… and I still haven’t gotten to the blackberries.



*OTAG = The Orono Traveling Art Garden

Last night we moved our ever-growing, community sculpture menagerie to what I consider the hub of our town–the Orono Public Library. There was music, there was rain, and a good deal of fun.

Our friend Herb captured the evening nicely in another great video (I particularly enjoy the moment where Tim flips his colorful new sign for the project at minute 2:45):

 

More than ten miles on bike. This summer a new statement is starting to appear on QW adventures: “Mommy, you coming?” 😊 After years of carrying and cajoling, I’m now the slow one being checked up on.

The full story and more photos can be found here. Hooray for Orono!

Our contribution to Orono’s pride month, just before we moved it to the center of town:

In the screened in porch.

The fellas have been devoted to sleeping there for weeks now. Their tools: a slumping air mattress, a mound of about 30 stuffed animals between them just to ensure someone falls out of bed (Reid has twice this summer), and an obscene number of blankets and pillows. They love it!

We’re rounding off the school year and Reid and Liam have each recently finished off their final pieces of writing for English Language Arts. Liam wrote about political speeches, dating all the way back to Pericles, a famous Athenian politician. For this essay, we worked on thesis development, outlining, and substantiating arguments with quotes. I think he did a really nice job. His essay can be found here.

Reid dictated his synopsis of The Odyssey to me after we read an illustrated and abridged version of the famous epic. He then wrote a comparison between aspects of the Percy Jackson novels and The Odyssey. Reid places Rick Riordan well above Homer in his evaluation. Here’s a piece of art he made, messing around on the digital art tool Procreate to accompany his comparative essay:

It’s been a ton of fun to work with the kids this spring.

…here are a few more links to add to our family’s pandemic archives.

If you haven’t heard of the sculptures, here’s an essay I published in The Washington Post about our neighborhood art, as well as a very similar version of that essay in The Bangor Daily.

Our neighbors Herb and Judy made a great video documenting yesterday’s move of the sculptures to the next neighborhood:

Finally, some more photos of the sculptures are here.

We will miss running, walking and biking past them on our street every day (especially given the daily dress-up work our friends Jessica and Jacob managed with new outfits for the squatting man, which they then turned into the squatting family–amazing!).

But it is also fun to see the sculptures now traveling to a new neighborhood and even more fun to see the menagerie grow. This masterpiece (below) is Señor Scrapwood, the Cromwell/Lexington neighborhood’s addition. Our hope is that each neighborhood will add a sculpture to the set as it travels through Orono this summer.

We loved celebrating with you this weekend, and we love having you in our lives.