Oh May, I am glad you're done with until next year. May is always so busy with Spring sports (1 in comp soccer, 3 in rec soccer, 1 in baseball and 1 in gymnastics), plus all the make-up games from early spring when they got canceled due to inclement weather, comp soccer tryouts (Nora and Annabelle were trying out) finals, Scott and I staying up late so Scott can tutor kids in math and science for finals, graduation plus all the dinners, festivities, award ceremonies that came with that, and then just keeping up with the normal work, school, homework, piano, youth group activities. Oh, and Scott decided this month, the week of tryouts, that he wanted to coach Nora's comp soccer team. He had gone through the courses/certification a few weeks prior, thinking he'd assist coach one of the girls teams, but when he found out there would be enough girls left in nora's grade plus some extras, to make another team, he went for it. So that made things even busier as he had to go to tryouts and then pick teams and contact individual families to make offers etc. I was so grateful we decided to plan a quick get-a-way trip to Idaho to be with Becca's family over memorial weekend so we could just get away from the busyness and slow down and relax.
Nora at her teammate Mayci's house holding her new baby goat. The saddest thing for Nora about switching teams is that she won't be with the girls she's been playing with for the past year and two. But we're hoping to still do playdates with some of them ocassionally.
Despite the crazy busy schedule, Scott and I still managed to get a date night in most every weekend in May. We went to the temple and had a few dinner dates.
Gymnastics Xcel team tryouts were also happening which is something Jane has been looking forward to all year. Jane made Platinum which is the second highest team in Xcel which is great, but with 12 hours of practice a week, its very expensive. She is now busy earning money this summer to pay for a portion of her fees (we made her responsible for her apparel which will be $860 this year. Her competition leotard is $400! Insane! We came to the conclusion that it must be hand-embroidered with gold and diamonds to cost that much!)
Jane is earning that money by Dog walking/watching(we made a flyer and posted it in the neighborhood and on our neighborhood facebook page), bake sales and taking care of Saige, our sweet special needs neighbor, who she'll watch a couple of times a week during the summer.
Becca made this cute graduation candy/money Lei for Elisabeth to wear at graduation. It came in the mail a couple of weeks before the big day.
We have young women activities every Wednesday night. On this particular Wednesday we were playing kickball and the missionaries rode by on their bikes so we invited them to join us, and they did which was fun.
This is the list of concurrent and AP classes Elisabeth took from SLCC while in high school (on the left) and then we went to BYU's website to see what they would transfer over as, which is what we've listed on the right side. We're learning from this first child of ours, and from this we learned that several of the classes will only count as elective credits at BYU, only to take either English 2010 or AP English Lang as they count as the same class, we don't need nearly as much math as we thought since they all count for the same Math qualitative reasoning, and to take Biol 1010 and Art 1010 like she did.
One Sunday afternoon we were sitting around the living room having a finance discussion on saving money and there came a knock at the door. It was Bob Marks! My old boss/supervisor in the copy center at BYU! He had gotten Elisabeth's graduation announcement in the mail and since he didn't have a phone number, so he just decided to stop by. I was so glad he did. It had been years since we've seen him; I had seen him at the Running with Angels race a few years ago when we volunteered to hand out water. He stayed for a couple of hours and shared stories and reminded us of the things that are most important: temple work, scripture study, family etc. It was so nice to have a righteous fatherly/grandfatherly figure in the home.
Here are pictures from another YW activity where we did a spa night with masks and nails.
Saige really liked doing the masks, but when she first saw it on her face (on a pic I took on my phone), she screamed! It was hilarious!
Friday after school, memorial weekend, we took off for Idaho. This was our first long drive in the new-to-us car. We got a 2017 chevy traverse; it was a salvage/branded title, but we had a mechanic friend look through the car fax reports and we test drove it and felt like it would be fine (they're cheaper), so we went for it. We'd been looking for years and saved up enough to pay for it in cash which was a blessing. The kids like the newness of the car: the leather seats, the dvd player and sun/moon roofs etc, but they did say it wasn't quite as roomy as the van and the seats weren't as soft...we had fabric seats in our van.
Becca took the salon out of her house a year or two ago because the stage Rain was in was very busy and she just didn't have time to do hair. But he's getting bigger and she's wanting to do it more now so she's taken a few clients on and she thinks in a year or so they might put the salon back in. One of the reasons we went to Idaho was becca offered to do my hair and make it brown again like I wanted. So she foiled a couple of colors into my hair, a brown and caramel color, and she gave me a trim. She also trimmed Elisabeth's hair and put a few highlights in Jane and Nora's hair and dyed Annabelle's hair dark.
We also hot tubbed multiple times,
made yummy foods, visited and went for jogs together. It was a nice trip and I loved spending time together.
