First week of school

Happy to say that our first week back to school was a total success! Busy, as always, but ever exciting! The pics below are actually from the second day of school. We met CJ's first grade teacher the night before school started, and saw several of his friends from kinder there, including his best friend Dylan. This first grade teacher seems to be absolutely wonderful, having written a note home to CJ after the first day of school telling him happy she is to have him in her class. What a difference one little note with kind words can make to a first grader and his family.

BJ, as you might guess, strode into his school with joy and smiles from ear to ear. He was SO happy to be back. I don't know what we're going to do when we ever have to part with his preschool. He looks SO tall now that he's back with his group of friends. What happens over a summer to make all these children grow so?!

Rick and I had a busy, busy week ourselves, and are enjoying a three day weekend to regroup, order text books (me), get a jump on some reading, etc. I'm REALLY looking forward to a fun sememster. I'm taking 12 hours of graduate classes, and TA'ing 20 hours a week, but the professor I'm TA'ing with is my major professor and I get to assist her in teaching her Children's Lit. class! I'm looking forward to the learning experiences that will come my way. My own classes include a linguistics class, a library acquisitions/censorship course, quantitative research (yikes!), and a reading assessment/intervention course. I LOVE IT!

For all those involved in equipping my family with bikes over the summer, I'm happy to tell you that the boys and I went on our first bike ride yesterday and it was absolutely delightful. We went to Mountain View Park (where the boys play soccer, mom, Sarah, and Charles), and we had the long bike path all to ourselves. A couple of runners passed us and a couple of walkers, but other than that, no traffic. We probably rode about a mile and BJ was walking his bike by the end of our ride b/c he was so tired. Last night BJ fell asleep at 6 PM and didn't wake up until 8 AM! He was really tired!!!! It's been a long time since I was on a bike and it was such fun. We're looking forward to going out as a family once Rick gets his tire fixed.

Enjoyed a nice day today, about 70 degrees with a nice breeze. Rick cleaned out the entire garage and some of our window wells. Fall is coming, we just know it, and if memory serves, fall is just BEAUTIFUL in Idaho!!!

Love to all and hope to post pictures more regularly now that we're back in school. Fingers crossed. Soccer starts in two weeks.

Petrified Forest, Meteor Crater, and Grand Canyon

These two pics were taken at the Petrified Forest.



This one photo is from our stop at Meteor Crater in Arizona.

Grand Canyon and Zion National Park

These pictures don't even begin to capture the shock your body experiences when entering the Grand Canyon for the first time. Posters and pictures are beautiful, but they can't capture the grandness of the landforms and the smallness of you.

Saturday morning. The sun was shining so nicely for us, but it was still cool out.

You can't really see him in this picture (blame it on the photographer, me), but the boys are crouching looking at this funny squirrel who had been tucked into the crawl space of the ledge, and then surprised us by coming out to stare at us. He stayed for a long time before darting across the path. He was obviously not intimidated by the usual foot traffic.

Stopped for a little ice cream near the South Rim. Benny has gotten REALLY good now at eating an ice cream and getting all of it into his tummy, as opposed to all over his hands and shirt:)


We finally were able to find the Colorado River.

Oh my, it's hard to even begin a blog that describes the unbelievable last three weeks of our lives. Not much time tonight, but I'm wanting to at least post a couple of pictures from our trip home. All the other pics we took are on our other computer, so will have to post them later (it's the really, really slow computer, so don't hold your breath!).

Can't believe we're celebrating 7!!!!

Two more cute videos...

Mimi's visit...

Mimi arrived at 11:00 PM before BJ's 4th birthday and what a fun way to celebrate his special day. He awoke to find Mimi at our house:) Mimi spent the day with the boys while Rick and I both worked and that evening Mimi took us all out to dinner and we came home to enjoy a cake that Benny decorated and to open a few presants.

It was hard to believe that a week could go by as quickly as this one did.

Mariner's game...

It was quite a treat to go to the Mariners' game when we were in Tacoma earlier this summer. It was quite pleasant outside that evening, we had very nice seats between first and second base in the outfield section, yummy cotton candy for the boys, and lots of laughs. One of the highlights to me was that we were able to ride the city bus to and from the game, boarding just blocks from Sonja's house, so it was very easy (of course dad and Sonja did the background work to get us on the right bus).