Grand-Dad's Luau Retirement Party

Over Memorial Day weekend we hosted a Luau themed party here in Kentucky in honor of Grand-Dad's upcoming retirement. We had a wonderful time at the party and appreciated everyone who traveled to celebrate with us! 

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Here are Grand-Dad and Grammy by the stone all of the Carlson siblings gave him as a retirement gift. The picture on the table is of Grand-Dad carrying the ceremonial mace at TTU's spring commencement earlier in May. We are so proud of everything Grand-Dad accomplished in his 33 years at TTU. We hope he enjoys his well deserved retirement!

 The LaBar family (minus Andrew and Jen who were busy climbing Denali in Alaska)

 Uncle Martin (Grand-Dad's oldest brother - aka "the other Pop-A-Lops) and his wife, Aunt Faye, with Grammy and Grand-Dad

 Aunt Faye and Uncle Martin came from South Carolina (twice - the first time they forgot their luggage so they had to turn around and go back) to spend the weekend celebrating with us.

 Uncle Scott (Grammy's younger brother), his wife Aunt Arla, and Aunt Pat (Grammy's younger sister) and her husband, Uncle Randy with Grand-Dad and Grammy

 Carlson siblings - Pat, Scott and Sherry

 Uncle Scott and Aunt Arla came from Wisconsin for the weekend

 Aunt Pat and Uncle Randy also came from Wisconsin too

 Aunt Arla, Aunt Pat and Grammy

 Aunt Arla and me

 Aunt Arla dressed Kennedy up in the coconut bra and grass skirt and got her dancing Hawain style. It was so funny! lol :)

 Then the dance party was on with Grammy to be the first to join in the fun!

 Aunt Faye getting her groove on too

 I asked Uncle Martin if he was going to show us his moves. He informed us we had already seen all his moves. Before we knew it, however, he was up and dancing following Missy K's lead and Uncle Scott and Grand-dad joined in as well! :)

 I was persuaded to dance as well :)

 My beauitful Missy K (3 1/2 yrs old)

 Missy Reagan (5 years old) was not in the mood for pictures but I did capture this cute shot

 Jackson (20 months) loves Grammy! 

 Here are some of our table decorations, inside...

 and out...

 The girls popping out from under the table to shout "Happy Retirement!"

 Tim manned the grill and did a great job. Here is working on Dorothy's out of this world chicken kabobs! They are beyond AMAZING!!!

Grand-Dad leading the way to eat

 Aunt Faye and Uncle Martin enjoying the outdoors

 Aunt Arla took this picture of Tim and me

 Jackson and Holden enjoying the sand table together

 They also enjoyed our small swingset on the deck

 Grammy and Aunt Pat decided it wasn't fair for the kids to have all the fun on the trampoline

 Jackson loves the trampoline but only if someone else is on it to bounce him around. He LOVED being on with Grammy and Aunt Pat who made sure he was throughly bounced!

 As usual the girls dressed up as princesses during the party. Kennedy decided to wear our duck costume over her Silvermist (a Disney fairy) dress along with bunny ears. She informed us she was a "fairy duck bunny."

 Then she reclaimed her hawain gear and declared herself to be a "Hawain fairy duck bunny" (her bunny ears fell off just as I took this picture).

Thank you to everyone who came to celebrate the weekend with us! We appreciate all the effort it took for you to be here and everything you contributed! We had an absolutely wonderful time and it would not have been the same without you! Congratulations again to Grand-Dad on his upcoming retirement!

Reagan & Kennedy's Many Colored Coats

The first part of our week studying the Jewish people was spent primarily learning about Abraham, Sarah and Issac. The second part of the week was spent learning about Joseph and his family. We learned about his many colored coat and how and why he was sent to Egypt to serve Pharaoh. I really like how sequentially and logically "The Story of the World" is laid out. There weren't any parts of the stories of Abraham, Issac, Jacob or Joseph that were new to me. Having said that, I had never in my years of Sunday School or formal education made the connection myself that Abraham is Joseph's great-grandfather. I love history and feel relatively well read but because history was not taught to me sequentially I wonder how many connections I will make as we progress through these books that have never occurred to me before. I thought it was interesting to discover the direct connection between Abraham and Joseph and just another example of why I like this curriculum so much! 

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One of the suggested activities for the week was making Joseph's many colored coat. There were several ideas on how to do this and we chose to improvise with products we had readily available. We started by cutting and then painting the oversized paper Grandma and Grandpa gave us for Easter. The girls had a great time selecting their colors and painting such a large sheet of paper. This picture reminds me of a favorite saying of Anne from the Anne of Green Gables series; there was plenty of "scope for the imagination" in this painting project! :)

 

 Reagan decided to do long vertical stripes in the order of the rainbow. Kennedy has been really big into creating patterns lately so she surprised me a little by choosing to do randomly colored horizontal lines. Both girls did a great job of being careful and creating colorful coats.

 I asked Reagan to smile in this picture but she was not at all pleased with the finished product. She liked her rainbow coat but was upset there were no sleeves. So much for my improvising...

 Kennedy on the other hand thought her coat turned out great and was as happy as a little clam with my improvisation! As a matter of fact she is still playing with her coat a week later. :)

The girl's favorite book from this week was "The Coat of Many Colors" by Jenny Koralek (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2004).

Transplanting Sunflowers

After a week we decided our sunflowers were ready to transplant from these tiny pots into something a little more substantial. The girls loved watching the flowers poke up while they were inside the house and were extremely proud of their development.

I thought it was interesting how the sunflowers emerged with their seed cases still over the sprout.

 Because the pot was so tiny and there were so many plants in each pot the dirt fell away from the roots as we were in the process of transplanting them. It was kind of neat because it provided a great opportunity to examine the intricate root system that had developed in a week. 

The girls placed their plants and some extra seeds we had around the pot. Reagan enjoyed this process but Kennedy preferred to observe instead of participating and getting her hands dirty. I think it's hilarious that she's ready to dive in with the chicken mummy but she doesn't want to touch dirt.

The girls worked together to water our sunflower sprouts after we completed the transplant process.

We had too many seeds and small plants to put in our pot so we decided to plant some directly into our vegetable garden where our carrots had disappeared. While we were there the girls were excited to discover our watermelon finally poking up out of the ground.

The Sunflowers in our garden were eaten by some little animal their first night. The ones in our pot are beginning to take off though. Here is a picture of them 9 days post transplant. I imagine we'll need to move them into the garden before long. Hopefully they'll be big enough to survive any critters when we transplant these little guys!

Flooding the Nile - Week 4

Success!!! It appears that if you plant your crops after the Nile has flooded they actually grow! :)

While we didn't plant any additional seed this week (we had such a bumper crop there wasn't any room) we decided to go ahead and flood the Nile one final week. I can report that at the end of Week 5 our grass was going wild and was so tall it was all falling over.

 My (very) brief attempt at creative photography... I think it would have been a cool picture if I could have figured out how to get the camera to focus on the girl's faces instead of the grass. Oh well! :)

This has been a great experiment to watch and learn about the Nile from for several weeks. We're looking forward to many future Story of the World projects!

I Love My Missy Reagan

While Tim was in DC for work the kids and I had one particularily hard day. I'm not sure why it was so rough, nothing of great signifance, we (especially Reagan and I) were simply having an off day. When we came home from one activity I was trying to get everyone in the house when Reagan dashed out of the garage and started drawing with chalk. At the time I was actually annoyed with her and asked her several times to come inside. Later I was outside for some reason and walked past what she had been so determined she had to draw right then. It made my heart melt to see even when Reagan and I are having our moments she still loves and forgives me just like I love and forgive her.