End of 1st grade awards

She's a little stinker she is.

So I got to go to her end of the year awards ceremony.  With camera in hand, and the boys being babysat, I was ready to enjoy watching her from afar.

The little stinker broad-sided me with two surprises.  She was the only one in her class and one of only 8 in the entire school that received the Presidential Physical Fitness award!  What?  My little monkey!  She said she stopped at 10 pull-ups on the bar because that's all you had to get.  I said, "Could you have done more?" and she said, "Yeah!"  like duh!

Here's Coach D handing her her Pres. Ph Fit award.

And another award for being in the Jogging club.  I can't remember exactly how many miles it was but it was many she ran each week.

The other surprise was with her Book Adventure points.  We worked to keep her well read with checking out lots of books from the public library.  She enjoyed logging on to the website, searching for the test and then taking the test.  I was aware of her reading 60-something books from Feb 1 through May from our house, but when I show up and heard that she had supplemented her home-reading with some school-reading and actually tested on 100 books, I was floored!  She hadn't mentioned any reading she had done at school to me.  I had no idea.  She read 25 books each month and tested correctly on them!  Wowsers!

I am so stinking proud of her and think it's cute that she's so humble about all that hoopla.

Here she is, the end of the year with her buds.

Mrs. Possehl

Abigail

Reina

Abigail, Reina, K, Anna, Blanca and Zenobia

 

Pure cuties!

St. Paul's Program

Nathan started St. Paul's this year in January.  He was there for just a couple of weeks before his buddy Jackson joined the same class.  Him and Jackson hit it off, once more, and Nathan even made a new friend, Chase.  He said he like Chase as his friend because Chase liked dinosaurs and swords.  What more is there to look for in a friend when you're a 4-year-old boy?

I would say the year was a success.  He did well in class.  Learned lots.  But seemed to find every reason under the sun to NOT go to school 2 times/week.  His name card was white and he wanted it to be green.  Circle time takes too long.  The teachers don't let you run around with sticks so you can pretend they're swords.

He survived.  Learned lots.  Made a new friend.  And now has a school to call his own.

The end of the year program was cute.  It was all the kids dressed up and acting out Nursery Rhymes.  Nathan, Jackson and another guy were Three Men in a Tub.  Better known as: the Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick maker.

Shall I refresh your memory?

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick-maker,
All put out to sea.

Nathan was the butcher, so boy did I have fun finding props for him to be the butcher.  He's wearing an apron, with a hamburger and a chicken leg poking out the pockets.  It was the best I could do.

There's Jack and Jill and a twinkling star along with some kittens who've lost their mittens.

And Little Bo Peep with her sheep.  Jackson, the Baker, is on the far left.

It was neat to see Nathan have something only he did and could be considered his and unique to him.

 

Nehemiah dance show

Katherine was in another Spring performance for Dance Divine and this year it was about Nehemiah.

Yes, I had to read the story of Nehemiah before I went to watch my daughter dance in it.  Yes, I had to do the same thing for last year's Esther dance.

Self-pic

 

A member of her entourage.  Cousin Kayla.

Dance Divine 2013

 

Dance Divine 2012

One proud papa.

 

More adoring fans...

Miss Patsy

 

Bamah

And mom and dad, of course!

Waiting back stage for the finale

Miss Gracie

 

and Melina

 

Miss Kaley

 

 

I'm a little bummed because I won't get to have Dance Divine 2014 pictures.  Katherine decided she didn't want to do dance again this year, but gymnastics instead.

So, I'll have lots of gymnastics pictures instead.

Spring Fever

It took having my first official 40-hr/week job before I truly understood what it meant to get spring fever.  All through school, if the weather was beautiful, I would just take the time to head to a body of water somewhere and enjoy it.  Studying, the part-time job, whatever responsibilities I had, could wait.  At least for that day, while I got in a good dose of spring time.

I LOVED and still LOVE spring time.  It's my absolute favorite time of the year.  I love the newness and rebirth and refreshing-ness and cool, crisp air.  Cold weather doesn't suit this Florida native, so when the first signs of warming occur, I'm rejuvenated.  I was thrilled outside of my brain when Katherine, my first precious baby whom I'd prayed for for years, was due within days of the first day of spring 2006.  Easter.  Flowers.  New growth.  Warmness.  Rebirth.

I love spring.

Spring is beautiful.

It's my favorite time of the year.

I really, really LOVED spring time before my three little precious-es came around, because, you see they have taught me to take the term "spring fever" quite literally.

I've written before about being disappointed for missing Easter 2 years in a row because of someone being sick in our house.  But 3 years?  Three years in a row we are split up because of sickness.  What's going on here, really?

To add insult to injury, Katherine's birthday is right around Easter, usually, so that means.... Yep, you guessed it - she's sick for her birthday!

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

So last year, when she turned 6, we had to postpone her birthday party.  And whadayaknow, we had to do the same thing again this year because of sickness.

Here's the breakdown:

Katherine's birthday party was scheduled for March 23rd.  We invited the largest entourage so far for a birthday party because it was going to be a Pony Party.  We paid a deposit to a Pony Party company for them to come out that morning and give unlimited pony rides to the short horse-lovers.  Except we had one serious problem - Katherine started "getting sick" at 4am that morning and it continued every half hour until about 7 when we realized we had to change the plans for the day.  That poor girl got sick every half hour for 4 hours and then proceeded to top it off for a total of 13 times in a 12 hour period.

Yikes, it was that bad.  I felt awful for her.  I couldn't stand her getting sick like she was and she was soooo excited about her pony party that we decided it was best to postpone.

So, no pony-ride birthday party for the day.  Jim took the 2 well children with him to celebrate Bamah's birthday party which was supposed to immediately follow Katherine's.

Sigh.  Poor girl.  I hated it for her.

So the next day, Sunday, when I realized dehydration might be an issue, I decided to make her some Gatorade pops.  Anything for her to get some fluids in and keep them down.  I had to get creative since we didn't have popsicle forms.

Behold, my astute engineering skills:

 

9 years of college were NOT wasted.  No sir-ee.

They did the job.  She enjoyed them and kept them down.

Monday meant daddy had to go to work and I was on my own.  I thought she might have been in the clear because we were able to paint.  [For those of you who know me well, this was BIG for us.  I don't do playdoh, painting or cooking with my children.  Let me re-phrase that: I don't do them often or well.  So for me to encourage 3 children to paint after being through major sickness for 2 days was kind of a shocker.]

I learned quickly that the well-feeling was short-lived for her.  She did great Monday, but Tuesday she was puny again.

Tuesday, we sat in the lawn next door to watch the tree be cut down in our neighbor's lawn.  Big excitement = heavy equipment.

You could tell she wasn't 100%, but was wanting to get out for some fresh air.

The tree company was friends with our neighbors so they kindly gave some heavy equipment rides.

Oh yeah, so one thing I forgot to mention was how Katherine scratched up her face the day before her planned birthday party.  We came back from school and were playing in the front yard.  She was happy, bouncing, playing and swinging and leaning back real far.  She leaned back so far she scraped her face along the ground and left a pretty bad mark on her forehead, along her eye and down her cheek.  Being the day before her party and the day before any of the sickness started, I was bummed she had scratched her face so bad.  It's the worst mark she's had on her face so far.  But nonetheless, we didn't have to worry about others seeing or questioning her about the scratches. :(

Not quite sure why, but Nathan just wasn't interested in sitting on the backhoe.  Hmm.

So on her actual birthday, Wednesday, I took her into the doctor because she wasn't perking up as fast as we thought she might.  The doc said that she was still contagious.  :(  The prospects of having her re-scheduled pony birthday party the next day, Thursday, didn't look good either.  So we made the hard decision to cancel the whole thing and start making phone calls.  Jim had to work the following Saturday and the next weekend was Easter and so on and so on.

I was so upset.  I tried not to show her.  It wasn't her fault and I didn't want her to think it was, but I was just so sad for her to be missing something she had been looking forward to for so long.  She handled it with more maturity than me.  She was calm and understanding.  She didn't cry once or even wimper.  She just knew it was what had to happen.

Boy, could I learn something from my brand new 7-year-old.

We still celebrated her precious birthday that night.

One of the super difficult calls I had to make was to our dear friends, the Poimboeufs.  We had made arrangements with them for Kaley, the youngest, to make Katherine's birthday cake.  The 2 girls browsed Pinterest and Katherine picked out a cake she loved.  One that Kaley could make.  So Saturday morning of the party, I asked them if they could somehow save the cake until the following Thursday.  Then Thursday, they delivered the cake.

Kaley did an awesome job.  The cake not only looked great, just like what Katherine had picked out, but it tasted dee-li-cious!  I just happened to be the official taste-tester.  It even tasted good after it was frozen. Twice!  :)

The following Sunday was Easter.  This was the 3rd Easter we missed together as a family because of sickness.  The devil has found a niche in breaking my spirit.  sigh.  Katherine felt better, but Nathan was down and out this time.  His didn't last a week like hers did and Brandon and Jim eventually felt the yucks for a couple of days.  She certainly felt it worst than anybody else and somehow, by the grace of God, I was spared.

Needless to say, my definition of spring fever has changed slightly over the years.

The good news ending to this story was that Katherine did get a chance to ride the ponies with her best friend, Reina.  The Pony Party people graciously let us use our deposit to come over and ride the ponies for half an hour.  Katherine and Reina had a good time and she got another horse-fix.