May 2019

May was a busy month.  Emmett stayed busy with soccer, loving his team, the game, and the competition.  He also buckled down getting all of his schoolwork done on time.  While he is a great student and super smart, staying organized and working steadily on bigger projects to get them done on time are his biggest challenges.  He loves to read and was able to do a research project on how reading affects the brain.  There was a research project fair in early May to see all their hard work.

 Elliott, Ezra and I went to a dance recital put on by Extreme Ballroom.  Before the recital started there were bounce houses and just about every Disney character you can imagine.  The recital had mostly Disney songs and was really fun to watch.  It didn't end until about 10pm, and we would have left early except one of the last songs in the program was a Star Wars song and they really wanted to see it.

Chip and Mrs. Potts from Beauty and the Beast

 Jim went on a business trip to Ohio.  We really missed him when he was gone, but he sent us lots of pictures of his experiences, interesting sites and foods.  He saw Lake Eerie, a waterfall, and a car dealership with VERY high end cars.

 Our house projects also continued, we were doing one of the steps of painting cabinets nearly every night, and also Jim ripped out flooring in our bathroom and laundry room.  We got our new flooring in the bathroom and laundry room and were so happy with the job.  We had thought about doing it ourselves, and we are really glad we hired the company that we did.  I had thought that a herringbone tile look with LVT would be really neat, but decided it was probably not realistic.  This flooring company did exactly what I had pictured and they were great to deal with.

 We also started the process of getting our hail damaged siding replaced from our storm that was in April 2018.  They got all the siding ripped off 2 sides of the house the first day.  Then they started in replacing 17 windows.  That took them 2 days, but it turned out that 2 of the replacement windows were the wrong size so we had to wait on those.  Then they got vapor barrier put up the 4th day along with some siding, which was good because rain was coming.  It rained quite a bit that weekend and the guys came back the following week to finish up the siding.

 We had a dentist appointment and Elliott was taking pictures during my turn.  Most of the pictures were just blurry or the back of someone's head, but he got this pretty good one of the dentist looking at my teeth.  Everyone got a good report except Emmett, who had an infection where he had a previous filling and had to get on antibiotics and go the next week to get a baby tooth pulled.  He did great with it, and hopefully the adult tooth comes in before our next visit in 6 months so he doesn't need a spacer or anything special.

 Ezra's second grade class did a big project called Kid Town.  They learn about how a town works and economics.  Ezra ran for mayor and wrote a great speech, but was beat by a little girl that brought cookies for the whole class.  He was happy to run the town recycling center and made lots of crafts out of recycled materials that he then "sold."  They earn money for doing their school work and have an event at the end that the parents are invited to to buy things with the money they have earned.

 The 4th grade puts on a musical production called "Go West" about the different ways people traveled out west and the reasons that they came.  Emmett was a cowboy riding a horse around the audience during one song.  It was fun to watch and he had been singing the songs all month in preparation.

 We went to a wedding and got to see some friends that moved away a couple years ago.  The wedding was moved indoors because of the crazy amount of rain we had received, but it ended up being beautiful afterwards and the reception was mainly outdoors and included lots of volleyball.

Wedding Reception

Jim continued to lots of work on the house and I helped as much as I could.  He put up more shiplap, and we painted the bathroom, laundry room and another wall in our living room.  We also installed a new toilet and Jim did a lot of plumbing work in our laundry room to prepare for a sink in there.  He not only learned a lot about plumbing, but also about cutting out and repairing drywall.

New flooring, paint, shiplap and toilet.  Still a few things to finish up.

 Ezra had been wanting to make a dessert from our Star Wars Cookbook and we decided he should make my birthday cake.  We made something that was essentially a roll cake with coffee ice cream inside.

 On Memorial Day we took a day to drive through Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.  We started early to avoid traffic and we had a really pleasant day!  We entered through the west entrance and walked around a boardwalk where we saw a bluebird that Jim got some great pictures of.  We also stopped at Gibbon Falls and did they hike at Artist Paint Pots.  Then we walked around Norris Geyser Basin.  There were lots of people camped out to see a Steamboat Geyser eruption.  We hung out for a little bit but not too long.  Steamboat Geyser is the world's tallest active geyser and has been erupting with more frequency (once a week or so) although is still unpredictable.  I just looked it up and it did erupt the same day we were there, probably about 7 hours after we had visited.

Jim got this amazing picture of a bluebird

Crowds at Steamboat Geyser

After Norris Geyser Basin we went over to the Yellowstone Canyon area and ate lunch.  We wanted to do Uncle Tom's trail but it was closed due to snow.  We hiked around a little bit and then headed to the Mud Volcano.  It was starting to rain and I was feeling pretty tired, so I took a nap in the car while Jim and the boys explored.  They had their closest wildlife encounter there, with a bison that jumped up on the boardwalk.  Luckily they were pretty far away, but sometimes things get a little sketchy with unwise tourists.  We drove through the rain and got into Grand Teton National Park.  The mountains were in the clouds.  We stopped at Jenny Lake and then continued into Jackson for dinner.  On our way over Pine Creek Pass in Idaho Jim spotted a moose and went back so we could all see it.  We caught a quick glimpse of it and it took a few steps and disappeared into the forest.

The last day of May was the last day of school, but we headed out for our trip to Oregon to see our nephew graduate from high school.  We stopped by the school on the way out of town for Emmett to turn in one last assignment and to grab Ezra's lunchbox that he lost the day before.

Emmett and his good friend Johnny