Big Wave Parade

So on the last day of school when the buses pull away from the school, all of the teachers are out there waving to all of the students their final goodbyes. 

WELL, since that didn't happen, they put together basically a reverse of that. They figured out the neighborhoods that any of the middle schoolers lived and made a route so that the teachers would drive around into all of the neighborhoods and wave to the kids. 

It seemed like such a good idea........

We were very excited about it because the kids got to see their teachers in real life again.

They sent out the route, and they were going to start at 1:00pm. The kids had a photography merit badge class that they were suppose to watch at 1:30 so I was going to go to the neighborhood before ours and when the parade of cars went into that neighborhood, I would run home, get the kids and go to where the parade would go by our neighborhood.

Well, I went to the middle school to see what the parade or cars looked like so that I would know what I was looking for. There were only about 15-20 cars, I was expecting  A LOT more. It was suppose to be all of the teachers at their school. The second car in line had a bunch of yellow balloons attached to it. Well, I saw what it looked like, then I went to my neighborhood, and then I realized that they would pass me and go to a neighborhood before that, so 2 neighborhoods before ours. I wasn't completely sure if I should give them anything or not, but after seeing other "parades" and seeing other teachers get things from their students, I decided to just give them something sort of small, just a goodie bag. So we put a soda, water, chips, trail mix, granola bar, and Oreos in a bag and then on the outside we had Mentos and blacked out the s, and wrote We (Mento) say you are AWESOME!

It was just a fun little thing for them, in case they needed a snack or drink while they were driving around.

We didn't quite get the bags ready and I was going to do that while I was waiting, but I did about 4 bags and then I saw the parade pass by and I was like WHAT????!!!????? Oh my goodness they are ALREADY going to the neighborhood two away from us. I could NOT believe they were so fast. It was only about 1:15pm. I jumped in and started driving, called Chris and told him to let the kids know I was coming home to get them because the parade was coming ALREADY!!!

I picked them up, then we went a few streets over where they were going to come and we QUICKLY filled those bags because "the parade was going to come any minute now". We finished and then waited and waited and waited and waited. They we started driving to the neighborhood that they would be right before ours, and waited and waited and waited.......AND THEN I REALIZED........when they passed me, they were only going to their 2nd neighborhood from the beginning of the route, I forgot they had to pass me to get to that neighborhood first. So while we waited, the kids used my phone to get onto their Photography zoom merit badge class. We drove a few different places hoping to see the parade and know where they were but we finally just drove back to our neighborhood. The parade didn't come into neighborhood until 2 hours after it started. We LOVED seeing them, and the kids would ask each of their teachers or counselors (whomever they wanted to give a bag to) if it was ok to give them something. We didn't want to come close if the person didn't feel comfortable with it. Each one enthusiastically said Yes, of course you can! It was SOOO fun to see their teachers. Their were more 8th grade teachers than any or Matthew's 7th grade, or Matthew and Allison's 6th grade teachers. I think it was more of their way of saying goodbye to the 8th graders. It all made us feel SO good to give them something.

The sad part though, those teachers were out for ANOTHER 2 hours!!! They drove around for 4 hours!!! Matthew and Allison's chorus teacher said they saw some kids, but not as many as they would have liked. Kind of like us, we would have liked to have seen more teachers, and principals. Even though we LOVED it, I think it wasn't worth it for the teachers to drive around all that much. They should have just stood in the bus loop for an hour or so, and those kids that wanted to see the teachers could have driven around the bus loop to see them.

Here comes the small line of cars!

Reading Time

Sometimes.....I mean A LOT of times, Matthew can be a really annoying brother. He plays that annoying brother role REALLY well. 

Usually within a couple minutes of Matthew walking into a room, we hear his name, but not being called in a nice way. He is usually walking into a room, and I am sure thinking....how can I annoy this sister....

This particular time though, he was really good with his littlest sister. He actually got her to read One Fish Two Fish. At the end she started not wanting to read anymore. I heard him say Michelle you have read all but two pages you have to finish it so that you can say you read the whole book....so she kept reading.

In House Exercise

One day, I asked the kids if they wanted to go for a hike or just do a workout at home. I told them that majority would win, and someone was probably going to be disappointed....Michelle was the one that got disappointed. We did a Biggest Loser workout and the kids didn't really enjoy it....and were hurting the rest of the day and the days following.

It was good for all of us.

Yellowstone County News Project

For Christmas last year, I gave Jon and Tana and their family, their names cut out of wood. Those are really fun to do. So anyways, at the end of January Tana texted me to see if I would be able to make a logo for them that was 2' and in an oval. 

I had an idea that I would cut out each individual letter and sun ray, cut all of it out, spray paint them the colors they are suppose to be and then glue it onto another piece of wood. It just seemed like SOO MUCH WORK, and I just didn't really know how it would work. I didn't want to do all of that work if it wasn't going to look good in the end. I really struggled how I was going to do it, since I had never done something like that before.

The really bad part about this was that she didn't give me a timeframe. That is NEVER a good idea for me. It took some time to try to find the wood that I actually wanted to use, I didn't actually find what I wanted but finally decided on what I would use. So then I got the wood, but never started on it. After the wood, I had to get the logo bigger than what was sent to me. I tried taking it to Kinkos but they were going to charge me $8 to enlarge it and then an additional amount to print it off. I didn't want to pay that.

(Then COVID-19 happened and I thought oh alright! I will have SOOO much time to get this done.....YEAH RIGHT!!! How did I ever think that? Nothing happened until ALL of the school work was done.)

So I came home and just printed the logo, the size of a piece of paper. I wanted to see if it would even work. Chris gave me the idea to just cut out the letters and use the wood with the cut out to give to them. I really wanted the black letters and mountains, and the blue river and the yellow sun to be apart of it, since that was the logo. So I printed off the 8x11 size of the logo and went and cut everything out. I didn't think about how things should be cut and just started cutting. I cut EVERYTHING out except 3 letters in the very middle, the OWS, and then there wasn't enough wood to hold things together as I cut and all of those letters broke away from everything so then there was just a big hole. I had spent ALL DAY working on this....and then when it was almost done, I ruined it so bad, it couldn't be fixed.

After spending so much time.....for nothing I needed to take some time off of it again.

I then printed off an 8x10 logo and put it in my copier and started enlarging each piece and putting it together and then enlarging it again, over and over and over. It was a big long process to get it to 2'. Then when it was ok, I had the idea to put the logo into Excell spreadsheet and see if it would just enlarge and print on 4 pieces of paper, with an oval behind it. It worked wonderfully! 

SO MUCH EASIER!

I was then able to cut it all out, because I knew ways to help it not break because of my first attempt. I also learned that their logo, is not great for a scrollsaw. It was SO hard and I had to change some of the letters and such, but it turned out ok.

So I cut out everything you see. Then I put another piece of wood on the back and found out where the sun, the river, and everything else would be so I painted those areas. Then I glued that back piece to the front piece of wood and clamped it until it was dry. Then I used small nails and also nailed it together. 

Then I put varnish on it, and put a hanger hook on the back with little bumpers so it doesn't scratch the wall. I was SOOOO excited when I finally got this done. It has only taken me only like 5 months but they finally got it.

Matthew's 8th grade slideshow

They asked the 8th graders to put two pictures into a slide for them to show the 8th graders. At one point they only had 43 slides out of the hundreds of 8th graders graduating. Matthew enjoyed seeing his friends' pictures, and I think more contributed.

https://youtu.be/YrHiOgzdl2I

Michelle's Big Girl Bed - PHASE 1

Since I didn't have the bed frame yet, we just put the boxspring and mattress on the floor. We knew we would have to move it somewhere else because the mattress was too long and she couldn't open on of her doors to her closet.

She loved it even when it wasn't fully assembled, and it was a good started bed, so that if she fell off, it wasn't quite as far of a fall.

Allison was excited.

"Now I can lay with you!"

Matthew's Braces On!

I already talked about how much I disliked Invisalign.

May 27th was the day Matthew was getting his BRACES on. We are counting down the days, and hours and maybe even minutes!!

We were excited.....he wasn't quite as much. 

We were SO excited that I was honestly scared that when he walked in and they took his temperature, he would for some reason, spike a temperature at that moment and get sent back. I wasn't allowed to go in with him. He got to go in, wearing a mask and then when they laid him back to work on him, is when they let him take it off. I just stayed in my car reading a book. When he didn't come out right away, and then within 20 minutes, I was pretty sure at that point that he was good to go and the next time I saw him, his braces would be on.

Sure enough, about 1.5 hours later he came out, and he wouldn't smile for me. I got him to and then I had to take the oblivious braces on picture. 

It has ONLY been a week and a half and I canNOT even believe how much Matthew's teeth have changed just in that amount of time!! He had one tooth in the front that was far back, so the wire had to go back to connect to that tooth and the up to connect to the rest of the teeth...and now it is in line!!!! WHAT!!!! I can't believe they moved THAT fast. I could see it within a week, it wasn't almost alined and then just tonight I looked again and I honestly couldn't even tell which tooth it was anymore!!!

He has only had invisalign/braces for 5 months and they have moved SOOOO MUCH!!! He is wearing his rubber bands so much more with the braces. They ALWAYS popped off with the invisalign. If he tried to talk at all, those rubber bands were off. I figured he just wasn't putting them on correctly, but sure enough I tried as well and they did the same thing. Now we only find little rubber bands everywhere:)

Michelle's Storytime

We USED to go to storytime when things were normal. 

Thankfully one of the local counties does Facebook Live storytimes, 5 days a week, so that is really nice. It is not the same, but better than nothing. Another cool thing is that my double cousin, Fawn Venzor, is a librarian in Montana and she does a Facebook Live for Three Forks Library on Thursday morning, so we always tune in to watch her. It is SOOO fun to see my cousin every week!! I LOVE it!!!

Michelle decided that her stuffed animals needed storytime, so she did storytime for them!!!

(This is before her room got a big girl bed in it)

Isn't she a cutie???!!!???!

Our Own Swimming Pool!!

Not as glamorous as you might have thought but one of the requirements for Allison's Personal Management merit badge was to find an item that our family wanted to purchase and look up different places and different prices and find the best price. You didn't actually have to buy the item to complete the requirement but I told Allison that if she did the research, I would buy it. She did research on a 10' x 3' swimming pool. I have wanted to have a small swimming pool kind of like this on those days that the pool isn't open like in the early spring or late fall when it was hot for a day or two. Now we have one. I actually went and got it the day that our local pool WOULD have opened....if it wasn't for COVID-19. The kids would have already started swimming team and such, but oh well, there is nothing we can do about it.

The girls had a lot of fun with it that first day. They stayed in it for about 4 hours. 

One of the best parts? They can't eat in the local pool, but they can in our pool, since we drain it so often, it isn't that big of a deal and we have to make it more fun than the big pool some how to make us feel better.

Family Hikes

Once school was over, we started a new schedule. Chris even was in between semesters so he came with us. 

Since it was cloudy/rainy I took us to Crump park which I knew had a paved road for a nice walk/hike for us. 

We went past the pond and saw these three cute little ducklings.

Then we went back the baseball fields.

At the end of the walk, was a train, actually a couple of them. I am not sure what the significance of that is, but oh well.

We found a bridge to go across to another field, this one was a football or soccer field. I am not quite sure.

 When we got back to the van, Allison put her Roller Blades on and got to roller blade around the big loop. Then the rain started coming down.

Another day we went to Three Lakes Park and made the trek around all three lakes.

At the end of our hike we stopped by an area that has fish in one small areas and then turtles in the big lake. There were a lot of turtles. The longer we stayed there, the more that came. I think we counted about 33 turtles in all.

Then we went to the playground, and there was only one other family there. A mom with her two sons. We just stayed our 6 feet from them.

Michelle wanted her picture taken on all of these animals.

Then we went to the smaller playground and played on the swings for a little while.

Allison enjoyed doing the monkey bars.

Michelle enjoyed riding on Clifford

The kids had fun...

 Until Michelle had to go to the bathroom and I didn't want her to use a public one, so we zoomed home quickly (only 4 miles away)

Another day we went back to Crump Park and found MORE ducklings. This time they were much larger, and there were eight of them!

There are the 3 little ducklings hanging out under their mom.

Then we saw another weird looking duck....or at least we think it was a duck.