Lestina Family

Ana completed the middle school vocabulary computer program she’s been working on for the last 3 months or so. Very cool!

And this year we have a sorceress, a witch, and a black cat — and of course Lunn's usual assortment of fantastically carved pumpkins.

The girls have gotten to the serious avarice stage of Halloween development — they went out with pillowcases for max capacity candy collecting, and hit the road fast to get as much as they can, as fast as they can.

We got lucky on both pumpkins and costumes this year — the pumpkins mostly came from a giveaway at the grand opening of a local bank, and the costumes are all holdovers from previous years, with a few new accessories. Ana would live in that cat costume if we let her…

So last year when we took De to Circe de Soliel, she started asking about acting, performing, and such. After her umpteenth request, I registered her with a casting agency locally, that I heard about from a friend who'd been an extra through them. All this seemed to do, tho, was get us on a mailing list for endless hype exhorting us to upgrade to the paid actors and models directory, which we of course ignored.

Last week, however, out of the blue, we got a call that the agency was auditioning kids De's age for a part in a commercial, so I took Ana and De both down there. It was pretty cool – there were lots of people there auditioning for all kinds of parts, and the girls had a wonderful time.

They had each girl in turn play out a short story, basically the staff told them what to do and they did it. "You feel sick…" "You're scared" "Now you're feeling better and you're hungry," stuff like that.

We went away thinking it had been a very cool experience but expecting nothing to come of it. Then I got a call that they wanted Ana to come back in for a call-back audition! (Apparently De had been too bouncy to be convincingly sick on command…)

So we did the call-back audition today. They had a bunch of women there auditioning for the "mom" role, and they were matching them up with little girls auditioning for the "kid" role and having them play through scripts. It was again, neat to experience. Here is Ana at the beginning of the call back audition, where they photographed her holding a name board.

Ana enjoyed herself, and they seemed pleased with her, but again, no expectations. Of course, Ana's now got the bug, and keeps asking if we can do it again soon…

Jenya's gotten very focused on drawing recently, and decided to sign up for an art class at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

She picked the "Drawing Wildlife" class, taught by Mark Klingler. It's actually an adult art class, because she wanted "real" art lessons, not pasting tissue paper onto cardboard (her words).

She handled herself very well with all the grownups, and the instructor was very supportive and encouraging. It was a great experience. They picked something from the CMNH hall of mammals, and then spent 3 weeks progressively sketching, drawing, painting, and polishing a watercolor of whatever they picked. Jenya learned quite a lot.

Ana wrote a haiku on hummingbirds and entered it into a web contest — it's posted here at this site:

http://www.hummingbird-guide.com/hummingbird-haiku.html

The prize is a hummingbird feeder — she's hoping she'll win it.  Neat contest!

Last day of Worlds, and it started super-early — 6am practice ice (ugh).  But the girls were troopers, and skated quite well.  Here they are in (presumably) the last ever performance of Rockin' Robin. 

After skating we headed up to Salem.  Had a wonderful time doing all the witch tours and museums.  Very cool.

Jump and Spin today for Jenya and Ana – they did a lovely job, placed 6th out of 9.  Here's the video:

 

Then in the evening we all went to the Rachel Flatt skating show / benefit.  A lot of fun — basically it was various skaters and teams picked from Worlds to show sort of a sampling of the competition, plus of course Rachal Flatt skated twice.  And the girls had a great time trading pins during intermission, too.

Today was De's Alpha program, and then Ana's Delta stroking.  De unfortunately had a fall, but she picked herself right up and kept going, and otherwise skated quite well.  She got 5th place.  Ana did a lovely job on her stroking, and got 3rd.  Much longer that usual stroking, too — they went around easily 6 or 7 times, not the usual once or twice. 

Here is De's program:

 

And here is Ana's stroking:

 

Today Jenya skated her FS1 program, and Ana skated her Delta compulsory.  Both skated very well and did a nice job – unfortunately for them, some of the other skaters did better.  Jenya got 4th place on her FS1, and Ana got 4th also on her Delta compulsory. 

Here's Ana's routine – the filming is a bit blurry in places because there was literal fog on the ice in this rink:

 

And here is Jenya's:

 

First day of actual skating — this is easily the biggest skating event we've attended, not surprisingly.  The girls went nuts looking at all the vendors, all the displays, and meeting all the other skaters.  There are people here from all over the country, plus several other countries including China and Qatar. 

We bought a new competition dress for Jenya, after of course she spent a huge amount of time comparison shopping.  Nice blue one — Lunn's planning to gem it up himself, it should look wonderful when he's done. 

Jenya skated her FS1 compulsory — unfortunately she had a bad fall during warm up and knocked her funny bone, then she went on first and promptly forgot what she was supposed to do.  So she just sort of improvised, wound up getting all the required elements in but not in the required order, and also went over time.  Oh well — at least she didn't just stand there.  Here's the video of her "nonstandard" routine…