GLC

In our bed

How many grownups do you see in the grownup bed?

Camping in the house

Becoming a mermaid

Making their own breakfast

Strange times

Starting Kindergarten in the Pandemic

Mina will be attending Westerly Creek Elementary.  We moved to this very specific area in Stapleton (now renamed Central Park) so that she could attend close by, but unfortunately for Dan, he will still be biking every morning to take the kids to daycare. 

Fortunately for us, our daycare is accommodating the school age kids, and have been able to hire a teacher to help kids get onto classes and get on their zoom meetings.  I honestly don't know what we would have done otherwise. Despite our neighborhood being chock full of kids, everyone has found different solutions - one of our neighbors has a nanny, another has joined a school Teaching Pod, another is a teacher and is going to teach her daughter, and another is a school principal somewhere else and managed to get her daughter enrolled there. 

Westerly Creek school gave us a chromebook and we sent that, as well as all her school supplies, to Knowledge Beginnings (KinderCare).  The first week was a bit of a rocky start, with the daycare teachers not realizing where and when Mina had to be at her classes, but hopefully it'll get better.  More importantly, it does seem a bit nuts that we have to expose our kids to daycare germs AND not get a super great kindergarten experience, but it could be worse. 

Getting familiar with her new computer. I'm impressed at how quickly Mina picked up the touchpad and how to navigate around.

These kids are champions. They made it almost all the way to darcare (about 2 miles) on their respective modes of transportation. 

Camping, Cherry Creek State Park

We took our first family camping trip.  We eased into it by staying pretty close to home at Cherry Creek State Park which is built around a reservoir right in Denver.  It only took us about 20 minutes to reach.  The weather was absolutely perfect during the day, and we took a nice long walk to the reservoir beach.  At night, though, we had some surprisingly gusty winds that buffeted our tent and kept the grownups awake and frozen.  The morning saw us all with dirt mustaches from all the grit blowing through.  

Dry run - sleeping in the backyard 

Got the new tent set up and a nice dinner of cucumber sandwiches

Testing the trees to see if any of them are whispering secrets, like those in the Enchanted Wood

Hanging at the beach

Washing our feet in the fancy pump

Fabulous dirt mustaches

Wall of Vines

Dan is a good steward of the house.  He has changed all the lightbulbs to LEDs, has a strict eye on the water heater, has equipped us with a fancy thermostat, and a thousand other things I don't even know about. He realized that the South side of our house gets a lot of sun, so we figured vines would be a natural and simple solution to keep the heat out.  

 

Before: bare and hot

Building two boxes for the plants

Helping

Building frames with chicken wire stapled onto it

Ta da.  We planted some Boston Ivy and are hoping that once it grows it'll really leaf out and turn a lovely red color

Dan's Birthday

The spread

Plus some yummy care packages in the mail from New Jersey and Singapore with a variety of sausages and cheeses. 

 Dan wanted to watch Star Wars for his birthday treat.  We were only five minutes into the movie, but as you can see, Rowan was not having fun at all. 

James and Kat

A few days after we moved to Denver we randomly ran into a couple from Rochester.  They attended the Mayo graduate program at the same time we did, and they often played with us on "Bluecardi", our lab soccer team. James and Kat also had kids at the same daycare as us, which is how we met them.  

We hadn't had a chance to go to their home yet because of the pandemic, but also because Liam, their elder son, was recovering from a pretty significant brain surgery.  He seems absolutely fine now though, so that's good. 

Liam (3) and Mason (1). For some reason, Rowan and Liam decided to be naked the whole time. 

Garden of the Gods

We drove up to Colorado Springs to visit the "Garden of the Gods", a picturesque public park that is very family friendly, especially during COVID, because you and drive and walk through different areas of the park.  There are huge, magnificent red rocks in very strange formations all around that are very unique to see. 

View from the visitor's center

Climbing around on the rocks

Managed to find a backroad (quite by accident) that took us all the way up.

Wrapping it up