Goodbye Summer.

Stonington Borough, August 2013.

Dear Family and Friends,
Stonington is truly a spectacular place during the summer. I could easily spend hours watching sailboats come in and out of the harbor, or listening to the lapping of the ocean waves on the shore. The Borough is so alive with people shopping, enjoying the various restaurants or walking down Water Street to swim or relax at Dubois beach down at the point. Growing up in Minnesota, I always enjoyed summer very much. Some of my best memories are from spending time at the lake cabin of some of our dear family friends.There is something about the ocean, however, that is intoxicating and magnificent. Maybe it's the salt in the air, or the cry of the seagulls, but it leaves a lasting impression. I treasure the past two summers that we have been able to live in Stonington and enjoy such a beautiful community. I love that Clara goes to bed at night humming along with the fog horn, and Stonington is always a wonderful place to share with family and friends. So now I feel a bit sad having to say goodbye to summer. It was a good one.

We have stayed busy this month with teaching, choir camp, and other various projects. Joey took time to fix up the guest room in our attic. It was dirty and unpainted, and not a very welcoming place to be, but now it is a nice, cheerful room and we have already had guests use it. 

Joey has also been cooking some fabulous meals lately, including a lobster and sweet corn chowder. It was delicious!

Fresh lobster from the local sea food market and sweet corn from a farm stand.

Yum!!!

We have also had a lot of fun doing things as a family, such as swimming, going to the beach, visiting the Providence zoo, going on picnics, and enjoying our vegetable garden. We grew tomatoes, basil, green and red peppers, and green beans this year. Joey has experience with canning, so we spent last weekend and this weekend canning various vegetables, as well as making fruit jams. We canned 81 jars of various jams and vegetables! It was actually a lot of fun, and Clara and I are both very much looking forward to the canned dill pickles, since we both love them.

Clara's upgraded pool at our house.

Enjoying a friend's pool with an awesome view.

Clara's arts and crafts.

Two love-struck Giraffes at the zoo.

Picnic Time!

A small sample of our canning.

Vegetables from our garden.

As I sit and write this blog, there is noisy pounding happening on the outside of our house (Calvary House.) The house is in the process of being completely fixed up on the outside. It has needed a lot of work for quite some time. The exciting thing is, once the outside of the house is fixed, it is going to be repainted to look more like it did historically. Word on the street is that it's going to be white with some kind of iridescent blue trim which picks up the stones of the church. The color of the shutters is still being debated. It is going to be so much more beautiful than the current grey color, although we will miss referring to it as the "haunted house." Once it is all done, I will be sure to include a picture. Hopefully it will go quickly, since Clara is having a hard time napping with this pounding going on.

Practicing Piano.

Clara is talking a mile a minute these days. She is so interested in the world around her. She loves to be silly and laugh, and she is an extremely physical child. She continues to enjoy dancing and will return to ballet classes soon. This year she will be in a class with 3 and 4 year olds, and while I have no doubt she will be able to do all the moves, I hope she does ok relating to the other kids. We will see how it goes. Clara can also be quite serous, and will sometimes become very fixated on an activity or sit and observe other kids. I see both Joey and myself in her, depending on her mood. She is definitely our child.  

Practicing for ballet class.

Clara's serious face.

We are looking forward to the fall and are excited about the things we have lined up. It is going to be an extremely busy fall. Joey will of course maintain his full-time duties at Calvary Church, as well as his part-time position as Artistic Director of Calvary Music School and the piano and organ teaching he is doing. He is still acting as dean of the New London American Guild of Organist (AGO) chapter, and he also has several organ/piano recitals lined up as a soloist, and in collaboration with me as the "Ripka Duo". Our first recital is in October and will be a violin and organ program. We also have two other recitals scheduled in CT and MN. In between our joint recitals, Joey has several solo organ recitals and organ presentations lined up. I will give more details in the next blog for those of you who are local and might like to come to some of these events. 

I am expecting to have anywhere from 18-23 private students registered for lessons this fall, which begin on September 3rd. I will be teaching Tuesday, Thursday (every other week), and Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Joey will teach Wednesdays and Thursdays along with his Wednesday evening chorister and adult choir rehearsals. He will also lead hand bell rehearsals on Thursday mornings. Somehow Joey and I have managed to make our schedules work and still have Mondays off for family time. We don't really have weekends free for obvious reasons. Trying to fit practice time in with everything else is usually the biggest challenge, but somehow we make it work.

We hope you have had a wonderful summer and that you have a nice start to fall.
Till next post...
Joey, Erin and Clara

Our sweet, energetic 2 year old.

  

Minnesota Vacation!

Dear Family and Friends,
This July, Joey, Clara and I spent two weeks visiting family and friends in Minnesota. We spent the first week with my parents in Saint Cloud, MN and the second week in Princeton, MN with Joey's parents. Clara did such a good job traveling on the airplane and being in new places, and we were able to find a lot of fun things for her to do while in Minnesota. It was great to see so many family members and friends, many of whom had never met Clara before. 

Some of the highlights while visiting my parents included: driving up north to Brainerd, MN for a day to eat fresh walleye at Madden's resort, looking at shops, and visiting some beautiful rural churches, spending time in the children's section of the the Saint Cloud library, going to the Minneapolis Children's Museum, playing with Clara at Lake George and other local playgrounds, visiting with Joey's former organ professor Charles Echols, meeting up with my long-time friend Karen in Maple Grove, and having dinner with our friends Cindy and Mike at their home and getting to see their two precious children.

Thanks for letting us enjoy your pool Cindy and Mike!

St. Cloud Library

Lake George, St. Cloud, MN

 Fun at the Minneapolis Children's Museum!

It was also really nice to see my childhood cats Simba and Sassy. Simba is getting quite old, but he is hanging in there and is such a sweet boy. It was special for me to be back in my old house and old bedroom for the first time as a mommy. My parents bought their house when my mom was pregnant with me, and I have so many memories there. I enjoyed looking through old family photos and was startled by how much Clara resembles the way I looked at her age. Clara loved playing with my childhood toys, books and stuffed animals.

My sweet Simba!

Dad and Me.

Some of the highlights while visiting Joey's parents in Princeton included: a party at Joey's house with many of his extended family members and long-time family friends, a trip to the zoo, fun at the Isanti county fair, and riding the rides at the Mall of America. Clara also got to meet her uncle Brad for the first time and see his new house. Joey's mom purchased a large pool for the deck, and Clara enjoyed spending time in that and playing with bubbles. She also really liked their horse and would often look out the window to see where he was. Unfortunately Joey's sister Kim was not able to be in Minnesota while we were visiting, but we really hope we can all work out a way to meet up in the future when we come for another visit. 

Fun at the Como Zoo!

Grandpa and Clara making grumpy faces.

Clara won a prize for her excellent fishing technique! I guess she has some Minnesotan in her.

Bubbles and Grandma and Grampa Ripka's house!

Minnesota is a great place to be during the summer. The weather was really nice and there are so many activities to enjoy. As it turns out, we will be returning to Minnesota sooner than we expected, because Joey and I have been contracted to give a violin and organ recital on the Chapel Series at the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, MN in February 2014. It will be a quick trip, but we hope many of our family and friends will be able to attend the recital.

We hope you enjoy the rest of your summer!
Joey, Erin and Clara 

We thought this was funny.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Clara and her best friend "Tubby Kitty".

Dear Family and Friends,

I'm sorry my July blog post is late. For the past several weeks we have either been visiting family or have had family visiting us. My parents flew back home to MN yesterday after a nice trip to Connecticut to see us, and over the weekend my aunt and uncle from Virginia came to visit too. During the middle of July, we spent two fun-filled weeks with both my parents and Joey's parents in Minnesota. I am going to include a separate post about our trip to Minnesota. As it turns out, the two weeks we were away included some of the hottest weather on record in Connecticut, so I guess we chose a good time to leave the state.

The beginning of the month was a lot of fun. We started by celebrating Joey's 31st birthday. Several friends were very generous, and we ended up with multiple birthday cakes and flowers to celebrate with. Clara was so excited about the cake that she started digging into it with her fingers before we could light candles or sing "happy birthday". 

She couldn't resist.

On July 4th Joey presented his 2nd annual "Stars, Stripes and Pipes" concert, which was sponsored by the Stonington Historical Society. Again this year, the church was so full that people were standing outside the door to listen. He played great patriotic music, and the audience really enjoyed singing "America the Beautiful" out of the hymnals. This year Joey put up a screen at the front of the church so that people could see him play and watch his feet. I think the organ 4th of July concert is going to be a tradition in the Borough from now on. 

Helping daddy practice for "Stars, Stripes and Pipes!"

Singing "America the Beautiful".

Before Joey performed, the three of us marched in the Stonington Parade. Actually we marched with a group of "Minnesotans in Stonington." One of Joey's adult piano students is from MN originally, and she suggested that we team up with other Minnesotans in the area. As it turns out there are a pretty good number of Minnesotans living around here. We wore Viking horns and Minnesota shirts, carried Spam cans, pulled Clara in a home-made canoe wagon and got a lot of cheers from the crowds. We were even mentioned in a small write up in the local paper the next day. It was fun, and we even got some authentic mosquito bites while marching in the parade. (The Mosquito is what we call the "state bird" in Minnesota. Haha!)

Summer is a great time to get fresh produce at local farmer's markets and farm stands. We took Clara to a "pick-your-own" fruit farm, and she helped us pick wild blueberries. She loved finding the blueberries on the bushes and putting them into our bucket. They were delicious! This time of year there are fields full of Sunflowers. They are so beautiful to look at, but I don't recommend bringing them home because they make an awful mess!

The fruit of our labor.

Clara continúes to enjoy playing in her pool on the deck, playing in the sand at the beach and going to the park. She participated in the summer reading program at Stonington Library and was awarded a prize for keeping track of her book reading (meaning the books we read to her!). She loves going to the library and coloring, playing with toys, picking out books and sitting in a big plush chair while I read to her. She also loves story time. Her speech is developing at a really fast pace, and we are able to understand her really well. She loves to sing and is always excited to learn something new. She is doing really well with her numbers, letters, colors and shapes. She is growing up way too fast. 

Helping Momma chuck the corn.

It's ready!

One of our favorite summer dishes: Green and Red Tomato Mozzarella Salad with fresh Basil (from our garden) and Balsamic Glaze. Yummy!

Little Swimmer!

Funny Faces!

My baby and me.

We hope you are enjoying your summer. 

Stay tuned for the "Minnesota Vacation" blog post. 

Best,

Joey, Erin and Clara