July Happenings

For the 4th of July we went over to a friend's house to hang out with our young marrieds accountability group.  It was a lot of fun and it wasn't one of our kids who touched the hot end of a sparkler this year. 

The kids both got to spend a week at vacation bible school!  It was nice to have 3 kidless hours a day, but I spent most of it still at church working on things for the MOPS Community Fair.  Although that was kinda fun too :)  The kids got to put on a little performance after the week of VBS was over.  Nola was a hoot and decided to just sit down for one of the songs and since she was in the front row it was quite obvious.  She definitely has her own way of doing things! 

(pretending to be sad, but really we were doing a happy dance inside)

And since we are in a year round school district, Embry had her first day of Kindergarten!!!  Wow time flies huh?!  She's been pumped to go to school for about 2 years now, so she couldn't have been more excited to start.  She got into Vail Academy and High School via the lottery and we're really loving it there.  They have a 'letter of the week' each week, they can count to 100 and to 100 by 10's, they're learning lots of sight words, they are learning parts of sentence structure (Nouns, verbs, etc), syllables, and starting to count money.  I have gotten involved in a project that the high school economics teacher and the FBLA (future business leaders of America) started a few years ago called 'The Classroom Economy'.  It's geared towards K-5 graders and they earn fake money for doing tasks (or have to pay the money back after receiving fines) and each month they get to come into our 'store' and spend or save their money.  We had the first store day last week and it went really well!  Anyhow, Embry is loving school but she has had a few issues since starting.  She started out being really mean and just disagreeable once she was done with school for the day.  Anytime we asked about her day she would get very frustrated, but thanks to the advice of a few friends and former teachers, I've started giving her an hour or so to decompress after school everyday before I ask her anything about it and it's really helped.  The other thing she's struggling with is that she's consistently peed in her pants in school for about a week now.  At first it was just every once in a while which I kinda just chalked up to being in a new environment with new rules etc but now she's doing it everyday and I'm not sure what to do about it.  I think she's just afraid to ask the teacher if she can go, so I will bring that up at our parent/teacher conference on Thursday.  Her teacher is very nice, although I can see how she could be a little intimidating too.  I've volunteered in her classroom twice so far and it was way better than I had expected.  I imagined total choas, but it was really well structured and the kids actually seem to listen to the teacher which kind of floored me since I can't get anyone to listen to me at home and there's only 2 of them!!! 

The Pantano MOPS Community Fair went quite well.  We had a pretty good turnout and the weather was fantastic!  We had about 100 vendors, 5 food trucks, face painting, a jumping castle, pony rides, and Anna and Elsa from Frozen were there for photo ops!  The kids really enjoyed themselves and since Tony's mom was already down for Embry's first day of school, she got to come to the fair too! 

We also had family pictures taken!  July was an exciting month!