High School Easterns Champions

Hi everyone. It's a quiet Saturday afternoon after 2 back-to-back Ultimate Tournaments. Declan's team CHS Ultimate has won 18 straight games, swept 3 tournaments and has emerged as the HS Easterns Champions, a long-sought title. It is so fitting that CHS won in the 40th year of ultimateplay in Maplewood-South Orange.

This link to the tourney results describes the weekend better than I can:http://hs-easterns2008.upa.org/results/open

Magda arrived home safely from Mt Holyoke with an up to the gunwales (ceiling,really) Beetle. She's turning right around Monday, flying to Paris, then on by train to Montpelier to visit her close friend Sarah Keeping. She'll be back the 31st, then starts a new job waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in Maplewood.

Declan will be a counselor 2 weeks in July for a Music camp @ Stokes State Forest, 2 miles from the cabin.

More about July 4th week soon!

A follow-up to MUDDERS' DAY

Hope all of you are having a great Saturday!

Grandma wishes to thank all of you for your MD cards, flowers, treats, telephone calls and dahlia bulb(s)--and the great video of Freya and the message which described MD 5/11 on Middle Fork.

It has been a busy week with Maura here while she attended a workshop/seminar at the Country Inn west of Waukesha. Very favorable weather meant we spent a lot of time outside with transplanting and planting.
We are behind Casey with our squares but did get some seeds into each one, but no plants yet--still some frost danger. Susan was here for a few minutes this morning to bring Gma a hanging plant and a short visit. We did see both she and Jay on Tuesday evening when they came and had some supper with us and to have a visit with Maura. Assume you got home safely, Maura, when Mom left the message for you last evening.

Monday began with preparations to go to the MARTA--Milwauikee Area Retired Teachers' Assn. Spring Luncheon a the the downtown Hilton. Had a visit with Aunt Nancy Richter and she had already learned that we had been at EXPO to enjoy Charilie's drumming. That evening was our next to last Bible Study evening. We will conclude until fall after the last date, 5/19. Doing all the reading about those guys who lived so long makes us feel 0lder, too, we guess!!

Mark left early on Thursday to drive to Poughkeepsie to pick up Domino. Gpa went to Ft. A to be an overnight guest of Calvin and Capri. This involves an after school pick-up and for this trip a drive to Cambridge to take Calvin to his guitar lesson and then getting him to the HS for Behind the Wheel Driver Ed at 7 AM Friday morning. After that Capri and I had some bfst before I took her to school and then drove back to Big Bend.

Casey and Matt, hope your Alaska preparations are going well and that you will have had a good visit with Michele and David before you see us 2 weeks from today when we fly:

UAL 7698 Lv MKE 6 AM Ar Denver 740 AM 5/31/08
UAL 6611 Lv Denver 825 AM Ar Boise 1028 AM

Our return flights are:

UAL 582 Lv Boise 320 PM Ar ORD 741 PM 6/7/08
UAL 7995 Lv ORD 9 PM Ar MKE 949 PM

By the time we begin this trip, we should know how we are to going to be involved with graduation for Bridget and Cooper and that will be the first order of business on 6/8/07.

Must commend Declan for his very succesful weekend in Pittsburgh when his Ultimate squad was the top winner in the tournament(?)/meet. That had to be a very unique Mom's day
present for Lyn. A very hoarse Kevin provided us with the
highlights as they made the 'midnight' ride back to SO on Sunday evening.

Don't know why the FONT changed mid-stream? Gremlins??
Gma is grateful to all of you who remember the LARGE PRINT.
Thanks.

Gma picked the first rhubarb of the season and got some extra from Lucille Snyder and is making, as I write, Mrs. McKenna's Crunch recipe. (The file card written by Mrs. McK is now so faint that I typed a large print copy for Gma this AM. Hope I didn't have any typos). She plans to take it to a Mother-Daughter lunch at St. Joe's tomorrow which Susan, Bridget and Maura were unable to attend. She assures me that she will leave a portion for me here at home.

It is a great outdoor work day and as soon as I have a little lunch I will be outside again. Where has the morning gone??

Love and prayers for all of you,

Grandma and Grandpa

Happy Mudder's Day!

Freya is literally calling today "Mudder's Day," and it has been a pretty sweet one around here. She made me a little plaster-of-paris heart-shaped plaque with her handprint in the center of it--a perfect token of a two year-old's wishes to her mommy. So you know I'll be cherishing that one forever.

I was served a great breakfast, then we went and ran some errands. Freya took a nice nap (a gift in and of itself), and Matt and I continued the war against our ugly back yard. We've got a contractor coming this week to extend our patio. We want to get it done before the Coloradans and the K9 Kontingent arrive for Memorial Day weekend, so that we can have a nice barbeque or two out there. We planted our tomatoes and peppers and potatoes and 14 basil plants, and we are hoping for a better harvest than last year. It's easy to be optimistic at the beginning of the growing season.

Matt made homemade pizza for dinner, and then we had a cake that he and Freya baked for the special day. You can see quite a bit of the frosting on Freya's face in the video below, where Freya and I kind of recap the day.

We hope everyone out there had a great Mother's Day--we're sending lots of good thoughts and love to you all.

Casey, Matt & Freya

Hi to all from Big Bend----will begin with a report on Bridget. Mom spoke briefly with Jay this evening and he said she was doing OK--had seen the doctor and he OKed her for her usual schedule, with moderation. She had been at her newspaper job this afternoon and was at the Alpine Valley job this evening.

Glad to have our busy week at the WREA convention at Olympia at Oconomowoc behind us--a lot of driving, but it worked out well. Mom went with me for the Board dinner on Monday evening. I went early on Tuesday for the Board meeting and came back to BB to bring Mom back for the opening session/banquet that evening. We were both there together all day on Wednesday and I returned alone for the session that ended after lunch on Thursday. The days were cool, but driving conditions were good.

Unexpectedly, the week ended on a high note. David had called
on last Thursday to tell us that we had a chance to experience/hear/enjoy Charlie's Drum Line performance on Saturday night. Sheboygan North was having an all school Fair with a long evening of events which included two appearances of the Drum Line--one at 8:30 and the second at 9:45. We drove up Saturday evening and went to the school with Susan, David and Finn. The place was a zoo with young people and parents with things going on everywhere. We did enjoyed a good portion of the early performance and had good auditorium seats for the second.
All that drumming left us wide awake, so the drive home which ended at 12:10 AM, Sunday was no problem. BRAVO, Charlie!!

Had a phone visit with Kevin last evening. They had invited us to come to Pittsburgh for the Mothers' Day weekend to watch Declan in his last Ultimate competition as a Columbus student.
We decided that this was just to much to try to do with all that driving. The team is doing very well and they had a first place at a competition at Amherst last weekend.

Maura has a workshop she will be attending in the Milwaukee area next week. She will be staying with us and we expect to see her on Sunday afternoon.

Mark is leaving late next week to bring Domino home from Vassar. We will be with Capri and Calvin overnight on Thursday
as they begin to prepare to have Domino home with them, again!

Yard and garden work is progressing well and we are thankful for the many good days we've had to be outside. Hope to get some remixed soil into the raised bed boxes tomorrow and get some seeds in before the end of the week. Concentrated on dandelions today. Dug out every one in bloom, or had blossom in the front and side yards so that they would not go to seed. Some of the plants looked so nice I was tempted to sort some out for a
vegetable dish.

Time for bed!

Love and prayers, expecially for those who will be traveling this weekend.

Mom and Dad

Its Thursday night and Bridget is feeling alot better. This was not the way she expected to spend her 18th birthday. She's not sure if she is going to try to go to Prom on Saturday, but she thinks she'll go to school tomorrow at least for awhile. We are pretty exhausted from the excitement of the week, but she seems to have come through swimmingly. The scar is pretty small and unobtrusive.

We missed one awards banquet, but there are two more coming up, so we should have a chance to celebrate a few more times. The departure for Paris is June 9th which will come up very quickly. I have a feeling that the summer will be a blur!

On our one nice weekend we managed to get the pier in, but the bench that we kept on in blew into the lake during the storm last weekend. That will be interesting to get out. That thing has been on the pier for years and never moved, so that wind must have been really strong.

I had a lovely evening in Sheboygan last Friday. I have quarterly meetings across the street from the R-O's, so I try to arrive right at dinner time. Strong storms were coming through so I stayed till 8 PM and still ended up driving home in some unpleasant weather. Bridget started feeling sick around 3 on Saturday and called us at our friend's house at 7pm in pain and in tears. We ate a quick dinner and came home, but by the time we got home, her pain had localized in the right side of her abdomen and she was warm. We took her right to Burlington where she was imaged and poked and prodded until the surgeon decided it was probably appendicitis and took her into surgery. They were trying to rule out another ovarian cyst and her appendix wasn't visible on the CT scan. It did turn out to be inflamed, though. This was our third all nighter in the last couple months. We must not be as old as we think we are. Everyone in the ER and the hospital thought she was a great patient and when the nurse asked for her weight and height, the nurse said "Oh I wish I could be you for even a day!" It was pretty funny.

I had conversations with Matt, Michele and Kevin in the next couple of days which was nice. Sounds like we are not the only ones having psychotic weather. It sounds like it will be another iffy weather weekend, so our yard will probably continue to look pretty raggedy. Hope everyone is doing well! Love, Susan