Last Day!

The last day of school is finally here!  

Here's the last day of 8th grade for Jake...

 Last day of 6th grade for Allie...

The last day of 2nd grade for Nathan...

It's a great day for these kiddos!

Last Day of Kindergarten!

Jason got out of school a few days before the others.  On his last day, he went in the morning so that he could go to the dance festival assembly.

 He was so cute as he headed out for his last day.
He got to ride the morning bus with Allie and Nathan.

It's crazy to see so many kids at the bus stop now!  Two families moved in and suddenly there is a neighborhood full again.  It's awesome.

After Jason got to school, I went to Jake's school to see him get an award for being on the honor roll.

Then, I went straight to the elementary school to watch the other three dance.

They're all so cute.

 Nathan had a program after that for the parents.  He had a few speaking parts and it was cute.

Mike and Jason (with his Harry Potter on the ipod) came too.

I thought it was funny that they were all wearing orange.
The end of school year activities are so busy and I can't believe how fast the time is flying.  Crazy!

Memorial Day in Orem

I woke up on Memorial day and agonized over whether or not I should go down to Orem to see my mom and Spanish Fork to see my Dad and Sam's grave.  

It was raining pretty hard and I found a leak in the roof of the motorhome and I was bummed about that.  The house gutters were over flowing and the boys looked to be destined to spending the day in front of the tv.  I didn't want to come up with ways to entertain them, so I left Mike to dealing with all of that.

 Allie and I got down to Spanish Fork with my Mom and we checked out the graves.  We tried to identify who might have come down and put flowers on Sam's grave along with the other relatives.  Whoever it was, I'm grateful because I came empty handed.  It has been a long time since I've come to Sam's grave.

It's showing a lot of wear and tear.  So is my Dad's.  One of these days, they'll look just as old as the grave stones all around.

 I don't like to think of my precious Sam there.  I really prefer to linger on the knowledge that I have that his spirit lives on.  So much easier to think like that for sure.

We stopped to visit Mike's sister on our way out of town and took Allie to the Icelandic monument.

I'm glad that even though her grandpa is dead, he is more to her than a name on this monument or his headstone.  She knows of funny stories and sees pictures of him.  I hope he's real to her.

We had a nice picnic with my sister and her family.  It was just a nice day.  A quick trip, but worth going.  I'm glad there's just this one last week of school.  It will be nice to get into our summer vacation.
Life is good.

Memorial Day in Star Valley

We needed to get the pipes out on the farm in Star Valley.  

 Grandpa Joe showed us how to get all the new gaskets put in and how to hook them all together.  We had to maneuver them up and down the hill as we found pipe that would all fit together.  It was a long day of work.

 The littles brought us drinks and rode around on the wheeler and motorcycle.

 Charlie caught a mouse and then thought it was a super fun game trying to keep us from getting it out of his mouth.

 We had rain on and off and when we were about to call it a day, it really started to come down.  By the time we gathered all our tools, and came down the hill, there was a beautiful double rainbow over the knolls.

I'd never seen one so low.  It was pretty incredible.

Allie and the littles hurried up to the rainbow to see if they could catch a pot of gold.  They said it was so bright up there.
Nathan said "it was the best rainbow I've ever seen.  It was over our heads and so bright.  I was glad I was there".
 Jason said that the rainbow was running away from them.
It really was beautiful.  I wish I could have gotten a picture that looked exactly like what we saw.

After we finished with the pipes, we took a ride to the cemetery.

Mike talked to the kids about his brother Steve.

Katie's new bench was beautiful.

On the way home, we decided to go over to Helen's house.

Mike's cousin was there with his kids and they were having a music party.  Jake picked up the bass and played it as if he always had.  I love that he can do that.

Allie and the littles played the tambourines.  I played the guitar and Mike sung.  It was pretty funny.

 Helen has a book of music and everyone just plays what they know.  It's a musical house for sure.  It made me wish that we sat around every once in a while doing that instead of watching tv.

We had the motorhome there and one of Mike's childhood friends tried to sneak in on us to stick the horn. (when you put a stick in between the horn and the seat of a car and wait for them to come out and see what's going on).  It's a bit hard to do when we're actually in the motorhome trying to sleep.  :)  We had fun laughing with him and his son for a little while.  Mike has the funniest stories from his childhood.
It was a super cold night.  I hadn't prepped the motorhome before we left, so I didn't have a whole lot of blankets.  It was a restless night and then we had to get up early to get home for a meeting I had at church.
It was a fun quick trip though.  Life is good!

The Last Homework Packet

Jason's been a great kindergarten student, but he hasn't ever really loved doing his kindergarten homework packets.  We rarely turned them in on time, so when I told him he was working on his last packet ever, he got pretty excited.

Finished!  Next stop, 1st grade homework sheets!

Wind Storm

We had a crazy wind storm and I got a text from Jake after he walked out the door to go to school.  He said "check out the trees next door".  I went out and saw that our neighbors had lost some big aspen trees.  It was sad to see.  They were out of town too, so we knew they'd come home to a big mess. Several other neighbors lost trees and some fell down in the canyon.  It was a crazy storm.  

After school, we saw that our other neighbor was out there with a chain saw, cleaning up.
We sent Jake out to help.

When the littles got off the bus, they hurried over to help too.

I'm surprised that none of the trees on our back hill were affected.  It does make me glad that we took down the two in our back yard that were a danger to the house. 
Crazy wind!

Stitches

Allie had a bit of a run in with the stall in the girl's bathroom at school.  The school called me to tell me that she had been cut, but they gave her some bandaids and sent her on her way.  I figured it must not be serious and went on with my day.  When she got home, she showed me the wound and I saw that it was really deep and still bleeding pretty bad, so I took her to our pediatrician.  She was pretty nervous, but he put her right at ease and did a great job stitching her up.  He cracked us both up when he came in saying that he had just watched some youtube videos and he was fairly confident that he could stitch her up. He told her she was his first patient needing stitches, but then, later when he talked about stitching a kid up the day before, she caught him in his lie.  She was laughing the whole time rather than letting her fears get in the way.  

She ended up with 6 stitches.  It healed up nicely and we went back in a week to get them out.
Believe it or not, it's our first round of stitches in the family.  Way to go Allie!

Runner Boy

Nathan is doing track this year.  He's really enjoying it.  We've been to a few meets so far and he's getting the hang of how things work.  He insisted on running the mile for the second meet in a row.  He likes that long distance thing.  He needs to work on focusing on the end goal though because he's very easily distracted as he runs.

He's doing great though!  He's good at the standing long jump too.  Way to go Nate!