick to his face), etc. until I'm desperate to have these things done and then have to wait for weeks.  Not sure that made any sense.  Suffice it to say I'm bad at that stuff.  BUT, I am pretty good at returning library books.  Go figure.
• I love reading to Fancy's class at school.  I always try to find a book that I can share some personal story about (like the book that was my favorite as a kid, the book my Mom rewrote the ending to, the book about class picture day and the goofy photographer, the book about a goat who ate healthy food [b/c my brother raises goats]).  Aren't they a cute bunch?  AND, I love all the hugs I am bombarded with when I arrive.

• I was asked to shoot another wedding this summer.  My knees are knocking!  Haven't decided if I'll do it yet, but I'm considering...
• I painted pottery this weekend and made myself a cute square platter with simple lime and white design on it.  THEN, I noticed a set of china in the Belk circular this weekend that will match it perfectly!  Too bad Spode figured out my design, first.  I coulda been a millionaire! Also, I discovered that painting pottery is very enjoyable!  It's so quiet and relaxing and satisfying!  Too bad it's also so expensive...
• All of my 3T spring hand-me-down girls' clothing are missing.  What a shame... :)
•  I'm in a mood for new spring clothes.  I'm also in a mood to jog or do something active, but I have a bum hip that is finally quiet and I'm afraid to aggrivate it.  What a shame...
• These bullets are boring.  But thanks for stopping by!

Guessing Game

OK, dear readers.  Let's have a contest.  Any guesses as to what dear little Rella was concentrating so hard on in this picture?  I'll give you some hints since I cropped a lot of the picture out (note, these hints are completely unhelpful...:).  1) She was wearing her leotard, tights and ballet slippers under that sweet sweater. 2) She was sitting on the steps. 3) She was having a super cute hair day and was in a fantastic mood and I was just so in love with her all day. :)

So what could she be working on? Leave me a comment with your guess, and I'll reveal either the winner or the answer, well, whenever I get around to my next post!  And if you somehow manage to guess it, I will most certainly give you a prize!  But only if you guess it.  And I'm not worried... 

Connecting

This weekend Geof and I have had a lovely get-away.  The kids are just up the road with grandparents, no doubt having a fantastic time.  And we are just down the road, playing tourist in a town where we've always been anything but tourists.  Lots of walking and relaxing and a little shopping.  Perfect.

Today we spent a very bright and sunny day on Jamestowne Island.  Thought it would be fun ot check it out after so many years have passed since we were last there (I'm thinking it had been since our first date, about 16 years ago!!!).  We're walking through the small museum, reading about the settlement, and, aha!  A whole section about William and Joan Pierce!  Very cool.  Then another small write-up about Joan and her lovliness and hard-working nature and the fact that she grew acres of figs (my mom and I also grow figs!).  Then a write-up about the adventures of Pierce's ship in Bermuda.  Anyway, all very interesting and made me feel a teensy bit connected.

Then we toured the settlement site and New Town site, and another aha!  There was the Pierce property, complete with signage and information about the family.  Here's the view of the river from the Pierce property:

We continued on and toured the church, the archaeological dig site of the recently found Fort and the Archaeum (museum of artifacts from the Fort). Here are some views of the church (reconstructed on the foundation of the 4th church at Jamestowne, the first stone church structure) and the Fort:

One portion of the Fort was marked with many of these crosses, indicating burial sites for many of the men who had arrived in the first wave of settlers to come to Virginia and perished in the late summer/fall of 1607.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is to provide a correction to the previous post about Joan Pierce and her 2-year-old traveling companion, Edith (and somehow it has just worked out that the correction occurs way down in the post.  I could run a newspaper after all!  Kudos to you for reading way down).  We found a book in the Archaeum gift shop that was a novel based on the life of Joan Pierce and her older daughter, Jane, who accompanied her to Jamestown and survived the "Starving Time." (Jane was the daughter who later married John Rolfe).  There was no mention in the book of little Edith Pierce (my family's descendent from Joan).  We came back to the hotel and did some more research.  Turns out I need a family fact-checker to go with the family genealogist.  Joan may not have been accompanied by a 2-year-old on her voyage to Jamestown.  She was accompanied by Jane and left a second older daughter, Cecily, home in England, perhaps to care for a younger sister, Edith (though we can't be sure of that yet).  Or, perhaps Edith's birth date was wrong and she was born in Jamestowne after Joan and William had settled here.  After our afternoon of research, the details are a little fuzzy, but it does seem that there was an Edith in the family.  But my awe of Joan still stands, whether she kept an elementary-aged girl alive during the first awful winter while wondering if Cecily and her 2-year-old were faring well across the Atlantic, or whether she gave birth to Edith later on.

Here I am in a really old tree on the Pierce home site.  Yes, I am wearing gigantic green beaded earrings.  I figured I could try something way out there since I wouldn't be seeing anyone I knew.  And now I am back to my trusty yoga pants, Life is Good t-shirt and little gold hoops and feeling much more like myself. :)  I think that if I had lived on this property and if I had had these earrings, I would have traded them to the Powhatan for cornmeal.  Yep.

Raising a 2 year old...

...400 years ago.  It's fun, funny, lovely and sometimes hair-raising and exasperating to be raising a 2 year old.  I know I sometimes post about the ridiculous stuff, the stuff that makes me think, "seriously!  Why am I havnig to deal with this?"  I'm finding it helps to take a step back (in this case a step WAY back) and put things into perspective.  Should I really bemoan a tantrum over pants with no pockets at Target, when A) I am able to go to a store that is 3 minutes from my house that provides me with just about everything I could ever need and definitely everything I don't need.  B) I have transportation to get me there. C) I have 3 healthy, (somewhat) educated children to accompany me there.  And so on.  The answer to the bemoaning question is definitely "no."  I imagine kids throughout the ages have whined, laughed, cried, sang, lied, hugged, spilled, cuddled.  But imagine dealing with all the hard stuff in circumstances where you aren't just trying to get the child to wear matching clothes or clean her plate or pick up his toys.  You're trying to survive and keep your precious charge alive with you. And you're on your own in a foreign place with your community dying around you.  I'd like to think that if I had to be that mother, God would equip me.  Well, actually, I know He would, I just don't know what that would look like.  The thought overwhelms me, especially when there are so many days when I take my eyes off God and try to equip myself to handle the life I'm living now, and I feel like I'm struggling to survive in what are relatively cushy cushy cushy circumstances.  I'm trying very hard this year to count my blessings and learn from what's hard.  To enjoy the smallnesses that can sometimes overwhelm, because someday I'll miss them.  And because the woman in the story to follow would surely tell me that she didn't go through all she went through so I could be content to bemoan blessings of abundance.

So with that introduction, please welcome my guest blogger for the day, Mr. Geof (who really needs a good blog name).  He's been knee-deep in genealogy research over the last few months, putting together lots of bits and pieces of family hisory that we've collected over the past several years and finding lots of interesting history.  Here's a part of my history:
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As the product of a family tree full of relatively recent (19th, some 18th century) and northern immigrants, the depth of Laura’s old Virginia roots has always intrigued me. To my knowledge, Laura doesn’t have a single ancestor who arrived in this country after it actually became a country. And most of them had been here for at least a hundred years by then.

I’m making I believe my second guest appearance on this blog to tell you the remarkable story of Laura’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great (that's 12) grandmother, Joan Phippen Pierce, and the role she played in the very early days of our nation 400 years ago this winter.

Joan and her husband Captain William Pierce were among what is referred to as the “Third Supply” of settlers to depart Plymouth for the Jamestown Colony in the summer of 1609. Capt. Pierce sailed aboard the Sea Venture with Christopher Newport, Thomas Gates and the as of yet unfamous John Rolfe, while his wife Joan and at least two daughters (Jane, about 9 years old, and Edith, age 2) traveled on a different ship. The fleet of nine ships was caught in a spectacular hurricane (that many believe was actually the inspiration for The Tempest). Eight of the ships made it through together, but the Sea Venture was separated and ended up nearly sinking, but landed at an uninhabited Bermuda. Captain Pierce and the other passengers of the Sea Venture spent the winter of 1609-1610 building new ships and also enjoying the endless bounty of food on the rich Bermudan islands. However, the remainder of the Third Supply had no way of knowing that their leadership had not perished in the storm.

Meanwhile, the approximately 450 settlers aboard those eight ships arrived in Jamestown in late summer of 1609. They arrived to find only about 75 settlers living in very poor conditions with little food and frequent hostilities from the nearby Powhatan. The 450 additional mouths to feed were not extremely helpful to the situation. The ensuing winter is one of the most horrific times in America’s entire history. Known as the “starving time”, only about 60 of all the residents of Jamestown survived until spring. While disease, particularly that pesky bubonic plague, was certainly prevalent, starvation was the main culprit. I’ll leave to the readers’ imaginations what horrors this led to, but trust me … whatever you’re thinking … it probably happened.

(Jamestown Colonists Dealing Out the Last Kernels of Corn During the Starving Time, 1609-1610)

Extraordinarily, Joan Pierce and her two daughters Jane and Edith somehow survived. I’d like to pause for a moment and just appreciate the magnitude of what she accomplished. I’ve got a 2-year-old. Somedays I wonder if we’re going to survive with our pantry full of cereal and macaroni and cheese. I picture little 2-year-old Edith Pierce doing the same stuff as our little Rella, only probably with markedly less cute clothes. She threw little temper tantrums, babbled about ridiculous things, announced that there were no woodpeckers in her bed (though perhaps there were!), and had accidents in her colonial pantaloons. And somehow this mom, Joan Pierce, made it through this horrible winter with her little girls in tact. I’m sure there are hundreds and thousands of similar stories of men and women surviving under conditions we can’t even imagine that helped establish our nation, but I must say I’m really proud that my children are descended from this extraordinary woman.

On May 23, 1610, a scene unfolded on the shores of Jamestown that 30 year-old Joan Pierce would never forget. Her husband and the other Sea Venture survivors, long assumed to be lost at sea and dead, arrived at the Fort quite healthy. While the joy amongst the Pierce family was surely long-lived, the implications for the colony were not so great. The new arrivals had only brought enough food for the Atlantic crossing, so they really just represented more mouths to divide already scarce rations amongst. Only two weeks after they arrived, the entire colony decided to pack up and return to England. They almost made it. While sailing out of the Chesapeake Bay, the party was met by a new fleet (The Fourth Supply) of settlers, this time with adequate supplies and leadership. They were turned around and returned to Jamestown Fort.

(Jamestown Fort, c. 1610)

Four hundred years ago this year.

Young Edith Parker (the 2 year old) grew up to marry Jeremiah Clements, a 1611 immigrant with his mother, who was the widow of a Virginia Company investor, Geoffrey Clements. They appear to have settled later at Wolfstelhome Towne, at present Carter’s Grove. Their son settled in Gloucester and the Clements family later relocated to Amelia (southwest of Richmond) and finally to Pittsylvania County in the mid-1800s. Laura’s great-grandmother was born a Clements in 1898.

Also interesting, Edith’s older sister Jane became the 3rd wife of John Rolfe after the death of his second wife, Pocahontas! So next time we’re at Disney, Fancy can tell Pocahontas that she is her great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- step-niece, or something like that. I’m sure that will be a special moment.

 And finally, interesting to probably only me, I find it really cool that Laura’s parents live only about 8 miles from the site of this drama. That means they have moved only about 100 feet every year!

Thanks for taking this break from the chronicles of our 21st century life to remember a spectacular life lived 400 years ago!

 (and Geof)

What's On Your Mind?

This was one of those projects that has been brewing in my head for a little while, but I just didn't have time to get it done.  Tonight I got it done.  I made a 2-page scrapbook layout of my 2009 facebook status updates. I started with December 2009 and worked backwards, update by update. It was quite tedious, and yet quite entertaining.  Kind of like watching that Seinfeld episode that takes place in reverse order.  Remember that one?  I'd read something and think, "what in the world was that about?" and then 2 updates earlier, "aha! now it makes sense!"  I tend to post a lot of updates throughout the day, and I'm finding it serves as a sort of diary.  It's interesting and eye-opening to see my days distilled to one-liners of sort.

Geof's doing a lot of genealogy research these days, and as I was cutting and pasting all these entries onto my page, I kept thinking of how interesting it would be to read such updates from, say, my Jamestown ancestors (though Geof says that the updates from the first winter would be quite disturbing as there was a lack of food and they had to - well, it wasn't pretty.  Another post on that later).  So now that these updates will make it into my family album, maybe one day someone will find it interesting. Or, at least admire the tedious work that went into preserving the updates.  And FYI - if you are thinking that this is a project you would like to undertake, I found that fb only lets you access updates for the last 6 months.  So get started now for 2010.  I am.

Here are my pages.  Not terribly interesting layouts since I needed to cram in lots of text.



And before you go hunting for your magnifying glass, I'll share a few highlights:

- Had the BEST Italian dinner with Geof and my new bag!
- Hot, tired, sweaty, belly full of berries and a car full of wiped out kids. How the end of a nice day in the country should be.
- oh no she didn't just color my new office door with a pink crayon!
- stood in the yard and ate figs off the tree for breakfast
- tests say ticker is fine
- EB keeps giving me hugs and tells me I am all better
- going to celebrate with some POANG, RIBBA and cinnamon buns with a candle on top!
- Bad dog.  Bad bad dog.
- EB's last statement of the day as I tucked her into her crib. "Well, there's no woodpeckers in my room!"
- Tomorrow is the first day of school for the third time this week!
- Y'all, I learned to make biscuits this morning.
- Preschool photo shoot in the rain
- Miss EB sets her cup of chocolate milk on the table and says, "I got no respect for this drink."
- I think the flu has hit our house
- Just renewed my web site.  Guess I'm sticking with this crazy little gig!
- I WILL NOT get out of my proofing chair and try to remember high school choreography to "Rhythm Nation."  I just won't do it.
- My 2 year old is too keyed up about Disney to sleep.
- She's so excited she's picked out which cheek she wants Minnie to kiss
- And we're now 3 for 3 on throwing up kids!
- We just passed the sock monkey outlet
- My diet today consisted of a chewy bar, mac and cheese, apple slices, and a pbj.  When did I turn 3?
- Searching for a deal on a dog sweater
- Thanks to the White Elephant is now a big fan of the Snuggie!
- Seems to me I used to know how to entertain 3 kids at home all day.
- Happy Birthday Jesus!

Want to read more? Head on over to facebook and look me up for daily updates! :)

Be My ...

...early Valentine.  Seems my last few posts have be void of pictures, so I must remedy this!  Enjoy some sweets. :)

Happy Valentine's Day!