Grammie Camp with Group 3, The Babes

This group of three girls is so much fun! They are all artistic, responsible, creative and love each other!

Claire, Eliza and Hazel are getting old enough to be quite incredible with music, art and gymnastics and know how to have fun!

We had a positively magical evening together!  After our scripture event and our happys and sads for the year, Josh joined us. He is a genius when it comes to the universe, star gazing and knowing so much about the cosmos! 

First he gave us an astonishing lesson on the computer about the stars and space. The numbers and scope is beyond belief. The girls were wowed!

This guy was born to teach! He had them in the palm of his hand!  And the best part is that you can tell how much he loves teaching…and the kids!

We sat out on the deck at the Lighthouse that night on a perfect black night with no moon and were in awe as he pointed out all the constellations with his amazing laser pointer. Cuddled up in a big down comforter, it was a night that none of us will ever forget!

The next morning we listened to the fun music that they had been assigned which was Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens. We had so much fun listening to this wonderful collection together. It was written to provide a little fun for Saint-Saens’ serious students. The songs are delightful! Ask them about the Elephant, the Swan, the Aquarium and they’ll tell you some pretty cool stuff!

From there we went right on to our own talent show. Hazel played beautiful music on the piano including an original piece that is incredible, Eliza did a lovely violin solo from her Suzuki repertoire and then we had a great time playing one together. So fun! Claire demonstrated her amazing gymnastics abilities on the lawn. That girl is like an elastic!  Remarkable!

Unfortunately we have this well-recorded….on video, which I don’t know how to insert! You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Our work project was combined this year with our ancestor stories as these girls completed the painstaking project of re-labeling the ancestor tree and putting current pictures on the branches of all the new kids on the tree since we last updated. It was fun and I think they learned some good stories about their ancestors in the process!

We ended with having a good time with a fashion book for each of them that Aniston has loved and thought they would enjoy. They had a great time with their incredible design abilities!

Thanks for sending me this picture Eliza, but I don’t expect to see you in these particular clothes below any time soon ! 

How I love these girls. They are a pure delight! And thanks to Josh for adding so much to our Grammie Camps this year! 

The Babes and the Princesses

Because our numbers of grandchildren are swelling, Groups 3 (the Princesses) and Group 5 (the Babes) began their Grammie Camps together. The older girls were tutors and the younger ones were Tutees. The help of those older girls was priceless!

We started with little gifts for the little girls. Story books with their own little plastic CD players with three princess song CDs was a real hit!

The music for this group was The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies from the Nutcracker. Thanks to a delightful friend who owns a designer costume factory in China, we had some pretty cool costumes as they danced to the music. Perfect sugar plum fairies!

 

The dance was spectacular with the Babes joining the Princesses for the splendor of Tchaikovsky!

Next we had a talent show. Since these girls are bursting with talent we were all thrilled with the performances:

After the older girls helping the little girls learn about our ancestors who are buried in the Bloomington Cemetery, we stopped at the Bear Cave for dinner and some shakes on our way to search for the gravestones of my parents, grandparents, great grandmother and a cousin who died because they couldn’t get him a new drug called penicillin in time.

They found the graves lickety split and now know more about their ancestors than maybe their parents do.

Here lies my father Roy Jacobson, born in 1892, a saint, a farmer with a life full of hard labor and many hardships along with the joy. He was the 2nd of ten children with goodly parents and profound love for the earth. 

And here is my pizzazy mother who had a passion for music, sports and people. She influenced the lives of at least 1000 school children and 1000 piano students as well as all of her progeny. Two of these girls are named for her!

My grandparents were true pioneers and here they lie with Uncle Jay who died at age 18.

My wonderful Grandmother left Denmark after joining our church with her husband five small children. After burying their 14 year old daughter before they left, they entered the ship to America in Liverpool along with their remaining five children. Someone got on the ship with the measles and three of those children were buried at sea and a fourth died just as they sighted the Statue of Liberty and was buried in NY. She walked across the plains 1000 miles pregnant and then was sent with her husband to settle Bloomington in the 1860’s. Her tenth and last child was my grandfather who was born in this little town in a one-room log cabin in the dead of winter.

We had to leave rather quickly because we were being swarmed by mosquitos and we needed to find a bathroom right away! 

After our journey to the land of our ancestors we delivered the little princesses back to their parents and the old girls (The Babes)  continued with their portion of Grammie Camp at the Lighthouse.

Their special gift this year since they are all artists was an acrylic art set which they were over the moon about. Wish I’d have taken one more picture here as they are so blurry, but just imagine it was because they were so thrilled that they couldn’t sit still (for sure, it wasn’t me)!

After a nice breakfast out on the deck overlooking the lake, we got down to the business of art and music.

Their music this year, which they had been listening to was Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky. The story goes that Mussorgsky’s dear friend who was an artist died and he decided to compose a tribute to him by chosing his choosing his favorite pictures and imagining that he was walking around the art gallery where they were displayed and composing what he felt as he looked at the pictures. Between each picture there is a promenade as he moves from one picture to the next. The girls painted what they felt when they heard the music. The pictures were titled things like The Gnome, The Old Castle, The Hut of Baba Yaga, The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks and the Great Gate of Kiev. They came up with some pretty creative stuff with their new paint sets! SO fun!

We finished the morning working on our new FAMILY TREE!  We have a family tree that we painted many years ago that shows Rick and I on the trunk and the kids on the branches. With the very important part showing the roots….the ancestors that made them who they are!  We cut up an old family calendar to get some pictures of the families but still need several faces as well as the new babies that have been born in the past few years.

 

This is a fun way to show where the kids came from with sixteen ancestors as the deepest roots who are all part of them.

We ended our fun time together with another “rock moving extravaganza”. The girls are all hard workers and such good girls! We are truly blessed! 

Grammie Camp with Group 4: The Guys

Since our kids are scattered all over creation with their children, almost the only time cousins have time to bond is in July at the family reunion. And the only time I get to have those groups of cousins together without their parents is before and after the family reunion at what we call Grammie Camp.

They are divided by age and sometimes by gender. This year this is how it goes::

Group 1: The Old Faithful's, ages 13-16

Group 2: The Three Amigos, ages 12 or almost 12

Group 3: The  Babes, ages 8-10

Group 4: The Guys, ages 7-9

Group 5: The Princesses: Ages 5-6  (Grammie Camp starts at age 5)

This year we started Grammie Camps with “The Guys”  which is five darling boys who are hysterical together.. They came to the Lighthouse with me for an overnight and a next day adventure.

They are bouncing off the wall by bedtime but brushing teeth and ancestor stories when they are stretched out in their sleeping bags helps to calm them down. I drink in having them all to myself for a few hours!

We have a Grammie Camp song and we learn a new scripture together every year. This year the there were two scriptures, II Nephi 2:25 and II Nephi 25:26. They loved their bag of Gummy Bears for saying them perfectly. Group 4 also put together our fun family puzzle from last year.

This year our emphasis was on classical music. I sent the little boys Peter and the Wolf to listen to about three weeks before Grammie Camp so they would know the story and the music. Then we acted it out which was more fun than a barrel of monkeys!  I had some collected hats from years of Halloween and a trip to Romania. It was hysterical1

Here is the bird…

The duck….

The supposedly “dead duck”.

The cat….

 

PETER…

The Grandfather…

The WOLF

The Hunter…

Since I don’t know how to insert video into a blog, you’re just going to have to imagine the fun we had whilst acting out this wonderful piece of music by Prokofiev!

Next we had a talent show and I was amazed at what they have learned since last year. This year it was pretty much drum and piano extravaganza. 

McKay has really whizzed along this year….

Charlie could still play up a storm, even with a broken arm! As you can tell, his hands are moving so fast that they are blurry!

Camden and Silas played thoughtful drum solos….

 

 

Oliver made up a beautiful song called Waterfall on the piano and at the last minute Cam plopped down on the bench and played a beautiful classical solo.

We stopped to see how the horses liked watermelon rinds (Lady, yes, Duffy, not at all)  on the way to dinner at a new place in St. Charles called Coopers. Those burgers and the play set behind the restaurant were a real hit!

Ancestor stories and a visit to the cemetery where those ancestors are buried is always a big part of the Grammie Camp. They know just where to go to pay their respects to those who sacrificed so much and worked so hard so that we could live in relative luxury.

Stopping to see my cousin Kay who,at 82 lives at his parents’ home during the summer was great. It is the old home where my Grandmother Nellie spent most of her life after her husband Freddy died at an early age and he takes such good care of it. He was delighted to see us and gave MkKay an American flag which he was thrilled to have! Oops, sorry Oliver, you were obliterated  by the flag!

As the child of a long line of farmers, work is always a part of Grammie Camp.  Usually I have them pull weeds but since all the weeks were gone this year because of the new landscaping, Group 4 hauled rocks from one pile that had too many rocks to another that needed some. They did a great job.Oliver demonstrates just how hard that was!

I must admit that after hauling a certain number of rocks free, they got prizes for the next 25 rocks. They were pretty excited about their prizes after all that hard work!

Oops, again, sorry Cam!  Here was Camden’s prize:

Another fun Grammie Camp comes to an end!