Last Day of School

Matthew graduated from elementary school this past week.  He actually graduated from elementary school last year too, in Gilroy.  Their elementary school there was only through 5th grade and they had a nice graduation ceremony at the end of the year.  But then we moved and he got to be in elementary school some more.  So he graduated again this year.  He's hoping this one sticks.  :).  They had a nice graduation ceremony on the day before the last day of school (or penultimate day - Matthew likes to use the word penultimate whenever he can...or antepenultimate).

Here he is getting an award for perfect attendance.  They didn't give out any academic awards, which I thought was weird.

Here he is while his name is announced.

And announcing the next kids name

Getting his diploma

Way to go Matthew!!

Elementary school class of 2019!

Matthew and Anna walking out to the car after the ceremony

One of his last days at this school and in elementary school.

He's all grown up (tears!)

Emma!  On the way into the graduation we were hurrying and Emma was wearing little clogs.  She ran fast and fell down and scraped up her knees, elbows and hands.  She was screaming and lots of kind people offered us bandaids.  A school administrator got her fixed up with some big bandaids and she felt a little better.  Poor Emma!

This picture is kind of dark but Emma is showing off some of her bandaids.

She's tough!

And then the next day we went to John's kindergarten graduation.

Can you spot him?  He's straight down from the big letter K on the sign.

He has loved his year in kindergarten and is sad to leave his teacher but excited to graduate and move on to 1st grade.

They sang some songs for us

John getting his diploma.  As each kid's name was called they also told what the kids said they wanted to be when they grew up.  There were a lot of paleontologists, soccer players and doctors.  John said he wanted to be Batman. He was quick to point out that he was the only kid who said they wanted to be Batman.  :)

Congratulations John!  He's grown up so much this year.

Hooray John!

John with his much beloved teacher, Mrs. Crockett.

He loved being in her class so much!

One last picture in his classroom before he says goodbye to kindergarten.

Emma can't wait to be in kindergarten, but she has a while.  I signed her up for pre-k next year but she'll only go two days a week for a couple hours.  She can't wait!

We went out to lunch with John and Emma - John's last time to go out to lunch on Friday with Scott and I.  Next year he'll be in school all day.  It was a Peter Pan moment (this is your last night in the nursery).  ((more tears)). Don't grow up too fast, John.

I went to get Matthew and Anna on the last day - Anna was very sad to leave her teacher who she really loves.  But she can see her next year at least.

Happy last day.

Grant is our Mr. Independent.  He likes to scooter himself to and from school each day since its gotten warmer.  He and John go to the neighborhood school and Matthew and Anna go to a school across town.  So Grant just scootered himself home on the last day.  He is excited for summer!  I got an excited last day picture of him after we all got home.  We're ready for summer.

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!