Join us for our Harvest Party this Friday!

This Friday’s play morning will be a Harvest Party! Bring some snacks and some creativity as we’ll be having fun carving pumpkins and enjoying the fall weather!

10am – 1pm. Suggested donation: $5 per parent/ child, $6 per family group. Pumpkins provided!

Find free and cheap family events this summer!

The Family Center has added a Community Calendar page to our website, listing free and cheap events in Durham and the surrounding area.

The calendars are constantly updated. Please email jcsutcliffe@familycenternd.org if you know of an event that should be added.

Hope this helps with finding fun things to do this summer!

Friday fun

We’re open again for drop in play on Fridays! Last Friday the craft was making holiday trees from sticky card and tissue paper:

V busy making her holiday tree

We had a visitor – a rescued box turtle. His rescuers named him Akachan – little red one:

C holding the box turtle

C and the turtle

Introducing Akachan to our friends

Do you think Akachan even knows he’s in a box?

L with the beautiful habitat she created for the turtle

The playground is open!

After a lot of hard work and a lot of help, the playground is ready for the preschoolers to use. Here are some photos of them playing last week, and helping with putting the new donated mulch in:

L found a worm!

Everybody getting ready to work

Climbing the mulch mountain

L showing Charlotte her worm

Busy digging

Happy to be on the swing set

Happy for a sunny day

The playground still needs some work. We need some more mulch, and some sand for the sandbox.  Please let us know if you can help!

Our new classroom!

Here’s a look at our new classroom. Melissa loves it because she can see everything that is going on. The children love it because they have much more space than before!

Moving progress – Sunday

The snack and block room is looking very empty. The art work is moving to the new location to greet the children on Monday though.

Bob and David carrying out part of the play structure.

Melissa’s Dad works as a “handyman” and he lent us his business’s truck and trailer. We couldn’t be doing this move without it. Thanks!

Natalie and Bob taking the top off the play structure. Natalie did almost all of the disassembly on the big structure!

We’re very grateful to the guys from the Roxboro Fire Dept. for coming out to help us!

The slide was just light enough for the kids to get in on helping to move the playground.

Who needs a swing set when Sunshine and David are there?

Moving is fun. Here the girls are singing and dancing outside our new location.

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.