The End of the School Year

Well, the school year has wrapped up, but the last month is almost always packed with activities, projects and general craziness.  But we made it through.  We always do.  We have gotten a lot of rain in the month of May.  The boys were supposed to have a fathers and sons campout one weekend in May. Anna was especially looking forward to having a girls night while the boys were camping.  Leading up to that weekend it rained and rained and the temperatures dropped on Friday while the rain continued, so the boys decided not to camp that weekend.  We went and used John's gift card to Fiiz as a consolation prize.  Not sure if we'll go again.  I'm not a big soda person and the drinks we got were just soda with extra syrup added - it was way too sweet and overpriced.  But it was fun to try it out.  Here's Grant with his giant cookie.

We did a lot of yard and house work on Memorial Day weekend and Scott went to see the movie End Game with the older kids.  We got the BBQ out for the first time since moving here and cooked burgers and hot dogs on the grill.  It was all very tasty!

With the basement done and storage room more organized we have been able to find our box of dress ups.  All the kids have been having fun dressing up.

Matthew completed his country project about Japan.  

He got to pick his country and he's a bit of a Japan fan!  One of his goals for this year has been to learn more Japanese.  We have a little app and he's been working on learning new words.

Grant's awesome end of the school year hair.  I need to get them haircuts but have been putting it off.

Two bat kids being silly

Grant's end of school year project on the Thorny Devil (a spiky lizard that lives in Australia)

Another dress up day - Emma as Minnie Mouse!

Grant got to go to a special pizza party for reading 100 books throughout the school year.  His teacher made them these cute trophies.  His class for the year was race car themed.

John helps Scott mow the big lawn one weekend.  He was so excited!

Emma tries the ladder a little bit.  Scott and Matthew installed a new slide on our play structure.

Here it is.  The other slide that we installed last fall (yellow) is in the background.

Scott had to build a special strut out of 2x4s to support it.  It was a lot of work!

The kids love it so far!!

And now a bunch of pictures of our house and yard work

Scott and I have been working hard trying to get things in our garage and storage room re-situated since our basement is now fully finished.  Scott installed some blinds in one of the windows in the basement and we have plans to add more as time permits.  I started organizing the storage room and made a little progress.  Scott got some more shelving and got things pretty well organized.  There are still boxes we need to go through and possibly get rid of some stuff.  But we did get rid of a lot of stuff before moving here, so we're in good shape already.

Nice work Scott.  I should have taken a before picture.

One weekend we put rubber mulch under the play structure so kids could play under there and weeds won't grow.  We put landscape fabric underneath it so hopefully it works.  It looks nice.

Little picnic table underneath too

This is a little flower bed in the front of the house.  I tried planting a few plants in there a few weeks ago and we immediately had a freeze and they mostly died.  Memorial Day Scott helped me dig out the area and plant some more plants along with adding some good soil.  Here is the spot before.

And after

Every day I back out of the garage and see the flowers haven't died, its' a good day!

On the back of the house there is this pretty flower bed - already landscaped and the plants came up so nicely!  I just pulled a few weeds and everything is ready to go!  There are two more areas in the front that need sprucing but I'm not sure I know what I want to do there yet.  And it might need drip lines.  So that will be a project for later.

Catching queens!  Or what we hope are queen wasps, hornets and yellow jackets.  Whatever they are, they are big and we're hoping to have the population more under control this summer.  

Fingers crossed.

Baby strawberries growing in the strawberry patch

Most of my herbs are doing ok.  Clockwise from bottom left is basil, lemon thyme, sage, lavender, rosemary and cilantro.  Cilantro is doing the worst, but seems to be holding on.

Blueberries on the left, raspberries n the right.  That middle raspberry plant is not looking so great.  I'm hoping it rallies.

Our fruit trees are looking great - we have lots of baby apples on this little tree.

The sunflower patch.  John planted this big sunflower seed at school and we transplanted it to this raised bed, then planted a bunch of other sunflower seeds.  The little sunflower sprouts are coming up.

Scott spent a lot of time cleaning up these grape vines.  There was tons of grass growing up all around them and he cut it all back and laid down mulch.  The grapes are looking nice and happy too.

These are green grapes and did produce a good amount of grapes last summer.

So hoping there are more grapes this year and they are looking happy so far.

So we made it to the end of the school year - its been busy and I'm ready for summer!