A Busy Day at School

The last Friday in March is Grandparents day the the kids school. The classrooms are open to "grandparents" (blood relations or not) to come and visit the school, do small activities with the children, enjoy some punch and cookies at a small reception and then stay for lunch with their grandchildren in the school commons area. The kids and grandparents always look forward to this special day each year. This year one of the mom's who does photography on the side had a stool and backdrop set up for pictures - and I think they turned out very nice!



At the end of the day each of the pods (divided up by grades - 1st & 2nd, 3rd & 4th, 5th & 6th) had their small monthly "words of the month" character assembly. I'd gotten a call earlier in the week from Emily's teacher telling me that Emily would receive one of the awards in her class for "Cooperation."

This is what Emily's teacher had to say about why she was given this award ... "Emily is a team player. She works well with her classmates to complete a task."

So far both girls have received a character "word of the month" award each year. At the beginning of this school when they both expressed wishes of receiving an award this year, we started having the discussion of how many awards are given each month vs. how many students are in the school. They both agreed it wouldn't feel very good to never get an award, I'm hoping that if we continue having these discussions we'll hopefully avoid future hurt feelings.



In the hallway leading to the 1st & 2nd grade pod, Becca showed me a small project her reading group had done on endangered animals. Becca wrote a little bit of information about two different animals ... the Copper Butterfly and the Komoda Dragon. Here's what she wrote about each:



"Copper Butterfly are endangered. Copper Butterflies live in marshes. Marshes are being drained for farms. The Copper Butterflys are losing their habitats."

"Komodo Dragons are endangered. People are taking the Komodo Dragons out of the Komodo island. Komodo Dragon are more safe in a national park."

Tuesday Adventures

Today we had grand plans of going to the library for story hour, eating out for lunch and then going to a tea party at local nursery's open house with Grandma, but only the latter happened, and that's probably best, every once in a while a slower paced day is a good thing to have, we don't always have too many of those around here on Tuesday's.

The nursery was beautiful. Not huge, like a couple of the other local nurseries, but their selection of plants and flowers was beautiful and they had some perennials I haven't seen else where that I'm excited about going back and purchasing once planting season gets a little closer.



They had a very nice little tea party setting for their open house, with little finger foods like salmon and cucumber sandwiches, along with a couple of fantastic tarts (there was an apple tart that was definitely Sam's favorite), cookies and chocolates.

Sam had a great time joining Grandma and me on this little adventure while Alex slept with Grandpa at their house. And it was nice to have a little one on one time with him to point out all the different varieties of begonias, or geraniums, or bleeding hearts and talk about the differences and similarities. We even got to see a little honey bee busy collecting pollen on the few flowers that were already in bloom and on display. So I'm really looking forward to taking the boys out next month to purchase a few new flowers to fill in some bare spots and hopefully find a new blueberry bush replacement for the one that didn't make it two summers ago.

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After picking up the girls from school, Alex from Grandpa's, and while I made dinner, the kids played outside. Given that we live on a cul-de-sac, and the cities love of sand during the winter months, every Spring the kids enjoy the curbside sandbox created by the city and drastically helped by the rain washing all the sand down to our end of the street. Before bedtime, GR was reminded of our curbside sandbox, the hard way, when he took off Alex's shoe while Alex was climbing over his head ...



We vacuumed and shook as much of it off as we could, but it didn't help much, after about 10 minutes he finally headed for the shower ...