Awards

The other day Rachael brought home a notice that she was going to be recieving an award at the school's awards assembly today. (Awards are given only to kids in grade 4 & 5.) "It's no big deal, Mom," Rachael said to me. But being the pround mom that I am I came armed with my camera ready to document the moment for posterity's sake. After singing O Canada in both french and english and handing out the birthday pencils for the month of June they started on the awards. Rachael was called up for a Citizenship award. Aww, that's great! She's always a nice kid.

Then she got called up for another award. I wasn't expecting that, but hey, great! This one was for Outstanding Effort. Cool. She always tries her best. I like that. And two awards is great!

Then she got called up for another award! This one was for Academic Achievement. Her report cards have always been great, but I wasn't expecting an honor roll award. Way to go, girl!

Wow, three certificates is impressive. I sure wasn't expecting that! But they weren't quite done yet. Those kids who received all three certificates also got a medal! (Ok, it's really plastic, but still.) Now that's impressive.

Not only did she get all the awards they were handing out, but her two best friends got them all, too. What a great group of girls! Alex and Alexa wanted Jaden to join them for this picture.

Way to go, Rachael! We're proud of you and love you lots!

A Dog's Life

Rachael wanted to celebrate her dog Caspian's first birthday, and since the weather was sunny (for once) we took him to the creek.

Sports Day

When Darcy grew up in "Smallville" his school's version of Sports Day was really more like Track & Field. So since work is a little bit slow right now he took the day off to go watch his girls at a "real" Sports Day. Rachael, being one of the big kids on campus, was in charge of creating and supervising an event for the younger kids to do.

(Apparently wearing the 3D glasses with the lenses popped out is "in" right now.)

Then after lunch the older kids got to play team events.

They had a lot of fun and thankfully the rain held off.

Grandma came and rescued Jaden from the torture of only being allowed to watch and took him back to her house for the rest of the morning.

The Three "R"'s

No, this time we're not talking about reading, writing and arithmatic, we're talking about Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

I went with Rachael's class last Friday to the recycling plant.

We made a bird feeder

out of reused household materials

and got a tour of the plant.

We learned all kinds of things there.

Did you know they get more money for the recycled milk jugs if you take the lids off?

Gone Fishing

Kaitlyn went with her class on a field trip to the fish hatchery where they got to go fishing.

Kaitlyn was the first one to catch a fish (most of the students didn't catch anything.)

Fortunately the fishery guy was there to help her land the fish so I could just catch some pictures with my camera.

I think it was a cut throat trout but that's a bit of a guess.

After the photo op they released it back to the pond.

They had lots of fun, but the best part of all was that Kaitlyn got to be in the same group as her best friend Emilie.

Young At Art

Rachael had her first Art Show on Friday. Auntie Kendra bought her flowers and everything!

She had about 8 pieces on display, but her favorite one is the pencil drawing of sheep you can see here over her right shoulder.

Next year Kaitlyn is going to join her in art class. I'm going to need a bigger fridge to display all this amazing art work :-)

June

So, I realize I haven't made a post in a little while, so this is kind of a make-up-for-lost-time post.

Last Friday was a beautiful sunny day so we decided the kids needed to go on a field trip instead of being stuck in the classroom. So we went to the aquarium. The kids had lots of fun. We stopped at the park
and we walked down to the beach by the seawall and saw some marine life au natural.

*****

On Monday Gramps and Gram took Jaden and Johnathan to the zoo.
The cousins had a great time, and I know Gramps and Gram did, too. (And great weather to boot!)

*****

Today was Rachael's first track meet. The weather was overcast, but it didn't rain on us, and it wasn't blisteringly hot for the runners. She had a lot of fun, and Daddy even took the day off work to come watch.