Bree’s favorite color these days is purple. Purple, purple, purple. At a Frog and Toad exhibit at the Seattle Children’s Museum, she does an art project. Her choices: purple pieces of paper glued to a purple sheet of paper, decorated with purple marker.
Angela has a budding carreer as a physical trainer for moms. The latest exercise: Bree lifts. Holding the toddler under her arms, squat. Stand up and lift. Repeat 10-12 times per set. Do 2 sets. Works glutes, core, arms, and heart.
Liya and Anya sing at the school’s annual Spring Concert at Town Hall.
Liya has her friend Charlotte join her for a sleepover. They stay up chattering away in Liya and Anya’s room long after lights out. In the morning we have nice spring weather, so Jan opens the treehouse season by hooking up the rope ladder. Liya scrambles nimbly up, although Charlotte’s a bit unnerved by the height. We talk her up the final two rungs, and then all’s well. (Bree, for her part, complains on the ground because she’s not allowed up yet.)
Anya and Angela host a book club at our house. The first reading selection was Anya’s current favorite book, “The Mysterious Benedict Society” by Trenton Lee Stewart. We invited a number of other girls and their moms, and all in all 5 daughter-mom pairs could attend. Everyone loved the book and enjoyed discussing it with their friends.
Jan’s still recovering from a cold, but takes Liya and Bree out of the house for a few hours so Anya and Angela can hold their book club. Jan suggests a trip to the Seattle Aquarium, which Bree enthusiastically endorses. At the aquarium, Bree’s at least as entertained by a whale cookie as by actual underwater creatures. Liya really enjoys the touch tank. Bree surprises Jan at one point when she sees a small vividly colored wrasse and comments, “That one cleans the bigger fish.” She’s right. We think she remembers this from a book we read a few months ago about Hawaiian reefs.
Movie school is now in session. While driving the girls to school a few weeks ago, Jan somehow got into a conversation about how movies get made. This somehow turned into a conversation about, “Here’s a movie we could make”, and finally ended up becoming, “Let’s make a movie!” The girls’ friend Kaila was brought on board as well. Now most morning carpool drives are spent talking about this movie.
This afternoon we finally kick things off towards actually making a short movie. (Very short: The goal is something one minute long or less.) Jan starts by having the girls watch the beginning of a favorite movie and actually try to see how its constructed from scenes, shots, and cuts. Jan counts out the shots as each cut goes by, and rather quickly the girls begin to perceive the shots as discrete pieces of the movie rather than a seamless whole.
From there we spend some time refining the story outline we’ve endlessly rehashed on carpool drives. With the basic story in place, Jan shows the girls a bit about drawing storyboards (with some real examples pulled up online). The girls happily dive into the task of storyboarding different bits of the movie.
Finally we end up with a screen test. Thus far none of the girls has actually claimed to want to take the lead (and only significant) role: a girl character currently named Lily. We decide to shoot each of the three girls saying a bit of dialogue from the movie so we can see how each looks and sounds on screen. Kaila comes out surprisingly strong, with Liya also quite good. Anya’s portrayal of Lily somehow comes across as permanently annoyed.
We’re still not sure who’s going to take the lead, but all three girls are enjoying themselves so far. We’ll see if we can finish this up by the end of school, now just a little over two months away. We have many more weekends of work ahead of us.
Jan takes Angela with him to shop for reading glasses. A while back Jan had an eye exam, and the optometrist said, “Did you know you’re really farsighted?” Um, nope, didn’t know that. Jan had previously thought his eyes were pretty sharp, but 20/15 vision just wasn’t impressing the optometrist–at close distances, those eyes still can’t focus without a lot of eyestrain. And it’s getting worse.
Last month Jan saw the optometrist for a second time, at which the optometrist finally prescribed reading glasses. To compensate for the undeniable reality of aging, Jan decides to get some nice ones, and takes Angela shopping with him at lunchtime to pick some out.
When Angela first sees Jan try out a pair of glasses, she bursts out laughing. Angela claims she’s just surprised to see the difference a pair of glasses makes. Hmpf. This is not making aging any easier.