The Keene Family

Every Monday, OneDrive emails me a little notice that it has automatically created an album for me with all the fun photos from the weekend. It's like a nice little feature that leaves us remembering the weekend activities while starting a fresh week. It started on Friday with our trip to Seattle Children's Theater to see "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." It was fabulous, of course. We have read the book years ago and just recently listened to the audio book, so the kids were well prepared for the story. We took the ferry over and were blessed with this beautiful rainbow over West Seattle on our way in to dock. The kids were very interested to see which actors were playing which characters. They had correctly predicted that some characters would play more than two roles. Haley met Lucy, Aslan, and the witch after the show. Saturday morning, we were ready to go at soccer for JT's game. His team had a good game but lost 2-1. Then th...

Sometimes you meet someone and then later in the conversation they say, "So what do you do?" meaning "What do you do for work?" And I'm not quite sure how to answer anymore. Lots of Skype calls with people all over the world. This one was a project manager in Israel! I'm a director for content and professional learning for i2e . That's mostly my job. But no one knows what that means. It's not as obvious as when I used to say, "I'm a teacher." It means that I organize our trainers and training engagements, and I manage projects to develop lessons, presentations, facilitator guides, and videos, for Microsoft in Education. Occasionally, I lead a training as well. But I also have a one-year contract to provide my expertise as a technology learning specialist for AVID Center . And then, through my own company, I have a contract with Seattle Preparatory School to provide one training day a month for their staff, and I have a c...

Once a friend of mine said she had a Leadership Retreat over the weekend, and I laughed when I heard that she meant her husband and she had a weekend away. But I have thought about that and used it since, when Jim and I have a date night ("leadership meeting") or sit down to talk finances ("team budget planning"). And really, it sounds so important when it's work but if our family is our priority, shouldn't we treat it with even more value? So with that, we had a team retreat this weekend. All four of us. :) We picked the kids up from school early on Friday to hit the road early. That was the first time either of them had ever been called to the office over the intercom. Very exciting stuff. We had snacks in North Bend, dinner in Moses Lake, ice cream in Spokane, and a late arrival in Spirit Lake. In the morning, the kids spent time exploring the cabin and all the fun gadgets around the house. After breakfast, the kids and I went on a...

We missed the Buddy Walk last year because it was JT's first football game. But this year, we made it! It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed seeing the sea of blue shirts and signs. It is tough to get a picture with Russell as he is a man of action, but I had JT and Haley hover around behind him, looking at me and smiling, and the moment he stopped to grab the hula hoop we snapped away. After the walk, we celebrated Walter's first birthday. He's getting so big!