A Year of School and Crafts

School is officially done for the school year and our summer vacation is in full swing. Annalyn ended the year with a kindergarten graduation full of singing from her small class of cute kindergartners. (She ended the year with only 13 kids in her class.) They also gave out some awards and we all got to watch them sing and have snacks. Annalyn loved school this year and sang those songs with a lot of joy and enthusiasm. She gave herself an award for learning how to do math and she earned the PE award for doing the most curl-up in a minute out of all the girls in her grade. She did 35 which I thought was pretty impressive. She demonstrated how well she can do them and she is good at those. She loved school this year and learned so much. She loved her teacher, Mrs. Hubbard and will miss her a lot. It was nice that her class was so small. She knows all of her letters, sounds and most of her sight words so she is right on track with where she needs to be. She passed on to first grade with flying colors. I am glad she enjoyed school and had a fun and positive start to school.

Annalyn loves to color and do crafts and is pretty good at them. I am going to include some sample of her craft projects from the year. Because she just went to school every other day a lot of these things were done at the library and a few were done at home but there are several things from school. She has the neatest handwriting for her age. It has gotten better and better throughout the year. I am proud of her and all she is learning. 

Brynlee had to go to school for another half a day after Annalyn had finished. We met her at the bus stop with a bunch of other mom's that had silly string and water guns and they attacked the kids when they got off the bus. Brynlee didn't want anything to do with that. She was pretty bummed to have to start the summer with a broken foot.

Brynlee also had a small class this year too. For a few months there were only 17 kids in her class. She is such a fast reader and she can pick up on things pretty quickly. She did really well in school and liked her teacher, Mrs. Ferdinand a lot. She had a great class and made a lot of great friends. She has grown so much a learned a lot this year.

Brynlee got to do several crafts and projects this year which is something she loves. She also draws a lot in her spare time at home. I am including a bunch of samples of her work below. She is becoming a pretty good little artist. I love reading the stories she writes.

Kyla didn't get to go to school this year but we did lots of crafts at the library and a few at home so I am going to include a few samples of her work. She is getting pretty good at coloring in the lines. She is working on writing her name but struggles with the K. It is her most favorite letter and she likes to tell everyone when she sees a K. My mom is doing a preschool next year so she is pretty excited about getting to go to preschool with her grandma next year. 

Summer loves to do whatever the big kids do and is actually starting to color a little bit so I will finish this posts with a few crafts from her. She loves to glue things but then will usually tear off everything she glued a few minutes later so a lot of her crafts come home destroyed. I was able to save a few of them.

A Broken Foot

A few weeks ago Brynlee had a friend over after school on a Friday night and they were playing upstairs together. I didn't find out until later but apparently they were both doing cartwheels off of the wooden blocks Joel built and Brynlee fell while she was up there and hit something and landed on her foot wrong. She didn't complain about it until the next morning when she fell and starting dramatically crying that her foot hurt. She tends to over dramatize her injuries and the fall didn't look like it could cause very much damage so I wasn't super worried but I got her some ice to put on it. For the rest of the day Brynlee was limping a little bit on her foot but she was still outside jumping on the trampoline, riding her bike, and she even put on roller blades and tried to skate on them. She was still limping on Sunday but she wasn't really complaining that she was in a lot of pain until Monday morning. By then her foot was super swollen and she couldn't walk on her foot at all. As soon as I looked at her foot I called my dad to see if he could watch my other kids and got ready to take Brynlee to the ER. I tried to call and see if I could take her somewhere else but her doctor referred me to the ER so that's where I ended up taking her. 

Luckily the ER wasn't very busy that day. We were still there for over two hours. Brynlee refused the wheelchair and any help to walk from me and preferred to jump on one foot throughout the halls of the ER. The doctor that looked at her foot didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with it but since we were there he ordered an X-ray. He said there were a lot of ligaments in that area that can get hurt and pulled so that was most likely the problem. It took a while to get that done and to wait for the results. They brought Brynlee some tylenol and then the doctor wheeled in a big cart full of things to make a temporary cast. He told us he was surprised but her foot was actually broken. The break was in her big metatarsal bone which is technically still the big toe and is a hard bone to break. The doctor wrapped up Brynlee's foot and someone else came in and taught Brynlee how to use some crutches. She was told she probably couldn't walk on it for six weeks and that it might be up to three months before the foot was completely healed. 

Right after Brynlee got her foot wrapped up we left for school. I gave her the option to stay home but she was determined to make it to school. She got the hang of the crutches pretty quickly and was going pretty fast on those things. I walked her to her class and then walked to the bus stop to help her off of the bus. She pretty much refused any help from me. She was determined to do things all on her own but she was pretty sore and tired when she got home. She told me she had always dreamed of breaking her leg but that it wasn't as fun as she had always imagined. Everyone at school kept bombarding her with questions and everyone wanted to try out her crutches. They would then run off with them and leave her stranded. It is a good thing the pants she wore that day already had a hole in them because we had to cut them to get them off.

Brynlee had a walking field trip planned for the next day. All of the second graders got to walk to the popcorn shop and take home some popcorn, they went to Pizza Hut and made pizzas to eat for lunch, they went to the park and played, and then they went and toured the library. Brynlee really wanted to go but refused to let me push her in a stroller so I ended up driving her to each location. There was still a lot of walking and Brynlee was not able to really play on any of the play equipment at the park. She had fun but she was super tired and grouchy by the end of the day. She kept begging me to let her walk with the rest of the class but there is no way she could have done all that walking on crutches.         

It took them almost a week before we were able to get in to see the orthopedic doctor. In the meantime Brynlee had a really hard time not walking and doing things on that foot. She got pushed and knocked over at school one day and came home pretty sore. I ended up driving her to school and picking her up most days because it was hard for her to get on and off of the bus. She managed it a few times but it was not easy. 

When we got to the doctor he showed us the x-rays (You can see the break in the picture below, it is the little piece of bone on the bottom of her foot that looks like it is just sitting there) and told us he doesn't see these kinds of breaks very often. He said he will see 10 breaks in the little toes before he ever sees one of these and the break was right through the growth plate so he wanted to take some extra precautions. He told he her she could do a boot but she had to make sure she was responsible and wore the boot the whole time. Brynlee told him he had better give her a cast. As least she knew she couldn't be trusted. She picked a bright pink cast and was excited to go to school to get all of her friends to sign her cast. The best news was that she would be able to walk on the cast in just two weeks, the day before her birthday and as long as the bone was all the way healed she would get the cast off in four week, three days before she is supposed to be baptized. 

Having a broken foot has sure been hard on this girl. She has missed out on a lot of the fun things she had planned for the summer. She can't go swimming or ride bike and she has been kind of miserable a lot of the times and she is good at making everyone else miserable around her. She has been super whiny this whole time. She has gotten pretty good at using her crutches and tries to do a lot more things than she should. She has always been pretty independent and still tries to do everything that she normally does. If she does not want to do it then her foot might just be too sore to accomplish any of her chores. It is funny how that works. She had several other friends that broke bones right around the same time she did so it has helped to have other kids she knows go through the same thing. This has been a hard month but we are hoping that she will be better soon and still have lots of time left to enjoy the summer. This trial has for sure taught her a lot of things and I think she will be stronger because of it.  

A Trip to Utah

We have been wanting to plan a family trip for a while. We really had no destination or time we needed to go but since we are having a baby this summer; I decided the sooner we could go the better. When the girls had a Friday off of school in May we decided that would be the perfect time to take a trip. We needed somewhere that was close enough to drive over the weekend so we decided to go to Salt Lake City, Utah to take a tour of temple square and we had plans to go to Provo. The weather forecast called for wet and rainy weather all that weekend so we almost canceled our trip but then we decided to just go for it and to make the best of whatever the weather brought us. Annalyn had her bags packed for this trip for months. She had a swim suit that she was saving to wear on the trip and talked about it to whomever would listen every chance she got. The rest of my girls were all packed a least a week or two before we left on the trip because they were so excited about it. We had stocked up on all kinds of road snacks and drinks that the kids had been drooling over for day so at this point we decided we had to follow through and go to Utah. 

We left on our trip the Thursday before Mother's Day, right after Brynlee got home from school and Joel got home from work. We had a laptop and a movie for the kids to watch and the kids were super excited. Summer didn't have a nap so she fell asleep in the car right away and slept for a while. The laptop had a few issues with the battery not charging so we stopped in the middle of the show and listened to one of the books on tape that I got from the library. 

We ate dinner at Burger King and the kids got to play for a little while before we got back in our car and drove the rest of the way. We ended up stopping a few towns before Salt Lake because we were all getting tired and it was getting late. We found a motel and checked in. We had a room with two beds so Summer slept with Joel and I and Annalyn and Kyla got the other bed. Brynlee opted to sleep in the little chair they had because she didn't want to share a bed but that must not have been super comfortable because in the middle of the night she climbed in the bottom of the girl's bed and slept below their feet. Everyone was pretty tired so they fell asleep pretty quickly. The motel didn't have a free breakfast so Joel went and got some donuts and then we all got on our swim suits and went to the pool. The kids could have stayed there and swam all day. Summer had some little floaties on and swam all over that pool. She kept telling me "I do it" because she wanted to swim all on her own. She also kept going over to the stairs and jumping into the water. She didn't even care that her face would go under the water. She would just laugh and do it again. The other girls had a blast in the water too. We stayed there for a while and then checked out and went to temple square. 

Our first stop at temple square was to the Church History Museum. They had so many neat things. Brynlee really enjoyed reading all of the cool plaques and learning about the history of the church. They had a short movie that we watched that was super cool. The screen made you feel like you were actually in the movie. They had a play place upstairs that the kids spent a good amount of time playing in. They colored pictures, played with blocks, and Annalyn and Joel made a whole flock of origami birds. I think we could have stayed there all day too. 

Eventually we made it in to walk around temple square. We went into a few of the old building and walked around. The weather was a little bit drizzly but it didn't really rain hard the whole time we were there. The temple was beautiful so we took a few pictures and enjoyed the spirit of being on temple ground for a little while until the kids started to get hungry for lunch. It was past 2:00 so I am surprised they were not complaining of hunger before that. Since we didn't want to walk back after we left we decided to take a quick peak inside the conference center before we walked back to the van to get some food. 

     The kids really enjoyed seeing the conference center and they all asked several questions to the people in there. Brynlee tried to count all of the chairs. It took them a while before they were ready to leave and then we had a little bit of a walk to get back to the van. We had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with several of the other snacks we brought for lunch. We were going to go on some more adventures but we were all tired so we decided to head toward Provo and find a place to stay for the night.

As soon as we got to the motel room Joel and Annalyn left to get some pizza while the rest of us watched a movie on TV. Kyla and Summer both fell asleep and took a long nap. Once they woke up and everyone got a chance to rest we decided to go check out the swimming pool. The kids had a great time swimming again and were tired by the time we got back. They all had baths and went to sleep pretty quickly. I was worried Kyla would stay up since she had a nap but she must have been tired because it didn't take her that long to fall asleep.

When we woke up the next morning we got dressed and then went to find some breakfast. They had a ton of food at their continental breakfast and the kids took full advantage of it. They ate a lot of food. Annalyn struck up a conversation with an older couple that was there and could have talked to them all day. Eventually we went back to our room and packed up for a trip to meet my friend Eugenia. It was wet and rainy so we opted to meet at the playground they have in the mall. The kids played there until lunch time. We went to Eugenia's house and warmed up our leftover pizza for lunch. It was super fun to see her and her cute kids. My kids all enjoyed playing with her boys and her daughter Perina. They were sad when we had to leave.

After Lunch we went to the Bean museum at BYU campus. I have a lot of fond memories of this place from when I went to school there. They have done a lot of remodeling so it looked better than I remember. They had all kinds of stuffed animals to look at and they had an animal show that they put on while we were there. The kids got to see a lizard, tarantula and a snake. They all touched the snake at the end of the show, even Summer. She was not scared of the snake at all and she loved the animals that she got to look it. It helped that they didn't move. We had originally planned on taking the kids to the zoo but this was free and I think they liked it almost as much as they would have liked the zoo.

We were pretty tired after the Bean museum, Joel didn't even want to make the effort to go up to the top floor so we opted to skip that part and head back to Idaho. Summer took another nap and the kids watched a movie on the drive home. They were much more whiny on the way home and Brynlee threw up once and Kyla had to make several bathroom breaks but overall it wasn't a bad drive. We stopped and ate dinner and then stopped for ice cream a few hours later. It was late when we got home and half of our kids were asleep so we stuck everyone in their beds and they slept until morning.

After our trip a few people asked Kyla what she did on our trip and she told them that we got to go swimming and that we got to eat gummy worms. Haha! It was a simple trip but it was kind of magical. This was the first time any of our kids got to stay in a motel and they loved it. It was fun just to spend this time making memories together. I love this little family of mine.