Barn Yarns

Tonight there was a spontaneous little dinner picnic out on the Barn Patio. That's Felicia and Maysa sharing a blanket, and Abby is sitting next to them. Ayan is at the end of the table, next to Abby's friend that was visiting, and Paloma. There was Chinese food involved. How cozy. =)

Tonight was a busy dorm meeting. We clarified a few rules, did a fire drill, talked up our dorm sweatshirt contest, and reminded everyone that we're doing a roommate workshop tomorrow night at 9 pm. Our dorm leaders, KyoungHee and Tilly, led us in an exercise about what it means to live in a community together. They made this cute poster, with things we like on the inside of the circle, and things we don't want in our community on the outside of the circle. We all agreed to hold each other accountable to our little circle of community expectations.

Then it was time for Super Clean, which used another kind of circle...our handy, dandy chore wheel (also made by our dorm leaders.) Everyone has a job and rushes off to do as much as possible in about 5 minutes. Then we all gather for snacks and hanging out.

Tonight, we were celebrating Ronghao's birthday, and Flo's birthday (which is tomorrow). Ronghao had asked for snacks, and Flo wanted strawberries. DELICIOUS snacks tonight.=)

Paloma is appalled that not everyone has gone to the chocolate buffet in Boston. =)

And, this is us singing happy birthday to Flo!!

G'night from the Barn!

Wow. There's so much to tell you, it's hard to know where to begin. On Wednesday, we had our first assembly of the year and also said good-bye (for now) to Briana and Riz, who are off on an adventure in China, performing Peking Opera. How cool is that? Two of their classmates are keeping blogs, if you want to follow along on the adventure: http://cswgoestochina.tumblr.com/ and http://theconfuciusproject.tumblr.com/.

Wednesday night, a bunch of us gathered for some snacks and homework and tv in the common room. It sounded like everybody had a pretty good first day of school.

Thursday at assembly, Victoria Z. made an announcement that she'll be teaching a D block class on Tai Chi! We love that at CSW students can teach classes, and we're thinking maybe we can get her to teach us a bit at a dorm meeting one night. This is a picture of her making an announcement at assembly:

Friday night was the first night of all-boarders weekend. We had a BBQ on the quad to kick it off:

Then, there was this awesome trivia challenge game show thingie. Rowan and Kandice rocked the music questions, Niko rocked the candy questions, and Abby went up for like four different categories and rocked all of them. Victoria F. was AWESOME at hula hooping (see the video on the CSW facebook page!) Denisha scored some points for the Barn as well. Honestly, I can't even remember everyone that won points but it was really fun and very funny. Then, we finished off with an ice cream social. Here are a couple of pictures from the event (you can see a little video or two on facebook).

Afterward, everyone headed back to the dorm. A bunch of girls started watching a movie and then as people got tired, they drifted off until it was only Victoria F. and Anastatia in the common room, looking so cozy that I had to snap a little picture.

On Saturday morning, the returning boarders went off to a local lake to do some kayaking and canoeing. (We're still waiting for those pictures to come in.) The new students (including day students) went to Hale Reservation, where they did ropes courses and team building challenges.

After everyone got back to campus, they had a mere hour or so of free time before dinner and then we all went to Kimball Farm, where we got wristbands that let us play volleyball, mini-golf, bumper boats, batting cages, driving range, etc etc. Oh--and there was also an ice cream sundae bar. (Are you getting the sense that we're big on ice cream here!?) =)

Milo was awake for a few minutes...

but mostly he slept through the fun.

Then, we got back to campus around 10:00 and the girls met to go over the fractured fairy tale plan. A longstanding tradition, this is a competition between the dorms. Each dorm puts on a skit of a fairytale that meets certain guidelines given by the dorm parents. This year, these were the rules:

everyone in the dorm must be in it
it must contain references to each dorm parent in the dorm
it must contain dancing (group or solo)
it must contain singing
it must contain a harry potter character
it must contain a representation of Aaron or Jane Moulding
it must contain the phrase "there's an app for that"

Here's the final skit, as performed for the boarding community.

I'm sorry to report that we didn't win, but Sarah did win for the best Jane Moulding impression. (Jane approved!) See the CSW facebook page for a video of Aaron explaining the tradition, and the giving of awards at the end of the performances.

We had about an hour for homework before a short dorm meeting. Ronghao's birthday was Saturday, so we had fun singing the birthday song to her during our meeting tonight!

Then we had some delicious s'mores over a bonfire before heading back to homework, and finally (!) bed, sweet, bed.