Elser Family Blog

Melinda Homework.

I realize this is simple stuff.. but I am still impressed. This was a project for English.. Melinda had to compose a 6 word “story”. Hers was: “I’m a lion, hear me ROAR”. But the cool thing is, she used a picture from when she was 6 years old. She actually went to the blog and searched it out and found it.

BMX!

Melinda and lil’ Hannah are going to race the fall BMX series! We have been practicing and everything. This is going to be fun to watch.

Action shot! Hannah is ahead, but today at practice, Melinda beat Hannah’s best time, so she better watch out!

Hannah notes from the second day of School.

Noteable:

• She has to take public transportation to school each morning. The busses run off electricity, with wires above for them. All of the kids take public transport.
• She has 15, 20 minutes between classes.
• They have almost 2 hours for lunch. Evidentally, even though they have a cafeteria, they often leave campus and go to a cafe or grocery.
• Some kids even take the bus back home to eat.
• Her maths look framiar. She might be repeating a little.
• Music class was also framiliar. That seemed like it might be comforting.
• She is behind on German knowledge, but does not feel too behind, and endevors to catch up.
• The Maths teacher says they will be learning some Python at the end of the year! I thought this was genius, and very smart of the school.
• She has an “IT” class.
• The school is BIG. 4 floors. “Oh, I am sorry, 3 floors above the ground floor” lol. Multiple buildings.
• ~1500 students in the school? But her class size is ~20 people, and they all attend the same classes thougout the day. (? not sure how that works)

First day of school 2014-15!

For everyone..
Here is Hannah’s first day at school in switzerland. Here she is meeting the Principal, Herr Schmid and her homeroom teacher, Herr Speigel.

Here is Hannah’s first day minus one. The day before she vistied the treeline in the alps with her Uncle and cousins! Her Uncles name is Jeurge, and her Cousins names are Liv and Lars. Remember that, you will be seeing a lot of them for a while.
🙂

And here is Rockwell and Melinda.. Not quite as excited about school this year. I’m happy in that they got excellent schedules, Both of them are in all the best classes. Melinda was even included in the Spanish class. If I’m not mistaken, they only had 24 spaces, and they only took the top 24 people in her grade.

Here are their schedules for this year.

Hannah has left the building.. er.. Country.

My sweet Daughter is on her way to Switzerland as I type this. I already miss her dearly. Sunday we invited some of her friends over to say goodbye. They had a really good time. Hannah was glad they came over, even if she was annoyed we surprised her and invited her friends over unannounced… Here is a cool thing; Everyone in this picture is in the top 10 of their graduating class.. Hannah has good taste in friends.

Here we are the night before At McDonalds.. She wanted to Have 100 Mcnuggets as a send-off.. Figured my nephew Greg might approve..
🙂

Hannah the night before playing with Rockwell.. this was a selfie that just showed up on my camera.

So, there where a LOT of changes in the flight plans, because of weather on the east coast.. she was rescheduled to go through New Jersey, then Dulles, then finally Chicago. It ended up Chicago was the winner, but it was a day late!.. Next time we will go though Atlanta for sure. grr. But in the mean time, the kids and Cousins got to play around. Here the girls straightened Rockwell’s hair.. (I know, my manual redeye removal leaves something to be desired.)

Finally! At the Airport! Love You Hannah, Have a great trip!

Summer activities

Melinda, Rockwell and I took a nice ride yesterday afternoon. Hannah was disappointed that I waited until she got out of the shower to ask if we wanted to go for a ride… Oops. sorry.

 

 

Yesterday morning we went to the Zoo in Columbia.. It changed a LOT in the last couple years! We met Christine there and dropped Ethan off.. We also had a lot of fun checking out the “new” zoo.

 

 

Cool Nannyrama shot in the penguin house.

 

 

Saturday Melinda and I went to the Paddlefest. Its a river event that benefits the Savannah River Keepers.  It rained half the way.. but it was still fun. Couldn’t get any pics in the rapids… because…

 

 

It looks like she is not paddling, but for some reason that is how she held the paddle.

 

 

Rockwell attended his first Hackathon. He and a friend built a “voltorb”.. Did not quite compete it unfortunately. But He got some time in with a razor knife!

 

 

Some interesting cleanup from when the girls plasma cut out the letters for the Little Library.

 

 

And someone added some books!

 

 

Melinda’s first time at Soup Kitchen… The other girls (Hannah and Amber really) gave her cruddy jobs.. so she did not enjoy herself… I guess it was a initiation.

 

 

Last weekend we went to the Saturday morning street fair in Augusta on 8th street.