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.

New Dos

Last Wednesday was haircut day at our house. All of us except for Sarah Claire got cuts. You don't get to see pics of the boys, since their changes weren't quite as drastic as ours. But you can take my word for it, they're both looking sharp.

Lee Anna has been asking for several weeks (or maybe months) now to get her hair cut. She wanted to grow it out long for Aunt Claire's wedding, but now that it's warming up again, she was ready to chop it off . I decided I was ready for a change, too, so we had a little girls' outing to the salon. Sarah Claire wanted to come, too, but I'm not ready to cut off these pig tails yet. Maybe in a few years...

Here's the last-minute "before" shot I took of Lee Anna as we were getting in the car...

 and here's the one she took of me.

And here we are back at home! (Sorry, the photo's kind of dark and blurry, 

but you get the general idea!)

 We left lots of hair all over the floor of that little salon,
and we're both very happy with our short(er) dos!

First Time for Everything

We've been living here for a long time. When we got here, Lee Anna was a year younger than Sarah Claire is now! And we've been riding sailboats on the river since the first week we were here. Not every week, but we've got to be in the 20s by now. Sometimes it's really windy and we worry that the boat might be blown over. Other times there's no wind at all, and they push us out a little ways with a pole, and we get to sit still and watch the sunset. Once, the wind wasn't blowing and they used a motor to push us around the river. Until the motor ran out of fuel, anyway, then they used another motor boat to pull us back to the dock in the dark. That was fun.

But this weekend we took some visiting friends on a sailboat cruise and had a new experience. When we first shoved off, we noticed that we seemed to be drifting more than sailing. Our sail wasn't catching much wind at all. The captain was a little younger, and perhaps a little less experienced, than many of the sailboat captains. When I asked him why we were drifting, he pointed up and noted that the sail was short. Well, okay, Cap'n, but it looks to me like it's just stuck and bunched up instead of being spread out. About that time we started to bump into another boat docked on the side of the river, so our guy had to push us off again.

Then he started calling out to all passers-by, asking them to pull us. A smaller motorboat came along after a few more minutes, and a second sailor-man got on with us. Before long, we noticed that our captain was cruising away on the little motor boat. The new captain then did what we hadn't seen before: He climbed up the mast to loosen the stuck sail! Our guest in town was 20 years younger than the sailor (and the current blogger) and also several kilos lighter than both of us. So I suggested that he climb up instead. He politely declined.

But after just a few minutes, and two trips up the mast, our guy had the sail unfurled and catching lots of wind.

And a good time was had by all. 

Beach Vacation

This week we took a little break from city life and headed to the beach. It was a beautiful week and we had a wonderful, restful time. We've been going to the same resort for five years now, since Sawyer looked like this... 

instead of all grown up like this...

 and Lee Anna looked like this...

instead of this beautiful almost-8-year-old!

 And when we first started going, this little princess wasn't even around yet!

 It's been fun to make so many special memories at the same spot. We always enjoy reminiscing about funny things that happened on previous trips, and remembering friends and family that have been out there with us.

Here are some of my favorite pics from this trip.

Sweet sisters

Daddy held down the beach chairs and tried hard to stay out of the chilly water.
Aren't those mountains amazing?

Lee Anna and Sawyer stayed busy one afternoon building a rock dam. 

If only they were always so loving toward each other...

And you have to see Sawyer's new trick!

When Jason told him to do a back flip off the side of the pool, I just laughed, thinking he'd never try it. But the next thing I knew, he was back-diving repeatedly into the water! He never quite made it 360 degrees, but he did some nice back dives!