27 May 2012

Becky celebrated her 38th birthday on Monday.  We made 2 delicious pizzas for dinner.  

Thai Chicken Pizza is on top in the photo and 

Strawberry Balsamic Bacon Pizza is on the bottom.  The Thai pizza was very good; the strawberry pizza was amazing!   ~   

https://everydayannie.com/2012/03/07/thai-chicken-pizza/   ~   

https://everydayannie.com/2012/05/09/strawberry-balsamic-bacon-pizza/

Last Friday Sofi invited some friends over to roast Smores.  Becky asked the teenagers (4 girls and 2 boys) if they needed help building a fire and was answered with snorts of derision and eye rolling.  Later she checked on them and found their "fire" consisted of 3 very large logs with crumpled newspaper on top.  Someone lit the newspaper and it burned long enough to catch a few marshmallows on fire.  We suppose we could have been delighted that it was so obvious none of them have been playing with matches, but mostly we were stunned at their lack of a basic life skill.  We especially thought Sofi, with a wood stove and a fire pit at home and camping trips every summer should know better.  We asked Sofi to demonstrate fire building for our family night activity and she lit a respectable, if somewhat disorganized, fire.  

 One of our teenage friends got a summer job stocking shelves at Lowes.  She works 9 pm to 5 am, so Becky sewed her an owl-faced sleep mask.  Gibson is modeling it below.

Abe played 2 soccer games on Saturday for a Memorial Weekend tournament.  The schedule for the tournament was 2 games on Saturday and 2 games on Sunday with points awarded for wins, losses and ties.  Abe's age group has 2 brackets.  The winners of each bracket meet to play for 1st and 2nd place on Monday.  The second place teams from each bracket play for 3rd and 4th place on Monday.  Abe's team won both of their games on Saturday.  Abe didn't play today (Sunday) but waited anxiously to hear the score from each game. His team won the first game, but lost the second.  They'll be playing for 3rd place tomorrow morning.  Not bad for a small town team who has been practicing together for less than 3 weeks. 

20 May 2012

Sofi and a friend declared Tuesday to be Octopus Day.  To celebrate, Sofi baked chocolate octopus sugar cookies and they drew octopuses on their hands.  The drawings were suspect; the cookies were delicious.   ~   Sofi's school had Honors Night on Thursday.  Sofi has had quite a year academically and she received certificates for academic honors and Math Team and plaques for the Brain Bowl team and the 260 Club.  The 260 Club is a group of students who scored 260 or higher on any portion of the state standardized tests.  Sofi scored 261 in science.  She now has her name emblazoned on a permanent sign board in the school gym along with the school athletic records. 

Sofi's school had Honors Night on Thursday.  Sofi has had quite a year academically and she received certificates for academic honors and Math Team and plaques for the Brain Bowl team and the 260 Club.  The 260 Club is a group of students who scored 260 or higher on any portion of the state standardized tests.  Sofi scored 261 in science.  She now has her name emblazoned on a permanent sign board in the school gym along with the school athletic records. 

One of the parents arranged to have a trolley pick up Sofi's friends for Honors Night.  They drove around town and stopped for ice cream on the way to the event.

While the boys looked fairly casual (some of them wore ties with their jeans,) the girls looked gorgeous in their fancy dresses.  Sofi wore her first pair of high heels.  

This afternoon we watched the annular eclipse.  We had the good fortune of being in the path of the total eclipse.  Brandan found the best way to watch the eclipse (not being prepared with welding glasses) was to direct the sun's rays backwards through a pair of binoculars and look at the image focused on a piece of paper.

We checked the progress of the eclipse every 5 minutes or so as the moon moved across the sun.  The glare off white paper was intense, but we found that black paper was easier to look at.  As the eclipse progressed, the light in the yard distinctly dimmed and then gradually returned to normal.

13 May 2012

Gib was playing with a funnel earlier this week and found it to be a very versatile toy.  Here he is posing as the angel Moroni.

And here he is pretending to be the Tin Woodman.  The funnel also makes a good telescope for a pirate.

Helen has wanted to have a lemonade stand ever since the weather got warm.  We had about a 45 minute break on Saturday between activities for her to set up a stand.  She sold cups of lemonade and homemade chocolate chip cookies for a quarter each.  She hired Abe to help her carry her things to the field near our house and to help her with customers.  Location and timing are everything--  it was 90 degrees outside on Saturday and 3 soccer games were being played at the same time in the field.  Helen made over $10 in the short time her stand was open!

Our photographer, Mindi, gave us a CD yesterday with about 280 photos she took of our family last week.  She hurried to get our photos to us by Mother's Day.  They turned out beautifully.  The only sad part is no one needs 280 separate poses of their family.  It's going to be very hard to decide which photos to enlarge and frame.

It's been a wonderful Mothers' Day gift to look through these photos.  Becky is very, very thankful for these 4 magnificent, beautiful, miraculous children. 

Abe looks more and more like Brandan the older he gets.

Sofi, on the other hand, has always looked like him.

 Helen loved posing with the props Mindi brought.

It's tempting to keep going and post all the photos here.  We'll end with a photo of Doggie, Koaly, Bob and Brownb (not a typo, but short for Brown Bear).  All of our kids have a special stuffed animal which they've had since they were babies.  They each got their stuffed animal in a different way, but they each used them to calm themselves when they were very small.  Gibson and Helen still sleep with Koaly and Doggie every night.  These animals have been a big part of our family so Becky asked Mindi to take their photo as well.  Our kids are growing up so quickly-- it's a gift to watch them grow and a treasure to have these photos to remember.

 

6 May 2012

Abe got Chinese finger handcuffs at the dentist this week.  Ever since, Gibson has been getting his fingers stuck in the tube.  We've shown him that he needs to push his fingers together instead of pulling them apart, but he still gets his fingers stuck several times a day.

  

We have plenty of chores to do out in the yard.  We worked on edging the grass in between soccer games on Saturday.

Helen gave a big drink of water to our bamboo.  While it still isn't the thick screen we're hoping for someday, it is alive, and we are thankful for that.

Abe tried out for, and made, the tournament team for his soccer club.  For the first time, the club is putting together a team to play in a big Memorial Weekend Tournament.  The strongest 3 players from each of the regular teams were invited to try out.  Since the tournament will be played Saturday, Sunday and Monday, we initially turned down the invitation. However, we changed our minds when the organizers said boys with religious reasons may skip the games on Sunday.  The photo below shows Abe during the try-outs.  He's the boy 2nd from the left in the orange socks.

We ended Saturday by having our family photo taken.  We used a new photographer who was perfectly charming and easy to work with.  Our kids behaved wonderfully well-- maybe too well as our 1 hour photo shoot stretched to 2 hours, far past dinner time.  The photographer had lots of fun props, all crammed in the back of her mini Cooper.  We're looking forward to seeing the results!