Summer Fayre

The school hosts a Summer Fayre (not Fair) each year. This year's was the best I have ever seen it, perfect weather, great music, family games, face painting, painting, necklace making, horse riding, and much more! The favorites? Clark loved the Segways, and Lucy and Piper loved the trampolines. These were not your normal trampolines, these were amazing. You get hooked into them so you can jump super high and do fabulous tricks on them. Piper spent most of the day jumping and then standing in line to do it again. We are so grateful for all of the fun activities that our school has.

Robot Town

Early Years at Riverside has been working on a big project...Robot Town. In an effort to become more environmentally aware the school has started a garden, re-hauled it's recycling, and made a whole town of robots made out of recycled parts. The grand opening of robot town was a huge success - a stroll through the town, snacks from the garden the children had grown, a puppet show, singing and lots of running around! Congrats Early Years!

Loket

We took a family overnight trip to Loket, about 2 hours west, to stay in the Lazy River Hostel (which the elder Syvertsens now run!). We went with Laura and the boys, Owen and Elliott, and had a great time exploring the city and its castle. The castle has a pretty scary torture museum (which we avoided) but a fun tower at the top.

Loket means "elbow" in Czech, which is appropriate since the river snakes through the little village and makes a sharp turn at the castle. We had a nice time at the Lazy River hostel and fun with our friends!

The castle at night, with a concert on the banks of the river that night...

Mommy pretending to be a praying statue...

Our friends the Kings were there too! Ben got a workout at the playground...

channeling Madonna

The Planks

Piper and Fabian are the sweetest of friends! The two of them have declared their love for each other, they laugh hard, play well and squeal with delight when they see each other. They have formed an after-school gang made up of all the younger siblings at school. They all bring their little motorcycle bikes and have taken over the playground. Hysterical to watch, they (about 5-6 of them) get on their bikes and run everyone down, they share snacks and play till the wee hours of the afternoon. Piper also had her first sleepover sans Lucy and Clark at Fabi's house last weekend and she did great.

Not only are Fabian and Piper great friends but our family has come to LOVE the Planks. The Planks have been great friends to us all and we have lived lots of life together, birthday parties, dinner parties, cookouts, antiquing and lots of coffee mornings. Sadly the Planks are moving to Casablanca, Morocco, on a job transfer this summer. Words can not describe how much we will miss them. We are so grateful for them and the time that our daily lives were intertwined. We love and miss you Planks!

swim days

We have been lucky with the weather and have had a lot of amazing beautiful days that have been perfect for swimming with friends!