Family

Fairmeadow fifth graders celebrate the end of their elementary school careers with an all-day picnic at Foothills Park. I volunteered to drive and chaperone, but really I had nothing to do since the kids are both self-sufficient and totally uninterested in interacting with adults. But it was fun to hang out and watch Ezra among his friends. I didn’t take very many photos but I’ll share what I have.

This one was when we first arrived. The boys immediately found sticks, and someone noticed there was a lizard on or near a rock. They were trying to do something with it (I don’t know what) and Ezra was very upset. He couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just leave it alone.

This is Ezra and some friends playing a game where they close their eyes and squeeze the hand of the person next to them, trying to go around the circle faster than the other groups.

And here’s the whole fifth grade class; I think there are 100 of them. Ezra is in the middle.

My favorite part of the day was when they got their yearbooks.

I loved watching them study all of the photos and rush to sign everyone’s yearbooks.

Parents were able to make a personal page for their kids if they wanted. Of course, I made one for Ezra. Since he’s only been at Fairmeadow for two years, I included photos from all of his years of elementary school. Even though he’s a man of few words, I think he liked looking back on the early photos, especially since the main part of the yearbook was filled with early-grade pictures of the rest of the class. Here’s the page I created for him.

Like many previous projects, this year’s science project (which fifth graders are required to do) was not met with enthusiasm. He chose a topic from the list of suggestions (do people taste jelly beans differently if their eyes are closed) and did some minimal preparation before testing his subjects: Henry, Emerson, Finn, Bruce and me.

I tried to let him do the project as he saw fit with a little help from us. We finally convinced him to take Bruce’s advice and use graphs to show the data. He wrote up everything else on Google Docs and we all helped put it together late on the night before it was due. Once Bruce came up with the idea of gluing jelly beans on the board, Ezra finally showed some enthusiasm. Then he drew comics and little legs on all of the jelly beans.

Here he is at the science fair. I think he was actually happy with the experience, in the end. But it wasn’t easy getting there!

On May 5th, I chaperoned Ezra’s class at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View. After an initial mixup on our entry time (we were early and they wouldn’t let us in) and an impromptu lunch on the outer grounds, we finally checked in and made our way over to the educational building. The day was split up into three stations; our first taught about wavelengths and light.

Really, though, the thing I found most interesting was that they had a model of LADEE, the spacecraft that flew Bruce’s error correction code for the laser communications terminal. Ezra and I were more than a little proud of Papa.

The next station had a few spinning things. Unfortunately, the guide didn’t explain what was happening, but the kids had fun anyway.

There was a third spinning demonstration — two people sitting in chairs on what looks like a seesaw. While the whole thing is spinning, the two participants try to throw a ball back and forth. It’s very hard. To the delight of the first group of students, their teacher leaned too far back and the chair snapped, throwing her off the seesaw. Sadly, it was out of order after that, but the kids didn’t mind because one of the chaperones had been filming so everyone got to see Ms. Darrow go flying. Luckily she wasn’t hurt and, as usual, she was a great sport about it.

The third station was a mockup of the International Space Station. Each of the kids had a different job. I don’t remember exactly what Ezra’s job was, but here he is.

All in all, a pretty informative field trip!

Two weeks after his birthday, we finally had Ezra’s birthday sleepover this past weekend. He invited his two best friends — Henry and Emerson — and planned an entire day of activities. As you might expect, there were a few glitches, some additions and subtractions to the activity list, and one superdad who had to leave for a conference, but it was a fun day.

Ezra wanted the boys to sleep in the tent, so Bruce enlisted their help to set it up.

Our first glitch was an all-too-normal visit from Palo Alto’s finest for a “wellness check” on our neighbor.

This was the scene when Emerson arrived. Always fun to explain that situation to a parent you don’t know very well who is dropping off their kid for the night. Luckily things remained calm on the street and the police soon left.

The first main activity on Ezra’s list was a Google X tour, so Bruce and the three boys headed out for that. I stayed behind with Finn to give Ezra a little big kid time. The result is that there aren’t any pictures from X. But the boys came back with pockets of Google candy and I think they had a good time.

Next up was supposed to be lunch at Five Guys, but the boys weren’t hungry yet (see above reference to candy) so they got started on another activity on the list — making tin soldiers. The kids love this activity. What’s not to love? Fire, melting metal, toy soldiers. It’s all good. Bruce set it up in the backyard with the camping stove this time which was great.

After they’d used the soldier molds, Bruce had the idea that they could make coins. So, he brought out the drill, some old wood, and carving tools.

They turned out pretty cool. Here’s Ezra’s.

Because the molten metal was such a hit and the activity was taking longer than we planned, we scrapped the Five Guys idea and ordered some pizza. After a late lunch, Ezra asked if we could do cake. Why not?

Wishes were made, cake was eaten, and the boys got back to their regular programming. Namely, more nerf battles.

It turned out that not everyone wanted to do archery, so instead of going to the range, Bruce set up the target he’d recently made for the backyard.

After shooting at the regular target for a while, they started adding balloons to it and shooting at the balloons. That led to water balloons. Which led to this …

Super fun, totally irresponsible use of water.

As evening came, we got going with Ezra’s choice of dinner — hotdogs roasted over the fire in the backyard. By this time Bruce had left for the airport, and I was too busy managing the chaos to take any pictures. The boys had their dogs and then roasted marshmallows for dessert, and headed back inside for a little more Minecraft time before bed. I was left with a quiet moment to roast a marshmallow over these beautiful coals.

There were a few tense moments over screen time conflicts, but about 9:00 I sent the boys out to the tent. I attempted to take a nice picture of the three of them. Here’s what I got.

Ezra thought it was very funny to be flipping the wrong finger. They stayed up for about an hour and just about the time I was going to go out and tell them to quiet down, they were already quiet.

I think they slept pretty well, although they were up very early. I plied them with pancakes, sausage, and bacon for breakfast.

After everyone left, the boys and I had a relatively quiet day. When I asked Ezra if he had a good time at his party, he said, “It was awesome.” You can’t ask for much more than that.