Places I've Been

Oh, my goodness, I haven't blogged in days and days and days!

I've been super duper busy with end-of-school fun, a family vacation, doing laundry and clean-up after the vacation, painting, and getting our summer off to a running start!  Blogging just wasn't a priority.

Here's the proof:

My firstborn is a 5th grade graduate!  I'll spare you the videos of her giving a speech, getting several awards, and receiving her "diploma".  When I was a kid, there was no graduation fanfare until you left high school.  I have to admit that I was a little shocked by the 90 minute ceremony for these kids.  90 minutes?  Are you kidding me?  I'm not sure if my university commencement ceremony was that long!  Nonetheless, I was very proud of Endeavor's achievements.  She's a hard worker!

This is Superkid's perfect attendance award--at least, the part that fit in that jumbo-size bucket.  Feel free to scratch your head and wonder how on earth Superkid won any type of attendance award for the past school year.  The same Superkid who had 25 absences due to illness from August thru April, managed not to miss any school in the month of May.  It just happened that the PTO had a lot of money they needed to spend, since our elementary school closed at the end of the school year.  The PTO decided to come up with some big prize packages (ipods, bicycles, buckets of summer fun, etc.) that children who had perfect attendance in the month of May could have a chance to win.  They drew names, and Superkid was the winning kindergaretner!  There must have been $100-150 worth of outdoor toys in this bucket: balls, walkie-talkies, giant water guns, a bubble machine, games......just a few of the things I can remember.  All my children were completely thrilled!

I felt slightly guilty that Superkid--of all children--won an attendance prize!  But Justone rationalized the situation for me.  "If she could, Superkid would be at school everyday," he told me.  "She hates missing school!  She deserves this prize more than anyone else because she really, really wants to go to school, even when she's sick."  What an awesome brother!

As my mother says, Superkid was "born under a lucky star."  If we gambled, we could take this child with us  to Vegas and become millionaires, I'm sure.  

As soon as school was over for the year, we headed for the hills!  The hills of Tennessee, where we met Ben's sister and her family (otherwise known as Dustin and his A-team) for a houseboat vacation on Dale Hollow Reservoir.  We had a great time.

We came back in time for a day of appointments at our favorite children's hospital.  Superkid needed to see her cardiologist and metabolic specialist for scheduled appointments.  Her appointments were in the morning and afternoon, so instead of going home, we went to the zoo inbetween appointments.  (Our zoo is just a couple of blocks away from the children's hospital.)  There, we saw our zoo's newest inhabitants:  the cheetahs!

I think the cheetahs were donated to the zoo by a famous race car driver.  

I'll post more about what our doctors said, later.

It took me a few days after that to "recover" from the vacation.  There was a lot of laundry to be done.  Then I had to get organized for the summer.  

It took me a couple of days to organize our schedule for the summer, and prepare for the things I wanted to do with the kids this summer.  There are things we need to work on (me included!) like following a schedule and completing specific tasks each day.  I've come up with a system for that, and so far it is going well.

More about that later, too!