We're Smiling!

Can you guess why we we're all smiling around here?

We are officially finished with our 2011-12 school year! Second grade and kindergarten are in the bag for these two. Today was our official last day. We've been winding down for the last few weeks, but today we really finished everything up. 

We finished our last two read-alouds--A Little Princess and a wonderful biography of Gladys Aylward. My goodness, that woman had some adventures! We probably could have finished the read-alouds a little sooner if I hadn't had to keep stopping to wipe my eyes and swallow the lump out of my throat. I just love that my kids are being exposed to such wonderful stories--fiction and non-fiction!

We celebrated with a special End-of-the-School-Year lunch, and then a surprise trip to a new little children's museum that just opened near us recently. "Museum" might be a generous term. It's really just one big room, but they had lots of fun, educational activities. First the kids got to go "shopping" in a big fruit and vegetable market, then they had to weigh their food to determine how much it costs. Since they see these kinds of scales used regularly, they loved getting to do it themselves.

When they had finished shopping, they put on doctor's coats and stethoscopes and played doctor with a big skeleton. Then when they finished that, they got to build little cars and towers out of some special building blocks. And all that playing cost just about $5 each. We will definitely be going back there!

And, since this will be my last school-related post for a while, here's Lee Anna's last writing assignment of the year. Her assignment was to write a story about a trip into space. Enjoy!

Does it get any better...

than Oreos and bubbles? Not for these guys!

Thanks to our awesome friends visiting from the states, we enjoyed some real-live, authentic, double-stuffed Oreo goodness tonight. It was wonderful!

For the Birds

We had a blast celebrating Sawyer's sixth birthday with an Angry Birds birthday party last weekend! Here are the kids, decked out in their new t-shirts from Mimi, practicing their best "Angry Face."

A sweet friend took pictures for us during the party, which means that this party was a lot more thoroughly documented than some of our other birthdays. I'm so glad she got pictures of everything.

 There were birds...

 and pigs...

 all over the place!

When all our guests had arrived, we went up to the roof to play our real-live Angry Birds game!

 Have you ever seen such fierce concentration? Those pigs don't stand a chance!

We also had lots of bubbles for those who were waiting their turn with the slingshot.

 And the swingset got a good workout, too!

 We went back inside for pizza, and then had fun playing "Pin the Beak on the Bird."

By the time we got back upstairs to do the pinata, it was pretty dark, but they all still managed to find the candy that fell out!

Here's our sweet photographer enjoying a hard-earned cake & ice cream break.

We are so grateful for this sweet, silly, energetic, thoughtful, 

affectionate, wiggly, snaggletoothed little boy.  

Happy Birthday, Sawyer!

Plugging Along

We're steadily making progress toward the end of our school year, hoping to be done in about a month. In between the dusty days in April, we had some really pretty days. Some of those became Roof School Days! 

We've also been sprucing up our roof a bit this week, getting ready for a big event coming this weekend. You'll get to see more pictures of that soon, I'm sure.

This guy finished his Kindergarten math book this week. Here he is with the completed Book B! First grade, here he comes!

And here is our most recent art project! Sawyer is turning six this weekend, and he decided long ago that he wants an Angry Birds party. So I decided to combine party prep with elementary art, and we had a paper mache morning last week! We discovered that Lee Anna is much more excited about having gooey stuff on her fingers than her little brother. But while he wasn't so thrilled with the actual paper mache process, he loves the final product! Look for these guys back in another blog post soon.