First Quarter

 Since I haven't been diligent about keeping up on the blog this year, I've got a lot of pictures to catch up on, but I don't always remember what was going on when I took them. :) I'll make my best guess. And probably not include too many details because I'm trying to catch up on the second half of the year. 

Ryan needed a hair cut when school started. A week or two after it started he agreed to a haircut. Starting with a reverse mohawk was picture worthy.

Ryan found a few baby lizards. He's good at catching them. They're super cute.

Annie got to go to the cast party for the drama club from summertime. 

One of my former Young Women, Emma Spendlove, got married! I talked to Jill Reimann, who was also her YW leader, and we put together a low key bridal shower. It was lots of fun to see people from the Desert Willow Ward before it was split.

Megan and I went shopping and stopped for lunch while we were out. Pizza at Target. Delish!

I stayed pretty busy with the PTA during the first quarter. One of the things we did was the bookfair. We were able to buy tons of books for the school. These are all for the library (there was a stack at least this big for the teachers, too).

Rachel started early morning seminary. It starts at 6:15 so for a while we would get the kids up at 6:05 and have family prayer before I would take her to seminary. Ryan and Annie ready for prayer (or maybe having fallen back to sleep):

Cranky kids made it obvious that the extra half hour was needed, so we started having morning family prayer twice, once with Rachel, once with the other kids after they woke up at 6:30. It has been a struggle finding a time when everyone was home together to have family scriptures since Rachel some days would be gone from 6:15am until after 9pm, so literally didn't see Ryan or Megan because they were asleep the only time she was home. Before school worked so well for us, but now that that isn't a good option we are trying to remember to do it at dinnertime with somewhat decent results. 

The PTA planned a game night. With an events committee this year it has made things so much less stressful. I just showed up to help rather than being so deeply involved in the details during planning. The game night included board games, Human Hungry Hippos, Twister, Plinko, and others.

I left the game night early to go straight to the post-FSY activity at the church. It was great to hear from many of the youth that attended FSY and how it changed them and helped their testimonies grow. Rachel had a great experience at FSY, too. After the testimonies they went to the gym and did some group games and a couple of the FSY dances. The kids (including Rachel) had lots of fun.

Rain! This year we had a fabulous monsoon season. It just kept going and going. So much wonderful rain=lots of opportunities to go puddle splashing, both in Jacob's car and barefoot in the street.

Megan and Grandma were twinners!

Jacob had a birthday! One of his main requests was no-bake cookies (aka Dinosaur Poop Cookies).

The Knights were gone for about a month on their vacation to Portugal, then returned to Tucson for a little less than a week before officially moving to Seattle. We squeezed in as much cousin time as we could while they were here, knowing that the cousins would miss each other a lot when they were gong. 

Mud brothers:

Ryan and friends apparently do this most days at school.

Megan got glasses! She was farsighted in 1st grade, and now is nearsighted. (But she won't wear her glasses and wants contacts now.)

The PTA had their fall fundraiser with Step It Up. The company does a great job hyping the kids up and both Megan and Ryan won something at the kickoff assembly. 

The next day they earned prizes for sending emails and came home with these cool hats (and a couple other prizes). Then a few weeks later everyone in the school got to enjoy the Day of Awesomeness with a ton of inflatables to play on. And it was the best fundraiser ever so we haven't had to do more fundraising with the PTA this year, which is a win.

Some of us volunteers ran the obstacle course after the kids were done. (I won!) 

Busses have been hit or miss this year with a bus driver shortage. I'm super grateful for the Palmers and Sanders that live so close and we work together to get kids to middle and elementary school when the bus isn't running on time.

Karolee introduced us to this cool park at the new Rocking K development. The kids love it.

The school board election this year was highly contested and had some very negative people on it that don't appreciate Vail (even though it's one of the top districts in Arizona). It was a little scary and worth getting involved to help the good candidates win. I ended up putting up some signs for Anderson and Buster and got caught in the rain, coming home soaking wet. Gratefully the election turned out well and they won!

Annie did great for her 1st quarter of middle school and got straight As and the Principal's award at the awards assembly.