Moving progress – Saturday

Here are some photos from the move on Saturday:

Starting to carry the boxes out of the Murray house.

Melissa in the midst of chaos.

Jason came to lend us some much needed muscle!

The children were really getting excited about helping with the move.

We’ve been relying completely on borrowed equipment for this move. This truck and trailer were loaned by Melissa’s Dad (thanks!)

Bob tackling the library.

One of our youngest helpers after seeing the new classroom for the first time. She’s doing her “happy dance” and singing “I love the place! I love the place!”

A borrowed handtruck made things much easier!

Unloaded boxes in the new classroom.

Unloading all the furniture together makes for some great hide-and-seek spots!

Another shot of the classroom full of boxes

Natalie bringing furniture into the library

Here’s the playground. It used to have a giant, crumbling, unsafe play structure on it. Thelma’s husband Pedro took it down single handedly. The playground doesn’t look terribly appealing right now, but give us a few days and you wont’ recognize it!

This is one of the holes that the legs of the old play structure was stuck in . There were about 8 of them, all 2 – 3 ft deep. Pedro pulled them out of the ground as though he was the Incredible Hulk! How did he do that? We don’t know, but we’re glad that he did. Thanks Pedro!

Here the kids are trying to fill in the holes in the playground.

Thanks for helping, Gary!

Taking a break…

Packing progress – last week

We’ve been so busy it’s been hard to find the time to post all of our pictures. I’ll be putting up a few posts this evening so that you can follow our progress. Here’s a gallery of pictures from our packing last week:

Starting to fill the baby room up with boxes

Wow, we have a lot of art supplies! This isn’t even half of them!

Charlotte works for the Durham Literacy Center teaching ESOL. She’s been really helping us this week!

Daniel came over from the Durham Literacy Center to give us a hand

Conner worked hard at keeping us supplied with boxes

We had a job for everyone!

Wow – the library needed a lot of packing!

The stack of boxes was getting a lot bigger by the end of the week!

Website back up!

Our main website: www.familycenternd.org is back up. Sorry for any inconvenience!

A peek inside…

This will be our main classroom. It's a large room with child sized sinks and some storage. Melissa is excited about this room as it will allow her to see all of the children from wherever she is in the classroom.

A photo from the other end of the classroom. Those of you who remember our location in Bahama (a couple of years ago) will recall that the classroom was housed in a single big room. This room is perhaps a little bigger than that one.

This is our second room, where our children's library and family resource library will be.

Some more pictures of the outside of our new home

Here are some more photos of our new location:

From Roxboro Rd. Hopefully this will help you to find us!

There's a parking lot to the left of the church.

Another photo from Roxboro Rd. The cars in the photo are parked on Ellerbee, a gravel road outside our entrance. This is on the right hand side of the church.

This photo is taken from Ellerbee Rd. The door will be the entrance to the Family Center.

Pictures of our new home!

This is the outside view of our new rooms

From the opposite direction…

A pleasant garden in the grounds.

This play structure is going to be removed and replaced with the ones currently at the Murray Ave house.

Website Problems

Our website: www.familycenternd.org is having some issues. Therefore we’ll be using this blog to communicate information about our relocation.

We’ll post here when the main website is back online again.

Thanks for supporting the Family Center of Northern Durham!

We’re Moving!

The Family Center of Northern Durham will be moving from our current location on Murray Avenue to rooms in the Northgate Presbyterian Church in the next couple of weeks. This move will be great for our organization and the families it serves. All our programs will remain but our new location will provide greater convenience for our parents and help to make our future more secure.

This move is happening very soon. This week we will be packing everything up and preparing for our move. Our big moving weekend will be Saturday November 7th and Sunday November 8th.

Preschool will reopen on November 16th and Friday activities will be back on November 20th.

We need your help!

We’re planning to do this move ourselves, without a moving company. We really need some help to get this done. We need people, trucks and tools.

If you can help us, please consider signing up for one of the “teams” below:

• Packing at the Murray Ave house.
• Loading items on trucks and driving them to the church.
• Unpacking and setting up the classroom and library.
• Disassembly and disposal of the church’s current play structure.
• Disassembly and transportation of our play structures.
• Setting up the playground at the church.
• Cleaning up the Murray Ave. house.

Some of the items we need to borrow are:

• Trucks, and people to drive them!
• A couple of chainsaws, shovels, wheelbarrows (these items are for moving the playground).

Donations of the following items would be helpful:

• Quick set concrete.
• Mulch.
• Refreshments for the moving teams.

This is an estimate of the things we need help with. I’ll be updating this blog with more information as we work on our moving preparations in the coming week.

If you can help us, please send either Joanna or Melissa an email – jcsutcliffe@familycenternd.org or melissagibbs@familycenternd.org and let us know.

Looking forward to seeing you when the Family Center of Northern Durham reopens!

Flubber!

Today we made a cool goopy substance called Flubber. It’s made of school glue, borax and a little food coloring and the children LOVE it.

Adding Borax to the glue mixture

Making the flubber blue

Mixing the flubber

Flubber on a tube

How long will it take the flubber to reach the table?

For more squishy, goopy pictures of flubber play, click here.

Making decorations

On the last preschool day before the holidays we worked on making decorations. First we strung cranberries and popcorn:

Callie the cat gets some more popcorn to string

 

Conner and Niccolo work together

Then we moved on to cinnamon ornaments. The previous week we worked on making a dough from ground cinnamon, apple sauce and glue. Once shapes had been cut, the ornaments were left to dry. Today they were ready for painting:

Hannia made a colorful gingerbread man

Hmm. What color to use next?

Lots of finished decorations

More finished decorations

Even more finished decorations

 

More pictures are here:

Cranberry and popcorn stringing

Cinnamon decorations