Catching up on non-trip happenings

Gah!  I got distracted and stopped blogging.  Again.  Let's see if I can do a photo dump and catch up a little.  

Presents for the grandkids from our road trip.  

The girls attended a week of Hand Camp again this summer.  

Such a blessing!  They had a great time, and it does my heart good to have them in an environment where limb differences are totally normal.  

They came home tired, of course.

Grumman, impersonating a normal cat.  He doesn't usually do boxes.  

Oh, those pinterest ideas.  Sigh.  

I thought I'd try one of those pretty melted crayon canvases.  I kept seeing them in my feed and thinking how easy it looked to get great results.  

It was set to be 106*, so I put it out before we went to church and left it alone all day.  

The result was... disappointing.  

Hannah designs weapons in her spare time.  Rolled paper and paper clips became nunchucks.  She was contemplating adding marbles inside the tubes to give them more weight.  

Grumman was fascinated.  

He's a pretty boy.  

I love my first bulletin board this school year.  We have lots of paper book covers, and it was fun to get to use them creatively.  

Fiona, hiding in the shelves.

First day of school!  

Is it a bad sign when you go in for an office "procedure" and they give you a stress ball to squeeze if you feel any "discomfort"?

Hannah needed a pet photo for the yearbook, and Grumman grudgingly obliged.  He really does like her.  They have a whole routine where they play after her bath, and he claws her wet hair.  

We're on a hard boiled egg kick here.  One batch, I forgot to crayon them while they were hot (when they crayon melts against the shell, leaving a vivid THIS IS HARD BOILED! warning to anyone reaching for eggs) and my later attempts were faint Asian character looking lines.  

Oh Fiona.  That's not your most flattering pose, sweetheart.  

I saw this bus while I was out, and it mentioned free student passes.  I looked it up, and it's a pretty cool program.  On demand, corner to corner (as opposed to door to door) service.  We got Hannah a free pass at the library.  I think it would be good for her to learn to navigate public transport, I just haven't figured out where to have her go yet.  

Katie fell.  I admire her toughness.  She's a trooper.  

Hey, look, we've hit September!  We're really rolling along now!  My 9/11 book display.  

I had my 4th grade class make book cats inspired by my bulletin board.  It was a fun project.  I left them up for a couple weeks as library decor before sending them home.  

Whew!  I'll break this here.  

June in a Nutshell

The school awards ceremony was actually the very last day of May, but we'll throw it in here anyway.  

Certificates were awarded.  

Applause happened.  

Summer camp at Wolf Mountain.

It's nice to be hitting some of the same places they went last year, because I'm starting to get familiar with the route.  (Matilda still goes straight to the car wash after leaving the gravel roads.)

We started the process for a new leg.  We've actually got the leg now, we just need to go back soon for a different foot that's on order.

My dad & step mom were here for a visit, and we took the kids to the new Museum of Science and Curiousity.

It was a fun place to spend a few hours.  Lots of hands on exhibits.  

It's the kind of place I'd want a membership to if my kids were little.  

It was a nice visit, and I'm glad my girls got to spend a little time with grandparents.  I feel bad for them because the older kids got a lot more grandparent time, when we all lived closer together.  

My dad with Jack and Josiah.

And Bri made a quick trip to our area for a bridal shower weekend.  It was wonderful to see her, and she and I took the girls to a local rock shop.  Bri knows so much about rocks and minerals, and she just lit up explaining things to the girls while we were there.  

I fired up Crikey to make a journal for our trip.  (And then I was terrible about writing in it while we were on vacation.)  

Some bibs I made for the grandbabies.  There's an avocado one that's not finished, but I have to take my serger in for a spa day before I can complete it.  The farmer's market, watermelon, and banana prints came from the March quilt show.  The striped yellow coordinate was in a batch of stuff someone from church gave me.  The green, I picked up at JoAnn's.  The argyle and dots were leftovers from reversible toddler pants I made years ago.  

The End of Catching Up on April

Okay, so yesterday we left off with the cats and the bunny.  Let's see...

Jack showed me a sign he placed.  Being the proud mama, I took a picture.  

The spring Fine Arts Fundraiser occurred.  The sign on the left says ART in the Library.  Other teachers also posted samples of art from their classrooms.  

Oh, there's the crabby ocean scenes I mentioned yesterday!  I read the kids Eric Carle's Home for a Hermit Crab the week that they colored the crabs, then the following week we did the cut, paste, embellish parts.  There was glitter and sequins involved.  I'm pretty sure the janitor sighs a lot when he vacuums the library.  

There were drama, choir, and hand chime performances to go along with the visual arts.  

And dessert was served.  

I mentioned that I haven't been home Friday mornings lately.  I'm getting weekly iron infusions.  Turns out there are things besides motherhood that can cause exhaustion.  Who knew?

Our local adoption support group puts on a respite camp weekend for the kids.  I was so excited to get spots for the girls this year.  This was Hannah playing with sticks (she enjoyed whacking the trees--free therapy!) while we waited for official drop off time.  

And Katie with a branch.

Drop off was Friday afternoon.  

I helped her carry her stuff.  

Pick up was supposed to be Sunday afternoon.  

Saturday, we got a call that Katie was refusing to walk to the dining hall.  That she was being non-compliant.

2 hours later, we got the "she's sick, come get her" call.

I ended up picking them both up because I had no desire to spend 5 hours in the car 3 days in a row.  

Hannah and I went grocery shopping, and since she'd missed out on s'mores night, we got the ingredients to make them at home.  

Hannah got Hershey's bars; I decided to try using Ghiardelli squares instead.

It's not the campfire with friends experience, but 

they were still tasty.

Jack had some, too.

Miss Hannah had a birthday.  

She was full from dinner and asked if we could save "cake" for the next night.

Hence the costume change between presents and turtle pie with flames.

I printed and laminated some button placing pages from Twinkl to use with my K students.  

I tell them we're exercising their Lego muscles when we do things like this (threading beads on a pipe cleaner is another fun one we did recently).  

We're getting so close to the end of the school year that everybody's a little more keyed up than usual.  The weather got nice and good behavior went right out the window.  It's cooler this week, so hopefully we're be able to reign it back in a little bit.