Last Day of School

Friday was the kids' last day of school.   

Matthew is completing 5th grade, Anna 4th grade and Grant 1st grade.

Here we are outside our hotel before heading to school for the last time!!

Matthew is graduating from 5th grade.  In our town 6th grade is at the middle school, so he's graduating from elementary school here (or getting "promoted").  But in Utah, where we're moving, 6th grade is still at the elementary school.  So he'll get to graduate from elementary school again next year.  In any case here are some pictures from his graduation.  He wrote by his picture that he saw himself working for Nintendo in the future.

He was one of the recipients of the Gold Presidential Award for academic achievement.  To qualify for that you must have straight As and a high score on the California standardized tests. Way to go Matthew.

A tradition at the kids school is for graduating 5th graders to all take a turn ringing the bell.  This bell is the last remaining vestige of the original school house built in the 1890s.  Here's Matthew ringing the bell.

Congrats Matthew!

Matthew with one of his church and school friends

Some of his other school buddies

Matthew with his great 5th grade teacher

She attended this same school as a kid!

I got a bunch more pics of Matthew with various friends.  It's sad to leave them all.

Emma was sad after the ceremony.  Matthew comforted her

Here's Anna with one of her school BFFs

Anna was saddest to leave her friends

Another church and school friend

and sans mask

Anna saying goodbye to Matt's friend, who is also her friend.

It was a hard goodbye.  Anna and Matthew collected lots of addresses to write to their friends.  I didn't get any pics of Grant but he immediately told me he was sad to leave his teacher and one of his friends, Jayden.  It's hard saying goodbye.

After school got out we hit the road.  We drove through Los Banos to Sacramento and then over to Reno.  Scott drove his car with Anna and Matthew and I drove our SUV with a roof rack car carrier and the three younger kids.  Going over those mountains to Reno is beautiful but can make some people carsick.  No one threw up, so yay for that!

At Donner Summit

That means we're almost to Nevada

We stopped for the night in Reno.  Here we're having dinner at IHOP

Anna with a spoon nose.  The next day we drove from Reno to Lehi, Utah and my parents house.

That day was longer and a bit harder in the car.  But we made it.  And one of our silk worm moths even made its way out of its cocoon during the drive.  Luckily the new moth did not fly around the car.  We're so glad to be out of the hotel and at my parents house.

The Last Week

This past week was our last in Northern California before moving to Utah.  Scott and I were very busy with last minute tasks.  On Saturday before the last week of school Matthew had a pool party all afternoon.  We dropped him off and then took the other kids to lunch at Panera.  In the restaurant Grant fell down and hit his head on one of the chairs and got a big bleeding head wound.  We had to change our lunch plans and take him to the ER.  Here he is waiting.  I sat with Grant while Scott took the other kids for smoothies - and brought us some too.

The ER doctor determined that Grant would have to have staples to close the wound.  He had a cut about and inch+ long in the back.  We had to wait a long time at the ER.  Here they put some topical numbing gel on Grant's head and we were waiting for it to take effect.

Grant ended up getting four staples in the back of his head and will have to have them removed in a few days.  He was very brave about it even though it was scary.  Poor Grant!  It was not the kind of adventure we were expecting for our last crazy week.   We covered his head wound with bandaids all week so as not to scare his classmates.  And I'm not posting a picture of the staples on here so I don't scare YOU.  It was a little bit gross.

Scott entertained three other kids in the car while I had Grant in the emergency room.  It was over 90 degrees that day and the ER visit took about 3 hours.

After the ER visit but before picking up Matthew from his pool party we stopped at the garlic ducks statues in town.  There were five little ducklings so we really missed Matthew.  See some of us sitting on the Make Way for Ducklings statues in Boston HERE.

And while we were at the ER or sweating it out in the car, Matthew was at a super fun pool party for his class.

Lucky guy!!

Here's Grant feeling better later in the afternoon after ice cream and getting back to the hotel room

As one of our last Gilroy bucket list items we finally tried the garlic ice cream.  We live in the "Garlic Capital of the World" in case you didn't know.  They grow a lot of garlic in our town and during certain times of year the town does smell like garlic.  

We tried vanilla garlic and chocolate garlic ice cream.  The vanilla garlic ice cream just tasted like badly freezer burned ice cream that had started to take on the other flavors in the fridge (namely garlic).  It was not good.  The chocolate tasted a little better because the garlic flavor was less noticeable.

No one liked the garlic ice cream but now we can say we tried it.

Our house officially went on the market this week.  We had a few little issues with people walking into our backyard and trying to get into the house to see it (put a lock on the gate now) and the smoke alarms going off randomly during the day.  But now things are all good and hopefully we'll get some offers on the house.  We've had a few agents tell our agent they will be submitting offers soon so we'll see.

I'm sad because we have 24 unripe baby peaches on our peach tree and a vine full of baby Concord grapes.  I was hoping we'd get to eat some before we moved.

We made one last trip to Monterey for Ghirardelli ice cream

And walked on the beach a little

Grant wore his hoodie so his head wrapping wasn't as noticeable.  

Here he is doing a little dance on the rocks.

And then we headed into our last week of school.  It was a crazy week.  One of the kids locked the bathroom in the hotel room and we couldn't get it open for a while.  I was proud of myself when I thought to use the inside part of a pen to open it and it worked.

Matthew's class got to go on a fun field trip to Mt. Madonna - a state park and forest in the Santa Cruz mountains only 8 miles or so from our house.  

They had a BBQ and some fun nature hikes.

Matthew had his last scout activity.  His leaders bought him a super huge slurpee as a goodbye.

Wednesday the kids had a fun field day at school 

Here's Matthew doing the sack race

Go Matt!!

Field day included some face painting

Then we had a dentist visit

After that we went to get haircuts.  Grant's mustache survived the dentist.  Grant was glad he didn't have to get a haircut that time because of his head wound.  Bullet dodged!  Then we got frozen yogurt.

Extra points to spot Grant's hand

We took Anna to her last activity day meeting

And went to settle up with the library while we waited for her.

The kids played with duplos in the library while we waited

Then we met Scott for dinner at Panera - the meal we didn't get to have earlier in the week when Grant got hurt.  This time no injuries.  That was a busy day!

Thursday I went in to see Scott's office in Sunnyvale.  It was his last day in the office.

He took me out to lunch at a middle eastern place near his work.  The food was so good!

flat bread and an array of dips

I got something like a middle eastern version of spanakopita

It was good but rich!

Assorted baklava for dessert

Thanks Scott!  He knows what I like!

Scott's office

John was impressed with Scott's standing desk that could go up and down with the press of a button.  After we left, Scott packed up the things in his office and had them shipped to his new office in Salt Lake.

Here are the kids and I waiting at school to pick up our school people on the second to last day of school.  Our time is almost up!

Can you spot Emma peeking through?

Now we just need to make it through the last day of school!!