Sunday in the park with Jim

My old friend Jim Montgomery, who has been serving in the Army for many years now, was home on leave for the weekend, so several of us got together at a local park for some Sunday brunch and a social call.

Here is the General himself, with his paramour Angela:



My friend Greg and his family were there, playing mini golf like it was their job:



The kids got in on the golf action, naturally:





It's always a pleasure to catch up with old friends.

Celtic Fling

This past Saturday we went to the Celtic Fling at the site of the PA Renaissance Faire, located about an hour and change west of our house via the PA Turnpike. Our friend Dana was performing with his pipe band, Loch Rannoch, at the festival, and he was kind enough to arrange for us to receive free passes - including two extra ones for our friends Catie and McKinley, who are in town visiting us from Florida.

First order of business: Play some games. Maria decided to have a go at climbing the Jacob's Ladder, a rope ladder suspended from an overhead frame such that it is completely off the ground and mostly parallel to the ground. If you climb to the top of it and ring a bell hanging at the end, you win a little prize. Did Maria win? Of course she did. She is our resident monkey.











The kids also played a medieval version of skee-ball:









Nick and I then did archery, and unfortunately I don't seem to have any pictures of it. I managed to hit one target I meant to hit, and another target I didn't mean to hit. Nicholas hit everything at which he aimed.

I told Chelsea I would brush up on my archery over the next several months in case the need to defend our house ever arises.



Later, we came across some stocks, which were very handy when Nick and Anna started misbehaving:





Fair-skinned Maria and her friend McKinley both bought parasols to stay cool:



There are rides at the Renaissance Faire, but they are not the kind of rides you see at a town carnival. Medieval rides require the operator and the rider to do a lot more work. Here are some of our gang on a swinging ship that they kept going on their own, using ropes:



Maria went on a ride called the Wild Boar that involved a spinning, swinging journey inside a giant wooden boar:









It was a great day for a festival!

Puzzles and pictures

Anna and I sat down together after dinner the other night and put together a puzzle:



Anna decided she wanted to play around with the camera:



Then we took some silly pictures of her:



Sometimes the simplest evenings are the most fun.

Summer swim meets

We've been making our kids learn how to swim for the past couple years by signing them up for the swim team at our pool. Chelsea ran the numbers the first year and decided it was a no-brainer - $40 for lessons, or $25 for the swim team, which runs longer and teaches the kids multiple strokes. All three of our kids are on the team this year.

Our first meet of the season took place on Tuesday, just after Chels and the kids got back from the beach. (I need to steal some photos of that adventure from her computer.) I always enjoy the warmup part of the meets, when you have about four thousand kids in the pool all swimming laps and bunching up in swim lane traffic jams:



Young Nick, who you will notice is looking quite buff these days thanks to his constant athletic pursuits, is swimming a few different events. I believe what I've got here is his 50-meter breaststroke race, though he will soon correct me if I'm wrong.

Tightening up the goggles pre-race:





And they're off:





Later he swam a 50-meter freestyle. Worth mentioning that this is our team's first year in a new league, and this first opponent was the most formidable one we are likely to see. We lost, but we couldn't help admiring the efficiency and the quality with which they run the show. We were among professionals.





Maria swam in a couple races too, but it was later in the evening and I didn't get any good pictures of her. Anna and I had front-row seats to the meet, thanks to a rare early arrival on our part:



We have meets every Tuesday and Saturday from now until the end of July. If you're in the area and want to see my kids swim, just give me a shout and I'll provide you with the details.

Gettysburg, day 2

Four generations of Sperger men stood on the battlefield that day:



We closed out the battlefield tour and our boys' weekend in high style. Sunday morning we went to Mass and then had a leisurely breakfast. Around mid-day, we headed back to the auto tour to pick up where we had left off the night before. There was another of those dadblamed observation towers to climb:





Gramps wisely stuck with guard duty at the van... this was the highest of the observation towers, making this picture look like it was taken by a satellite:



We wound our way around to all the old familiar places - Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil's Den. The joint was jumping on Sunday, with lots of tour buses coming through:



Lots of opportunities to look stoic along the way... this is my uncle Mick at Devil's Den:



Nick clambered up to the top of the New York state monument on Little Round Top:





We also got to climb up to the top of the Pennsylvania monument, which was closed during our last visit. It's an utterly dark stone spiral staircase, only a person's width in size, and that was a hoot:









There was one more observation tower to climb, at Culp's Hill on the northeast end of the Union line:





All of the towers have these great line-of-sight guides for identifying landmarks... you just line up the two triangles and you're looking in the right direction:







Our battlefield tour, and our weekend at Gettysburg, concluded with a visit to the site of Pickett's Charge and the high water mark of the Confederate campaign:





I want to close this entry with one more picture of my grandfather, who has given three generations of Spergers an example of integrity, creativity, and good humor to follow. Doesn't he look fabulous? What a fine traveling companion to have on Father's Day:



Next year, we think we might go to Manassas, and cross into Confederate territory.

Intermission: Airport run

I'll have more Gettysburg pictures tomorrow, with any luck. When we got back from Gettysburg, we went right to the airport to pick up some friends from Florida who are visiting for several days. Nick and I came into the airport Sunday evening for our pickup, and found that we literally had the place to ourselves:



Nick wished he had brought his Heely sneakers, the ones with roller skate wheels at the heel. I mused that we could have bowled in the hallway had we brought the right gear. No liquids in a bowling ball and ten pins, right?

Gettysburg, day 1

Over the weekend Nick and I took a boys' trip to Gettysburg with my dad, his dad, my uncle Mick, and his son Brendan. This was almost a carbon copy of the same trip which we took together two years ago. The girls went to the beach and are due back tomorrow, so I'll have their pictures later in the week.

We drove out Friday evening and arrived around 10:30. In the morning, young Nick was raring to go:



Since our last trip the new visitors' center has opened, featuring the restored Cyclorama painting of the battle. We were disappointed to learn that the legendary Electric Map didn't make the trip to the new facility, but the restored Cyclorama is gorgeous, and the new movie they produced for the visitors' center does a fine job providing the historical context for the Civil War.





The museum at the visitors' center is a huge improvement over what they had previously. One of the best exhibits explained the order of secession of the Confederate states using a Freakonomics-style way of explanation: The exhibit shows the slave proportion of the population of each state, and then shows a map of the states with the date on which each one seceded from the Union. Five of the top six states with the largest slave populations were the first to go, almost in direct order of their rank on the population list. South Carolina left the Union only seven weeks after Lincoln won the 1860 election, and well before he had even been inaugurated.



Before long it was time to head out to the battlefield for the auto tour. You buy a guidebook in the visitors' center that comes with two CDs, and the CD narration explains the battle and guides you around the field. The battle of Gettysburg took place over a huge area - 25 square miles, if I'm remembering right - so the drive takes you all over town and occasionally into the countryside.

During the battlefield tour, Gramps supervised from the van and made sure that the vehicle was secure:



Nick did an incredible job during the weekend reading and listening to things, and generally seems to have absorbed a huge amount of information. I can't say I was as diligent when I was his age and we visited historical sites:



Of course, there are also a couple of vertigo-inducing observation towers above the treetops, so a young man with an athletic bent will get the opportunity to climb a lot of stairs and look out over the fields:







Of course, even the most dedicated historian needs a break now and then, so in late afternoon we headed back to the hotel for some R&R:





We had dinner that evening at the Appalachian Brewing Company, a brewpub right along the auto tour route. Though we didn't get out of dinner until about 9:00 in the evening, we decided we'd hit a few more stops on the auto tour anyway. Driving through the battlefield right at dusk was neat - we had the place to ourselves, for one thing, and the forested land was cool and quiet. I got out for a quick walk from one stop to the next, and the air had that wonderful early-summer smell of honeysuckle. We made the Virginia memorial on the Confederate line our last stop of the evening:



Touring the battlefield today, it's hard to imagine the degree of suffering that took place during that weekend - of the soldiers themselves, of the townspeople, and of the families who lost sons and brothers to the war. I took note of something in the museum that conveys just a little bit of that depth of loss:

"Every name... is a lightning stroke to some heart, and breaks like thunder over some home, and falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone." (The Gettysburg Compiler, 7 Jul 1863)

Wayback machine: November 2003

A light post for a summer Friday afternoon - here is a picture of Anna at the tender age of two months old:



Happy weekend!

Ballet recital!

At last! Here are some pictures of our amazing girls at their ballet recital this weekend. Maria was a Shooting Star:



Here's Maria with my Mom after one show... Maria performed in four shows over the weekend:



Anna was a Peppermint, and only danced in one show:





They looked great and danced their hearts out. We had a great time, and we're just thrilled with the quality of the dance education they're receiving.

Unrelated to the recital, Anna is sitting on the floor in my office as I write this, and she is absentmindedly singing to herself. Listening closely, I realized that she has mixed up two of the songs our kids have been playing in music lessons: "Hot cross buns, I fell in love with you / hot cross buns, I fell in love with you...."

Oh, dear.

Wayback machine: Keen Lake, July 2007

[Some editorial notes to start: Chels and I have not yet managed to connect on downloading photos from the ballet recital this weekend, so it will be another day or two before we get to that. Also, I'm going to be offline tomorrow, so after this post I will probably next get a chance to post on Thursday.]

Two summers ago, we spent a weekend with friends at Keen Lake campground, up in northeastern PA. It was a lot of fun, and we're eager to get up there again, perhaps this time with some of their lakefront sites. Here's our whole group at the canoe dock, looking like we posed for a Land's End ad:

Whirlwind weekend (aren't they all?)

We're recovering nicely today from our fabulous weekend of ballet, with Maria appearing in all four recital shows, Anna in one, and Chelsea selling a boatload of flowers at all four shows as a fundraiser for the school.

We'll have pictures of our tiny dancers this week. Meantime, this will give you a sense for how much hairspray was in Anna's hair even after she started her bath last night:



Ballet: Bad for the hair, good for the soul.

Pollen City

Chelsea volunteered this year to organize a flower sale for the girls' ballet recital. She also volunteered to make floral centerpieces for a teacher appreciation luncheon at the kids' school. Result: Our dining room looks like a flower shop:







The flowers will be out of here by this time tomorrow. In the meantime, the pollen count inside my house is simply amazing.

Strike up the band

Nick and Maria had their last day of school yesterday, and they were feeling pretty good about that. In the evening, the kids decided they wanted to put on some kind of show here at the house. Since they're all learning to play music, putting together a concert made sense to everyone. Somehow they took the thought process one step further, and they raided my work clothes so they could dress properly for a night of chamber music:







Hard to tell from the picture, but Nick is wearing my winter overcoat... I suggested to him that he might want to try something a little less heavy!

Ellis Island

It's a month of tying up loose ends in the Sperger household, as we close out the school year today for Nick and Maria. Several days ago Maria and Chelsea went on the third grade field trip to Ellis Island, closing out Maria's family history unit that we mentioned all the way back in March.



I've noticed in writing this blog that Maria and Chelsea are often absent from my posts - that I end up following around Nick and Anna. If you ever wonder where the rest of my girls have gone, this is your answer. Chelsea and Maria are globe-trotting.





Chelsea and I even talked the other day about my observation from a few weeks ago that she and I turn the camera in different directions for vertical pictures. She tells me that her direction (which she referred to as "the correct way") is easier to adjust in her photo editing program; my way (she used the words "bad" and "wrong") apparently requires more work. However, in my photo editing program, it's the same amount of effort either way. I helpfully suggested that she consider the possibility she is wr-wr-wron... mistaken.

How does your garden grow?

We reported back in April that we were planting a new vegetable garden in our yard. Recent weeks have seen all of the Spergers out there working hard to cultivate our lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, and other delights, including a side garden of herbs:







Hopefully we'll have some beautiful vegetables to show off in a few weeks' time.

Nick's triathlon

Our man Nick raced in his first-ever triathlon yesterday, up in Doylestown. This is a kid's triathlon organized by the township and a local cycle shop. In his age group, the events included 75 meters of swimming in a pool, 3 miles (4.8 km) on the bike, and 1 mile (1.6 km) of running. Nick did a terrific job overall. Here he is getting ready for his swim:





I didn't get any good pictures of him swimming - someday I might have to invest in some underwater cameras to get Michael Phelps-style pool shots!

Anyway, Nick swam well and did a good job going through the transition to biking. Here he is coming back in from the bike course:



Coming out of transition again for the run:



And on the home stretch of the run:



Nick was pretty wiped out immediately after the race:





We loved the obligatory "body numbering" that is standard for triathlons:



Later in the day, Nick had recovered well enough to play in his last spring soccer match of the season. Nick's team showed up ready to play, and thumped their opponents 6-1:





Anna was along for the entire ride yesterday; Maria stayed over at her friend Nora's house and missed out on the triathlon, then hopped over to her friend Alyssa's house for some swimming and missed the soccer match. Here is Anna doing some artwork on the sidelines at soccer:



We're very proud of Nick for testing his physical limits, and we're going to be working with him over the summer to get him in great physical shape for fall soccer.

Signs of summer: Nick's buzz cut

The weather outside is frightful today - 60F/16C and raining - but our man Nick is ready for the return of the sun. He gets a buzz cut every year at the start of the summer, and yesterday was the day for this year. Here's how we looked when he sat down... notice he's been sporting a little Mohawk up top for the past week or two:



Ten minutes later he stood up, brushed off some stray hairs, and went out into the world looking like this:



Farmers shear their sheep. We shear Nick.

Middle School Concert

I've said before that the last six weeks of the school year are like the last two minutes of a fireworks show - they seem to fire off half of the shells at the end. Last week we had one more in a long line of end-of-the-year events - Nick's band concert.

Nick's brief musical career has already been varied and distinguished. He has played recorder, piano, viola, and trumpet at school so far, and has been learning a little guitar on the side. He was first chair viola at one of his concerts last year, and has often been chosen to serve as an instrumentalist for school events.

Here is our boy on the trumpet at his concert last Thursday, with his wonderful music teacher Chris Buzby conducting:





With Anna on the violin, Nick roaming around the entire orchestra, and Maria coming along fast with her piano lessons, we have an entire house full of musicians! I'm planning to join their ranks myself - I've arranged with Maria's piano instructor to take lessons this summer. I've always wanted to learn how to read and play music. Having all these budding musicians around has given me just the push I needed to make it happen.

Maria's home run derby

I got a chance to upload some recent pictures from Chelsea's photo archive, which dwarfs my own - I think she has more than 20,000 pictures on her hard drive. Anyway, Maria's softball league had a home run derby sponsored by the Phillies the other week, and we snapped a couple of nice pics of our girl hitting the ball:





The little stinker won a four-pack of tickets to an upcoming Phillies game... if you ever want to win a contest, make your entry in Maria's name. She wins things constantly.

Dog days of the school year

Anna has her last week of school this week, and the older two finish up Wednesday of next week. We always find these last few weeks to be a grind for everybody - the kids (and their teachers!) are done with the year, while at the same time we have an explosion of special school and activity events, like the girls' ballet recital next weekend.

Nick was sacked out on the couch last evening, preparing for an English exam today:



See that enthusiasm - and also that suntan? That's school in June for you. Stick a fork in us, because we're done.