Motionsdag

 This is Ian.

Eliza with grazing does in the background.

On the Friday before fall break, all of the schools in Denmark take a day off school and do some sort of physical activity, called motionsdag (motion day). Our school annually goes to the deer park by our house for their motionsdag. At the high school, we were given the opportunity to volunteer to go with one of the younger classes, so I went with  Eliza’s class.

Lunchtime

 Had I not gone with Eliza’s class, I could have slept a few hours later and  gone straight to the park, since the high school is very relaxed about activities like this, but since the fourth grade class had to go to school first, I got to sit through and hour of fourth grade classes, and then took the train with them back to the park, where we walked for a few hours before stopping at a big hill for lunch and playtime...

Eliza prepares to climb into the tree with the help of one the logs I had to move into place.
Her teacher can be seen up in the tree as well.  He fits in well with his class.

… Which very quickly became an ‘Ian, help us lift this log here and climb the tree with this big branch to help us build a tree house!’ type of playtime. I was very impressed at how well the boys made their platform, using teamwork, they were able to get a lot of branches up on their own, but when it came to the heavy ones, I had to climb the tree while holding 30 – 40 pound pieces of wood with only one hand available for climbing. 

 

Lars was with his own class, (fourth grade girls were too much for him to handle). But we still saw him on the way. 

We did not see many of the 2,000 deer in the park, as they well avoided the roar of the kids, heading up to the north end of the park where fewer people were, but we could still hear their mating calls from miles away.

Eliza's exact words, "That looks like a nice set of antlers on that buck"
(my mom had forbidden ME from making any hunting/trapping/shooting/scouting jokes about the deer )

 After going back to school when the walk was finished, Eliza went to flag football club, which she was glad that I was able to help her practice passes, since the boys can be a little rough (they wanted me to show them tackles. Not very easy to do when it’s a 6 foot 5, high 200’s, defensive lineman vs. a four foot tall elementary school student).  Eliza passes well, but is a little afraid of the ball when it’s thrown hard. We plan on throwing passes in the yard over the break, (the hard part will be keeping our nice football away from our small, furry ball of razor wire, even though he is very sweet J).

QB making a pass