School fun

The Christmas parties are in full swing at the kids' schools. Annie's teacher has been out all this week, so last Friday they went to the bowling alley for some fun.

Annie has loved Mrs. Xochitl (pronounced So-chee).

But she has not loved the half hour of homework daily or being away from the family for the whole day. She was doing fine for a while, but before Thanksgiving started complaining a lot more and not wanting to go to school in the mornings. And homework always involved a lot of crying. I totally do not agree with 30+ minutes of homework for kindergartners, but that is part of SSA's "appeal" is that they are college prep, which they somehow think means lots of homework even when it does nothing but make kids hate school. Annie is at the top of her class. I can't imagine how homework goes for some of her classmates that still struggle with knowing which letter is which.

Anyway, since Annie has not been loving school, and Desert Willow would not allow us to transfer her over because their cut off for kinder is September and Annie's b-day is October, we are just taking the rest of the year off and Annie will go to Mrs. Heather's preschool until she starts kinder at DW in July. She is excited about it, but will miss her friends, especially Arianna and Isaac.

Rachel has been doing great in school. She has met every AR (accelerated reader) goal this year, so she got to participate in pie day on Wednesday.

They also decorated their winter wonderland scenes Wednesday.

I was going to help out, but Tuesday came down with a horrible stomach bug, so I decided to keep it to myself even though I was mostly better Wednesday.

Annie has reached a new milestone: she lost her very first tooth!

She was so excited to have it come out as it has been loose for a long while--probably 2 months.

She woke up so excited to see what the tooth fairy had left her, only to find her tooth still there! When she got down stairs for breakfast she found a note that said, "I didn't want to wake you up, so I left some money here for you. Since it's your first tooth, you can keep it! Love, Tooth Fairy" She was happy to have some money and immediately said, "I need to pay tithing." Good girl! She took her tooth to school to show at show and tell today. Lucky the tooth fairy left it for her to keep. :)

Ryan's school had a Christmas program yesterday. They sang a bunch of songs for us, then got to make gingerbread houses.

It was lots of fun. Even Megan got in on the fun making a Christmas tree.

Ryan helped make this awesome snow globe ornament.

He's got more of a grimace than a smile here, but I think that's because we are true Arizonans and the thought of snow makes us grimace. ;) Though we really do love the once a year snow we usually get. That's plenty for us. (Ryan's camera smile needs a little work. The only way to catch a real smile is to catch a candid or to have him say candy, or turkey, or something of the sort.)