Father's Day Weekend

Last weekend we went to Plano for my cousin Jonathan's wedding. It's always fun to see the extended family. Here's some of the cousins and second cousins. No one would look at me.

The wedding was outside so they handed out fans and sunglasses to guests.

And Indian headresses and mustaches.

The kids ended up on stage and it was difficult getting Robert off. He was a dancin' fool. Looks like we got two hams on our hands. Check out Wyatt doing his thing in the background. Ha! The aspiring breakdancer was putting on a show for everyone.

There were several of these glass waterfall things in the atrium of our hotel.

We had breakfast at the hotel on Sunday morning and Clara gave Daddy the scrapbook she made him for Father's Day. She worked very hard on it and pretty much did the whole thing by herself. I showed her how to do page layouts and helped her organize the pictures and the rest was all her. She kept asking me to spell things for her, but I wouldn't do it. I felt kinda bad but thankfully she didn't mind and did her best without complaining.

Then we went next door to the hotel the rest of the family was staying in and gave PawPaw his cards and said goodbye to everyone before heading home.

We attempted to get a picture of all of us when it was time to leave. Robert had decided he was officially done and Clara and Laney had just experience a head-on collision and Clara had hurt her lip. That was our signal to get on the road.

We got home and gave Chris his other, rather large, custom wrapped gift, a lego kit that is two buildings that hook together. It's one kit in a set of 3 or 4 that make up a city block. It was fun to put together and the kids have had a blast playing with it.

School's Out For Summer!

We were all soooo ready for summer around here.

 Especially this girl.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on here, but I started receiving phone calls from her teacher in January I think. Her problems all revolved around not listening and talking too much. I was sure the first incident was just because her ears were plugged completely and we had been experiencing the same behavior at home. I assumed she would be fine after we had them cleaned out, but nope. I probably got 5-6 calls the last few months of school.

To be fair, her teacher did say that her behavior issues were minor but thought we would want to know since it was out of character for her. The class social butterfly got moved right next to her at some point, so I'm sure that didn't help matters. Near the end of school I got a call that she had been disrespectful to the teacher so at that point I was counting down the days 'til summer vacation right along with her. One year down, twelve to go!

Alaina is Here!

Alaina finally made her appearance a couple of weeks ago and she's absolutely adorable. We got to enjoy some brand new baby cuddles and Clara thoroughly enjoyed holding her for a few minutes. Robert was more interested in Travis and Justin's cars than the new baby. I had just shown him some newborn pictures of himself earlier that day so when I asked him if he remembered what the new baby's name was, he said "Baby Robert". Makes perfect sense.

Clara was overcome by Alaina's cuteness and decided she needed a baby sister. Sorry little girl, but you're just going to have to live vicariously through your friends' little sisters. I reminded her that would mean another sibling getting into her stuff and picking on her and she hasn't mentioned it since :)

We had them over for lunch and dinner the next Sunday and enjoyed some more quality Alaina time in the process.

 
I tried to get a pic of Travis, Clara and Alaina but Travis wasn't in the mood. Justin crawled right up and struck a pose though.

Let's Backtrack, Shall We?

Clara's class learned about oceans the last few weeks of school. They were tasked with choosing a sea creature and creating a shoebox biome telling all about their animal. Initially, Clara chose dolphins but when I reminded her about the sea turtle documentary she had just watched, her eyes lit up with excitement.

She had so much fun making this with me. We brainstormed ideas and she was very unhappy every time we put it away to work on later. If you can't see, there is a crab and sea gull that are trying to get two baby sea turtles on the beach, a momma sea turtle laying eggs, a raft of seaweed with babies floating on it and another sea turtle eating sea weed.

Now you may be looking at this and thinking I did it all myself, but that is not true. I got her to recall some things that were on the documentary and helped her brainstorm how she could illustrate them in her biome and then helped with the hard parts (the beach, hanging stuff and cutting out her drawings). She did the drawing, painting, making sea anemones, play doh, and gluing with minimal assistance. I thought about being almost completely hands off, but I'm not sure how she'll learn to do some really creative stuff unless I help her at this early age. It's not like a teacher can assign a project of this magnitude to a kindergartener and expect them to do it all by themselves. Right? Please tell me if I'm delusional and whether you would have made your kindergartener do the whole thing themselves. I really do want to know because I don't want to be one of those parents who does all their kids' projects for them. Now when she's in 3rd grade? Yeah, she's on her own for the most part.