Graduation

I'm a little late on this one, but wanted it up here none-the-less.

One June 11th, our little munchkins graduated from pre-school and are SO VERY excited to move it on up to the big Kindergarten.    They are already making plans and anticipating what it will be like.  To the point where I hope they aren't let down.  Evaline was a tad dismayed to find at Kindergarten Round-up (in early May) that the students sat at tables - she was expecting to have her own desk.  I also have a hunch that she's expecting to learn how to read on Day One.  This could get interesting.

I'm going to back up a bit with my pictures to document this momentous occasion, to fully encapsulate the whole moment.

Here we are at Kindergarten Round-up:

We decided to have the girls attend Van Buren next year.  Cedar Rapids is a little weird in how its districts are drawn.  The majority of the city is in the Cedar Rapids School District (where Ian and I both teach, at Jefferson High).  A little bit of the Northeast side of town is skimmed off and attends the Linn-Mar District (where I taught my first two years).  And a bit of the Southwest side of town is part of the College Community "Prairie" District.  We live about 4 minutes away from Jefferson, and about 1.5 minutes (in a car - roughly 6 minutes if you're walking) from Van Buren Elementary...but we actually live in the Prairie district.  We can stand in our front yard and see VB.  We like the idea of a neighborhood school.  We like the idea of getting home from work, then walking over to the school to pick up the girls and walking home in the fall and spring.  We also like the idea of the girls being on the same break schedule as us.  So we're going to VB. And the girls are WAY excited.  Just look at those cheesy grins!

And here is graduation:

The graduation program included several song performances.  C&E rocked it out - I'm pretty sure they were the loudest ones with the most dramatic hand movements.

Cora had one heck of a time with that hat - it must have fallen off 5 or 6 times!

One happy family!

The very last day of preschool - with the framed diplomas!

and without.

For comparisons sake - here is the FIRST DAY of preschool, back in late August:

 It's quite hard to read, but in the frames on the FIRST DAY it says what the girls want to be when they grow up. Evaline's reads: "A mommy who also has a job which is a doctor" and Cora's: "A Mommy with Babies."  At graduation, when they received their diplomas, they also said what they want to be when they grow up.  Cora said "Movie Star," and Evaline said "Teacher."  But later Evaline told me that "[she] was disappointed that [she] had to just pick one thing to say at graduation, because [she's] only five and really, that's just too young to decide on one thing.  Right now [she's] really thinking about being a teacher, an archaeologist, or a shop keeper."

Teaching high school, Ian and I get invited to a lot of graduation parties.  I think its an Iowa thing - I don't remember anyone really having grad parties in New Mexico.  Or maybe I was just that much a loser that I didn't ever get invited to any. Either way, its a big thing here, and teachers are usually invited.  Our Memorial Day weekend is usually spent with a big list of parties and a lot of close scheduling to make sure that we can make it to as many as possible.  The girls know this, so when they first started talking about their own graduation, their first question was: So when's our party going to be.  I can't turn down a good party, so I made the trip to the dollar store...five bucks later we had party hats, a banner, plates and napkins. I didn't snap a shot of their cupcakes - but the are pretty close to the ones below, except the cakes were pink (strawberry) with purple icing.

Ok - not related to the girls' graduation, but it's still graduation. And this is more for my own record, so if you aren't interested in cake stuff you can stop here :-)  Our super good friends, the Neilly's, oldest daughter graduated (from high school) this year and they let me make her cakes!  I didn't get any shots from the actual party...but I've a couple of the cakes.  The sheet cake is lemon cake on the left and strawberry on the right, with a frosting that is a cross between buttercream and whipped cream. The cupcakes are vanilla with vanilla frosting (not as boring as it sounds).

St. Joe's, Michigan

Back in December, Ian and I decided that we needed a vacation.  A real, family vacation.  We certainly would have been happy with a little couple's getaway, but this was something that we wanted to try.  Last summer we went for a little under a week to Omaha for my brother and sister-in-law's wedding, and things went smoothly - although we had lots of family around, of course, to help keep all the kiddos entertained.

We wanted something that was under a day's drive away, so we decided on the Great Lakes area, and chose a lake town in south western Michigan: St. Joseph's.  It's connected to the slightly larger town of Benton Harbor, which will be the one to probably appear on most maps that don't go into detail.  Some of our neighbors had highly recommended this spot as a little family vacation area, and Ian's sister (and family) lived there for awhile, too.

Given that we have traveled so little with kids, and Willa still being so young, we made it a short trip - we left on Sunday and got home on Thursday.  Our first day there, we woke to this view out our window:

Day Two looked the same.  Day Three was foggy and cold - you couldn't see the buildings across the street.  But...we'd all read Arthur's Family Vacation, so we knew that even it rained you could still find a way to have fun. 

At the end of Day One, Cora said "This was the best day ever!  We went to two children's museums, rode the carousel, had popcorn and ice cream for lunch, went swimming, had pizza in an old train station for dinner and got to see a lighthouse!"  Whew!  It was a busy day!

Day Two was cold and rainy in the morning, so we stayed in and swam at the hotel pool most of the morning.  After Willa's afternoon nap, the sun kinda-sorta came out...well...it stopped raining at least.  It was in the low 70s and we figured that it would be too cold to swim/get in the water, but we headed to the beach anyway.  While we were there, the sun came out more, it was beautiful weather (for about an hour and half before the fog rolled in), the water was nice....but we didn't bring our suits.  To heck with that - we went in anyway!  (All but Ian who had a hard time having any fun because all he could think was the mess that the sand would make in the car...what a fun-hater!)

Day Three was foggy, and about 58 degrees!, but we headed to the sand dunes about a  half-hour south along the lake.  Cora and Evaline were troopers as they scaled a few dunes so steep they had to crawl on all fours.  Willa was in a hiking back-pack on Ian's back....and she didn't care for it one bit.  So she screamed for the 45 minutes we were there.  We headed back to town to have a picnic lunch and run through the huge splash pad.  The weather did get the best of us for that however.  We all needed jackets for the picnic as the wind was pouring in off the lake.  We opted for a few turns on the carousel in exchange for the splash pad, and then headed back to the hotel for more swimming.  

So despite the crappy weather, we had a lovely first family vacation.  And I believe that this view of the backseat on the way home is all the proof we need:

TGIF

Oh, just watching some Princess Bride and getting make-overs.  How do you spend your Friday nights?

Sunday Funnies

I should preface this story by saying that Evaline's three favorite TV shows are HGTV's Property Brothers, Flip or Flop, and Rehab Addict.

Last weekend we were hanging out with some friends and from the corner of the couch, we hear Evaline say "AHHH!  I'm FREAKING OUT!"

Everyone turns to look at her.

"What?!" I say "What's going on?  Why are you freaking out?!"

Her response, stated somewhat shyly: "Well, I'm on the phone with my pretend builder," (and she shows us the toy cell phone in her hand) "And he said that some stuff we wanted for our house is actually going to cost $299 and we thought it was going to be $199.  This is totally gonna blow my budget!"

"Oh my," I tell her. "What will you do?"

"I have to have it, so I'll just have to cut somewhere else, I guess."