PTA Brag

If you know me at all, you know I volunteer.  A lot.  Often a broad PTA umbrella, and a few new things I did this year got written up and submitted by our PTA president to the State PTA for consideration.  I was really impressed with the application Diana put together, and wished my projects had really been that awesome!  Based on that application, both projects won gold at State, and I got the reward of putting together display boards to bring to the State Convention (which I wasn't going to, partly because I was running a math table at the PTA-run STEM fair at the elementary school that first night).  What I'm actually proud of is that I implemented someone else's idea to add a QR code to the display so people could look at and download materials to do the project themselves.  Isn't that cool?!?

Yep, that and $5 gets me a 16 oz hot chai and a few quarters for the gumball machine.

What Happens at the H's, Stays at the H's...unless I blog about it

No surprise, Piper is in the chicken coop.

 Kyla grew a tail.

 V grew a halo.

 And E just went Puckish!

I adore them all.

Going to see Percy Jackson: The Lightening Thief--The Musical

Nothing like coming back from 3 days of camp and heading to the 5th Ave Theater with my daughters!

Percy Jackson Made a Musical!

Piper and I had just returned from camp, but the Percy Jackson musical was only in town for week, so we went!  It was a self-select event, as Wes has added Percy to the "List of Things I Hate For No Reason".  

5th Grade Camp

I love that our district has a 2 night camp for all 5th graders in the district.  Kyla went last year, of course, and when it was Piper's turn to go this year, she asked if I could go along, too.  

So Wesley went to Daddy Camp and I got on the bus with Piper and 60 other kids and chaperones the morning after Easter.  A friend and I chaperoned 8 girls, and to distinguish our girls from all the others running around (we were one of three schools attending together), we donned our Rosie the Riveter headbands.

We had a ton of fun learning archery, climbing the rockwall, catching a frog (when we were supposed to be carrying a log), and eating s'mores. 

It was not the most restful half-week I've ever had, but I'll sign up again when Wesley is a 5th grader!

Eggsellent

I love these kids!

We did our annual egg hunt and Easter dinner--smaller and earlier than usual, as I was going to 5th grade camp with Piper the next morning.  

Since only Ruby is small enough that we care about her feelings, The Moms had a delightful time of hiding the eggs.  Rochelle got the Most Devious Award after she tossed a clover-green egg into....clover.  Yep, that egg was the last to be found.  

Also in the egg hunt were 2 confetti eggs each.  The 3 oldest demonstrate how to deploy said eggs.  Evelyn's hair was a popular target.

After dinner, the kids practiced their circus acts on the trampoline.  The adults watched the show with rapt attention.

We were dazzled by the high quality of all the acts.

Happy Easter, Jesus!  We survived another Resurrection.  

Easter Best

  

I crop these so you can't tell Wes is wearing sweats, but I do solemnly swear his shirt has no unnecessary holes.  Yep, nailed it.

Evil Easer Bunny

Last year, there were tears.  Not mine, of course. But to buy us more sleeping time, I hid the kids' baskets as well as I could downstairs.  The extra sleep plan may have backfired.

This year, hoping my kids were smarter and more resilient (so that I had to be neither), I did the same thing. First, they woke to this:

Later, I added the PS No Crying!!

I buried each of the bunnies under as much other crap as I could, as the pictures show.

And then, once they found the bunny, they had to figure out the clue to find the rest of the loot.  "There's no cooler kid than Kyla" didn't work out for me, as she had looked in the cooler before she  had found her bunny.  Wesley's "I hope this doesn't leave any scars" befuddled them all for a long time, and I don't know who finally figured out that I hadn't underlined "scars" but "car".  Wesley also found Piper's on top of the freezer before she found her bunny in a box under a box in the office.  However, the big winner that morning? (Clearly not Jesus's resurrection, at least before 9am).  Teamwork.  Kids teamed up against Evil Easter Bunny and won the day!  

Piper Crafts....Bunnies!

Give Piper some yarn and she'll find stuffing somewhere and craft something new. This time, she was determined to make Easter bunnies for her Oregon cousins.  

 They even have really cute butts!

Up on the Rooftop...again

Just another Sunday evening for us--guests for dinner and kids on the roof.  This is the first day, I think, that I found out that Wes jumps from roof to grass.  

My First!

It's been 28 years in the making, but I finally got my first traffic ticket.  Kyla, Piper, and I were listening to Michelle Obama's audiobook, and one of them asked me to turn it up.  Did so, got caught, and now have my first ever ticket.  I haven't even been pulled over in decades.  Not that I haven't deserved a ticket before, but I was born under a lucky star.  

The kids and I visited Mom and Janet today, and we measured Kyla's height against Grandma's in the old OMG-How-Tall-Is-She-Getting!?! game. I took a picture, just so they could see how close they are, but I accidently caught very lovely, and loving, pictures of two of my favorite women.  

Spring Flung: Home via Tulip Festival

The ferry left British Columbia about noon, getting us back to Anacortes mid-afternoon.  It's only the smallest hiccup of a detour to go through the tulip and daffodil fields outside of Mount Vernon.  My favorite place is Roozengaarde, which does have an admission fee and lots of ways of asking for more of your money once inside ($13 cheeseburger, anyone?), but I fully got my $7 worth of the experience, and more than made up for everyone else as well.

Wesley (wearing PJs, sunglasses, and a scowl) went from 

  

to

👦

when I gave him my good camera and charged him to be my official photographer.  He actually did pretty well.  Here's an album, because I was blown away by how well designed the tulip layouts were this year!  The daffodil made out of tulips is inspirational, but the first few of a flowing "stream" through non-symmetrical tulip fields is my favorite.

Why does my favorite tulip remind me so much of my favorite cocktail?  

So glad we made it this year!  It was a vacation bookended by our beautiful spring, both in weather and flowers. 

Spring Fling: Fun & Games (and no one got hurt!)

I promised the girls an afternoon tea while in Victoria, which is probably something I should have done some basic research on first--so many tea rooms in BC, so many are closed on Mondays. 

However, ninth time's the charm and we found a public house that offered a decent tea, and substituted for our dinner.  

 

 

Meanwhile, Super Dad Dwayne was left to deal with a grouchy Wesley, who was not at all happy that we had spent part of the afternoon at the Bug Zoo.  But Brilliant Dwayne checked in at the Visitor Center and found, of all things, axe throwing 2 blocks away, and a Virtual Reality center another block up.  I can't emphasize this enough, Wes loved axe-throwing.  [To the point, I had to interrupt a conversation with Papa Jim, because I saw Wes headed to the backyard, carrying an axe and a piece of plywood.]

Dwayne says throwing an axe isn't that hard.  You get your throw down, and then step back or forward enough to have the axe rotate the correct number of times to hit the target. Wesley bulls-eyed 4 times in the hour, and hit the target often.

One more thing I love about British Columbia: it always seems more progressive than Seattle.  This sign was in the women's washroom at the Public House we had tea at.