Not that anyone was counting down, but when we started this final week of June, we were getting excited for our upcoming Summer Break! We talked about it every day, sharing plans...and ideas for those without plans. Somehow we stayed focused (as we usually do), with our tasks and activities for the week, which included our final spring session with the master gardeners, a volunteer morning at Grove, an excellent adventure at the Virginia Living Museum with lunch at a restaurant (!), and a very productive work day at Eaton. Check out our week below. And here's a friendly reminder that the next blog post will be on Saturday, July 13. We're off next week for Summer Break!
Tuesday, June 25
Hard to believe our spring sessions with the master gardeners were ending today. We had great visits with them - planting, harvesting, learning, and enjoying time spent visiting and chatting together.
Master Gardeners, we can't thank you enough for the time and attention you spend on us, and the interesting and always informative topics you share with us. We truly appreciate the plants we watch grow, and get to harvest! We're looking forward to fall sessions in September, and we know they will be here before we know it!
Karen has started growing "sweet potato slips" at home so they will be ready for us to plant in September for a fall harvest. Meanwhile, our spring/summer potatoes weren't quite ready to harvest today, so Karen and Barb will meet us back here on July 9th to dig them up! A yummy potato dish is in our future!
We brought lemonade to share for today's snack time, and Karen provided her famous (and very tasty) zucchini bread as well as a sample of mixed nuts seasoned with herbs! There were also dried olives in the sample, which most of us tried and found tasty, if a bit salty.
Karen found the olives and nuts at Trader Joe's, and we recommend them, especially if you like savory nuts! Thank you Karen for the nuts AND your delicious zucchini bread. Your baking is epic, and the zucchini bread is our favorite!
Since we learned about herbs with each lesson, and we planted the beautiful herb garden back at AFCC in the raised bed that was given to us by the master gardeners, we thought ending the season with a game of Herbs and Spices Bingo would be fun! Karen gave us clues and we searched for the herbs and spices on our cards, learning about a few new ones along the way, such as saffron and star anise!
Krafty Karen provided a bag of prizes, too! Barb enjoyed going to each winner and helping them select something!
Annmarie's dad, Andy, and his dad, Grandpa Andy (from upstae New York), were in the area and stopped by so we could meet Grandpa! He's 90 years young, and we were very honored to visit with him a few minutes!
Here is MG Carolyn's beautiful journal page that documents today's final spring session!
Turns out the uncomfortable weather we had over the weekend moderated a little by today, and the humidity was noticeably lower. It was still hot in the sun, but we went to the Warhill picnic area (for the 3rd Tuesday in a row), and enjoyed our lunch outside! We didn't take a picture while we were eating and talking a mile a minute with each other, but here's one of us heading back to the vans!
Back at Room 141, Liz had a surprise for Devin, the biggest Philadelphia Phillies fan we know! Her parents were lucky enough to attend a game over the weekend with seats in a suite. They brought Liz some swag to give Dev, including some new caps! She also showed us pictures her parents took, and we all felt good about the nice thing she and her family did for Devin! 💙⚾ (Liz is a Nationals fan, by the way!)
We love having a projector and VERY LARGE screen in Room 141, but taking pictures in the glare of the projector's lights doesn't always go well!
Speaking of the large screen, we ended the day with a "celebration" of Christmas! Today was National Leon Day, and "Leon" is "Noel" spelled backwards. June 25 marks exactly 6 months until Christmas. We decided to celebrate by watching a 1948 cartoon version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," which came out 1 year before Gene Autry's famous song about Rudolph, and 16 years before the stop-motion animation version of the story we all know and love. We compared the two versions of the famous tale. There were a few big differences, such as Santa was delivering toys to animals instead of kids in the older version, but we concluded that the underlying message was the same: be accepting of everyone!
We also did some Christmas-themed brain work. Nan worked with Drew, Kevin, and Laura to rearrange words into a sentence about the holiday.
Others worked on unscrambling Christimas words and figuring out the names of Christmas carols using rebus picture puzzles. Devin and Sam were proud of their answers, and Xavier and Carol were happy for them.
Lexi, Patrick, and Bryan chose to work on a Christmas crossword puzzle. They helped each other!
Before packing up we had requests to play Chritmas music. We ended our fun and busy day dancing with Mariah Carey! Do you know what the song was?! 🎄🎅🎶
Wednesday, June 26
The heat and humidity returned with a vengeance today, so we were glad to do our volunteering at Grove first thing in the morning and then spend the rest of the day in Room 141, where the air conditioning kept up with the heat very nicely!
First, we helped set up the line at Grove Christian Outreach Center with the different varieties of canned foods. Ursula gave us instructions today since Peggy and Joel were away, traveling with their grandkids.
We met this volunteer named Tom, who isn't Ursula's husband even though he has the same name!
Ally checked on us as we were about to get our assembly line underway. She said we always do a very good job!
Back in Room 141, we worked on a thank you note for the police department, and Jerry White, who had given us the tour last week. We colored pictures and wrote a nice note for them. Annmarie also sorted our Bingo markers which got mixed up yesterday!
Before lunch we got some movement to a few short clips from Go Noodle. It was a little tight in the space, but no one got an eye punched out by anyone else! We also took a look at our blog post from December of 2017 when we last visited the Virginia Living Museum. Wow, that was a long time ago. We're looking forward to visiting again tomorrow!
Sam noticed that he still has the same jacket he was wearing on our trip to the Living Museum in 2017! (A great jacket is a good investment, Sam!)
Lunch was great today! We used the Nina to reheat the leftover pizza from Devin's birthday last week, which Nan had kept in her freezer for us. It was just as warm and cheesy as it was the first time. We've got to say, we are fans of pizza from Harris Teeter now! Thanks again, Scott and Roxanne, for providing enough that we could have it this week as we "roughed" it in the smaller classroom!
We also celebrated National Chocolate Pudding Day by adding some toppings to our store bought chocolate pudding. So sweet! We spent the rest of the afternoon watching High School Musical, a "throwback" video to our teenage years that had us singing and dancing right along with Troy, Gabriela, and the rest of the Wildcats! For such a hot day, we sure had a cool time!
Thursday, June 27
We had the best time visiting the Virginia Living Museum today and enjoying lunch at Angelo's Steakhouse afterward! We can't thank the Virginia Living Museum enough for granting us a scholarship to visit, and our friends from GCOC, Peggy and Joel, for treating us to lunch! Each time we work with them, they enjoy telling us about their plans to go to lunch after their shift, and we enjoy telling them about how much we love to go out for lunch, too! This was a perfect gift for us from them!
Here are a few pictures from our delightful day! Michelle is a lifelong member of the Virginia Living Museum, so we had her expertise to guide us all day long! We began our day on the Dinosaur Trail.
Velociraptor was small, but with its large brain, may have been the smartest dinosaur.
So many interesting things to learn with information displays throughout the museum.
We met a volunteer named Nancy who ended up walking the outside trails with us, telling us a lot of cool things and answering ALL of our questions! Thanks, Nancy!!
Brown Pelican named Nigel
Edgar, a camera shy raccoon
Moe, a river otter who was completely full of himself during our visit!
One of our favorite exhibits were the noctunal and cave areas. Snakes, spiders, owls, noises...
Keep peace with a copperhead says Bryan!
We also enjoyed checking out the honeybee hive that was buzzing with over 70,000 bees! From this display inside, the bees had access through an opening in the window to the outdoors, and we could see many workers bees coming back and forth.
Touch pool
These were just a few of our many photos from our delightful visit to the Virginia Living Museum! We could spend much more time here and won't wait almost 7 years before our next visit! We are grateful to VLM for providing a scholarship for our visit. There is something for everyone here, and we appreciate the opportunity we had to go exploring.
The museum was so amazing that we didn't hear anyone asking "When is lunch?" even though our gang was super excited about eating out today! Once we arrived at Angelo's Steakhouse, we found that they had our tables ready (we called ahead) in a bright, but quiet area of the restaurant. We gave them our orders, which we had prepared before arriving, and before we knew it our drinks were served followed by our hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches, all within 10 minutes! We had a wonderful time chatting while we ate, and everyone was satisfied with their meals. On the way out, a group of retired teachers who were dining and playing cards nearby, stopped us to comment on how much they enjoyed observing us having such a nice time! We can't wait to let Peggy and Joel know how much their recent donation meant to us. They told us to "do something fun," and having a chance to enjoy a meal out together qualifies as fun in our books!
Yum!
Our day ended with bomb pops back at the school, because we couldn't pass up a chance to celebrate National Bomb Pop Day on top of the already stellar day we were having!
Friday, June 28
Even thought we were pretty excited after all the fun yesterday, we were able to keep our selves focused for a great work day at Eaton today! We had a lot of unpacking as you can see from these huge bins, and it took a big effort from most of the team. They rose to the occasion! Great job, Sam, Devin, Emma, Kevin, Xavier, Patrick, Bryan, Drew, and Michelle!
Liz worked on gasketing all day! Carol and Nan also helped (missed a photo op with them), and between the three of them, they gasketed almost 500 lids and bases!
As quickly as others were upacking and sorting, Annmarie and Laura were repacking the lids into neat stacks so a lot more would fit in the tubs!
It was a fun, busy, and well-rounded week for us. We were on the go, and that's just how we like it! Now, for a Summer Break! See ya on the other side, back at AFCC on July 9th!
Reminders:
1) We're still accepting sponsorships for the Women of the Moose Golf Tournament! Thank you to our families who have agreed to sponsor holes again this year ($50) and/or signed up to play. We're excited that our friends, Kelly and Scott, from APEX PT and Rock Steady Boxing, are going to play this year! If you need more information, please reach out to Lisa or Carol! ALSO - please let us know who can volunteer that morning: Saturday, August 3 from 8:30-11:30. THANK YOU!
2) Planning ahead! We are also accepting sponsorships and registrations for our biggest FUNdraiser of the year, the Williamsburg Landing 5k for The Arc, on October 5th! We hope to see you there!
3) Don't forget - The Arc of Abilities will be closed next week, July 2-5, for Summer Break. We will reopen on Tuesday, July 9 back in our multipurpose room at AFCC!
Here are our plans for the week of July 9:
Tuesday, July 9: We will meet some of our master gardener friends at the garden to harvest our potatoes first thing this morning! After that, we'll head over to Bowlero for bowling, followed by pizza and fruit for lunch. Arc shirts optional.
Wednesday, July 10: This morning we will volunteer at GCOC, so please wear Arc shirts. We'll also update our calendar for July and begin decorating our room for a summer vibe. Yesterday was Cow Appreciation Day, and while we weren't able to visit Chick fil-A, we will have a lesson about cows! 🐮🐮🐮 Lunch on your own - microwave available.
Thursday, July 11: Today is 7-11 Day, so we will celebrate by sending Nan and Carol to the nearby 7-11 with small groups at a time for free Slurpees! Since we love history so much, we'll also have a belated lesson about America's Independence Day. This afternoon we'll welcome our friend Laura Beach back for a round of Laughter Yoga! Lunch on your own - microwave available.
Friday, July 12: Today is a Pet Supplies Plus work day, so please wear PSP shirts. While our pet store group is away, the cooking crew will prepare a lunch of Beans and Franks and JELL-O, so we can celebrate both National Beans and Franks Day and National JELL-O Day! We'll end the week with yoga with Jaime. Dress to stretch!
Enjoy Summer Break next week! The blog updates will return on July 13.
Lisa, Carol, Nan, and the AoA Gang
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