SchoolOut.BalletOut.TBallOut.SoccerOut.CampOut.PeaceOut!

"5 Things I Love" Friday ~Colors & Coloring~

1. I LOVE: That this picture of adventure filled boots, perfectly color coordinated with my thriving flowers,  splashed with the last rays of sun for the day...brings me moments of things to smile about amidst all these rain and wind storms.

I NEED SUNSHINE!!!

WHO would have ever thought being born and raised as an eastern washington desert dwelling girl that I'd grow up and have pairs of rain boots all over my front porch!!???

(The pix of when i planted them a month ago)

2. I LOVE: These picture from my girls for me.

(Eden's)

I could jump into this scene! Hoping the skies will be bright and sunny around here like this picture for good! I'm having a hard time keeping up with Hallé's daily wardrobe consisting of first an outfit for wind, then a swimsuit for the sun and heat, then jammies for nap time, then warm clothes & BOOTS for the rain and windstorms at night!!!??

Hallé's My Little Pony Masterpiece for me 

Preschool...Here She Comes!

3. I LOVE: This Flower. The vase I love even MORE. 

It's an old salt shaker that my Grandma used and brought me flowers in once.

4. I LOVE: This Sun hat & these gardening gloves from my girls for Mother's Day

After gardening and getting my Hobo spider bite (left a gross scar on my finger & took over a month to heal)....these have been happily put to use.

5. I LOVE:  That I although I already declared an absolute refusal about a year or so ago to my kids that I would never draw a horse or dog because it's sooooo pathetic...Now, after Eden brought home the below picture she free handed at school for Africa week; I've now up'd it to pretty much ANY 4-legged creature!

6/8/10...Potato Sacks & Posters to Space

6-8-10

..It feels like such a perfectly numerical day not to blog about something so here is a wrap up from my cell phone pictures over the last 2 days of end of school fun with Eden's class. 

Hard to believe Friday is her last day and I'll have a 2nd grader on my hands. Ekkkk!

Of all the fun & memories, one I'll hold dear
AND

straight in front of my FACE during my girls' next "squabbling".....

 is the following award that Eden got.

(She said 3 or so kids got it....I couldn't care less if 15 kids got it!!.  I'm a MOM!  It's nice to have others eyes and insights about your kids while you're sharing your "baby" with them 7hrs a day.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 I'm sure I'll feel like this every year, but it seems next year's teacher doesn't have a chance at being as good as her teacher was this year.   We feel so blessed for the experience Eden had in her first year of all day school.  It was the perfect class and atmosphere for her with the kindest little girls and really involved and compassionate herself, teacher.  Her school counselor spends the entire year teaching each class a monthly trait on compassion or encouragement or responsibility, etc.
And the "Bucket Filling" concept is out of a really cool children's book about depositing INTO others lives rather that TAKING OUT of others lives.  It hit home and made sense to Eden.
I REALLY love her school.
They each had their own laminated paper buckets and all throughout the day if they saw something someone did kind or if they saw someone needed encouraging; they could grab a little note and write something to put in that person's BUCKET to FILL THEM UP!

Elle, Eden, Edyn, and Jadyn

on their way out the door with the classroom banner for 3hrs of Track and Field game fun. 

I'm so grateful my friend Becky and mom covered my daycare for me and let me be apart of such a fun day and memory. 

I'm sooooo grateful I didn't have to miss out on this.

Eden and Kalei moments before getting soaked in the Balloon Toss

Elle and Eden doing the Over-Under Ball pass.

Girls WON by a long shot.

(team work, organization, hand eye coordination, paying attention)

Not nearly wet or messy enough for the boys to give a hoot!

Eden and Edyn beat the entire class (TWICE) in the 3-legged race.

They were VERY PROUD!

Jadyn, Edyn, and Eden....

Little sacks of Potatoes ready for the race

Eden giggled the entire time saying

"I can't see...my hair is going crazy"

(this is actually her coming towards me)

Eden and Jadyn in the Sponge Squeeze Water Relay....They Won.

Bubble Table Slime Time

Room 7 Class Photo....

VERY COOL IDEA...

This poster Eden and the whole school got to sign (Her signature is on the letter b)

will get Fed-Ex'd to Nasa and actually

go up into space with the Space shuttle being launched in September!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And Then today was:

Water Day at the Sprinkler Park

with 90 some 1st graders!!

The squealing never ended and neither did the smiles....

It's so fun to watch Eden doing all these things for the first time as my oldest....Kindergarten doesn't get to participate in all these events so for these first graders it was MAJOR exciting.

Eden & Jadyn in their new classroom T-shirts with their names on the back

"Mrs. Minton-Valley's Room 7 is Blazin'!"

Hallé and mom got to join the fun after lunch time.

(sorry little girl in the pink, i don't know who you are or what you're doing?! I didn't have the heart to say no when she said "Can I be in your picture too?")

Kalei, Eden, and Jadyn "Sprinkler-sitting"

I think my kids actually have to work hard to avoid eye contact in this many pictures!

Eden and Jadyn's very  "OWN"  STRAWBERRY PATCH

They kept sneaking off the "path" and into the Library's strawberries....  They'd hide every time other kids would come by and let the moms yell at the other kids and then once the kids were gone and moms....they'd go at it again......I mean COME ON....

THEY AREN'T DUMMIES!

WHO WANTS TO WASTE OR SHARE GOOD STRAWBERRIES!!!??

Hallé all ready with rose petals and sunglasses to lead the pack of 100 some people back from the library to the school a mile+ ....she said

"I like that place so much I "frewd" petals on the ground to find a path back tomorrow"

~Don't worry sweetie,

it's momma's summer home!~

Memorable Memorial Day Campin' Pix

Eden was so excited to head up to Fishtrap Lake and get camp all set up....it was a toss up as to whether or not she'd skip school Friday and get to head up with her Gma/Papa, Auntie, Uncle, and Cousin Conner.  We let her decide.  But when I saw her come home from school with this make shift Camp Fire Hat...I started laughing so hard.  She said "Oh, this?  I just made this during free time!"  I said there was no way she wasn't taking that hat to go rally up some fun at the campground a day ahead of us...

~So once again the 7yr Tradition of Motorhome Dashdog Duty was on~

So the van packing began.... all that below just looks like LAUNDRY now when I look at it....campfire smoke soaked 11 loads of laundry. ;-)  Always worth it though....

Then of course the painting of toes

(not for vanity....simply to cover the camping dirt for 4 days of no showers or cell phones or internet. Love it!)

Auntie and Eden called while en route to request a bottle of purple polish be brought up!

and then the final snacks packed for easy access for arrival at camp.

It was windy and overcast and rained off and on.... most the time.... didn't seem to hurt the fishing and eating around the clock.  I ate a serving of my apple crisp at every bfast, lunch, and dinner and a few fourth meals here and there....pistachio nuts in such excess that my tongue may have been bloated!

 

I just love her in this little camo Cabella's hat!

Her Papa has never been more pleased to admit he's been skunked fishing than when it's Eden who's out-fished him!

Braving a break in the rain/wind storms to head out for more fish!

Hallé all ready for the fish and rain and wind and sun with her

Footy Jams, Sunglasses, Crocs, and Princess Pole!

She hates me making her pose on a boat...This girl is not a poser...she can F-I-S-H. fish!

A few hours after seeing them off here at the docks....I was back in this same spot but in a Rain Parka anxiously waiting for them to come around the bend in an absolute downpour/wind storm they got caught in.....All I couldn think about was Hallé and what her reaction would be to the freezing cold wind/water on her face the whole 2 mile ride back from the other end of the Lake...

Next thing I know I see the boat and before I can even make them out...I hear my baby and her  hysterical shrieking.

OH MY WORD. my heart sank. 

She was rashy faced, sobbing, and barely breathing because she was crying and screaming and kicking so much.

I rush to the boat; grabmy little Tinker Bell and think I need to console her for this scary-crazy storm she's just braved.   GUESS AGAIN.

SHE WAS PISSED!!!

SOOOOO FURIOUS that in the midst of this storm she didn't get to ride in the captain seat and steer the wheel for the high speed venture back across the white capped waters!!!??

Turns out I had snatched up my TINK...mid-tantrum.  It was so cold. I was soaked.  She was soaked. Everyone was soaked.  But she could've cared less about the storm...it was just crazy-making to her to have been told NO! 

Everyone was wet except CONNER. In the pen, under the canopy-by the fire!

He'll thank me one day for throwing on that baseball hat after I filled his pen with 40 My Little Pony toys!

SPEAKING OF MY LITTLE PONY:

I thought my girls would love having them all brought along to play with.

WRONG.

I kept asking if they wanted to play with them and realized I had the wrong approach. 

When I finally asked them if they'd like me to:

set up all the Ponies on a hillside, collect a bucket of huge pinecones, let them declare WAR, & slaughter all the ponies off their rocks...the reply was beyond an enthusiastic YAHOOOO!

~I love that memory~

Another memory I'll hold dear forever was the hike that just Eden and I went out on....We very proudly found TWELVE different types of wildflowers to blow us away once again at God's creativity and detailed ways He leaves Himself all around us. 

The flower hunt was of course a memory of warmth to my heart but Eden loved that on our hunt we climbed up a steep incline on a hill a bit too far for this one orange flower.  We had one of every color but orange and just HAD to have it.  We were STUCK!  Panicked for a moment...slid and skid a bit... and full of giggles when we finally made our way down.  It was an adventure she loved to tell.

Next hike I went out on with her....I turn around and she'd gotten stuck halfway up this rock wall and needed guiding down. 

Funny how I went from proud of Eden my adventurer in the above picture to terrified of my fearless Hallé in the below picture who decided to follow her sissy.

(yes....IN FOOTY JAMMIES. IT WAS COLD!!)

Once we all made it up the rock wall....the next adventure story she loved telling happened a few moments after this.  I stupidly let her be the only one rock scaling and field exploring in flip flops.   I ended up almost stepping on a med. size Bull snake.... we were all jumping and getting the little ones out of it's path and laughing and realized poor Eden was on a rock in flip flops a whole lot more worried than the rest of us watching this snake slither around our feet!!

A Post-Adventure Picnic with friends and cousins

Maybe we should've minded all the signs a bit better!! oops!

campfire entertainment with some wasting of paper plates!

AND bowls...

Eden said this was a belt she made around her waist. I took the picture and I said:

"Well, This'll need a caption!"

Eden Slept by herself in her Princess tent 2 nights...

Well....One and a half b/c she got wet on the second even with about I'd guess... around 100 some feet of canopies & tarping above, below and around us!! LOL... We blame the hill...err "slope"...

Hallé waking up to the storm all around us and peeking out at the standing water in front of the tent....First she asked for:

MOVIE TIME

(a shot of our water moat! It was POURING rain!)

Then she asked for her Boots and Umbrella

(one of my fav. pictures of the trip)

and a-puddle-hunting she went!

(she looks pretty happy for the 103 fever she had at the time!)

Then it was time for this little DASHDOG to make her appearance!

Then...since it was STILL raining, we decided to sacrifice our canopy....grab a knife and cut a smoke escape hole in the top of it and put it over the firepit!!

Because who DOESN'T give their kids S'mores for Breakfast!?!

Esp. when their kid can't eat the graham crackers and it's a S'mores with a chocolate bar on top and bottom of a marshmallow!!!

(GROSS!)

Yup, that's more Chocolate and another outfit below....maybe an hour or two later!

Conner decided to top all the girls' adventure stories by ending the last few minutes of the trip with a crash and burn in the RV

Party OVER....

Time to pack up and ......

HIT STARBUCKS!