Thursday, February 10, 2011

Beauty and the Beast

Ashlee and Mikayla's school has been working on performing the play Beauty and the Beast for a little over 5 months now. Tonight we got to see the perfomance. Ashlee and Mikayla were villagers. The play was an hour and a half long, but very well done. Especially when you consider the fact that the whole play consisted of Kindergarten thru Fifth graders. The costumes and props were great. All the actors had their lines memorized. My mom said it was better than a play she saw performed by college students several years ago.












Sunday, February 06, 2011

Family

This weekend LB was in town for the Tulare Farm Show. Saturday night Danny, Teresa, Sam, Heidi, Carlee, Preston and Audrey came over for dinner. Teresa brought valentines for the kids. The kids loved their valentine goodies. Watching them open their valentines, reminded me of Christmas. They were so excited to open them and began eating their goodies right away.






Carlee taking pictures with Ashlee's digital camera



Preston taking pictures




Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Criminal Idiots

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I turn on the TV to watch the news, while I am waiting for John to get out of the bathroom so I can get in the bathroom. This morning I got up and then decided to turn on the TV after all. I hear the broadcaster say that the top story they are following is an officer involved shooting in Ceres. I think to myself, another wacko in Ceres. I can't wait to see what they have to say. I have to get ready and get the kids up. I decide to leave the TV on and go into the kitchen. After all I can rewind the TV to find out the details later. From the kitchen I hear them say a name of a road near the kids school so I go into the bedroom and rewind the TV.
Apparently a truck with 4 people in it was pulled over around 4am around the corner from the girls school. As the officer is patting 1 of the 4 people down, the guy pulls out a gun and starts firing the gun. Thankfully the bullet missed the cop but hit the cop car. The gunman takes off running. The cops shut down the streets around the school to look for this armed and dangerous man.
I wasn't about to take the girls to school and put them in an environment such as that. I have to go to work. I have to figure out what to do with the girls. I decided to text my friend who works at the school. She calls me back and tells me to not take them to school. She says she got a call from the district saying that she shouldn't report to work. At 7:30am the school calls and tells us that school will start in 1 hour due to police activity in the area. Another hour goes by, the school calls again and says to bring our kids to school at 10am. At about 9:30am I call the school and they tell me that they are cancelling school for the day. What a crazy day! How many lives did this 1 idiot affect today? How many people couldn't go to work today? In other parts of the country people deal with school delays due to bad weather. In California we deal with school delays and cancellations due to criminal idiots! Almost 12 hours later and they are still searching the area to find the guy. The girls are happy to have the day off of school and to be spending time with grandma. Mikayla asked if she gets to stay home again tomorrow since they still haven't caught the guy. I guess she thinks she's not going back until the criminal is caught. I hope they aren't afraid to go back to school after all this. It's times like this when I think maybe home schooling would be best. Or maybe it's time to move out of here. But there are criminal idiots everywhere. Just more in some areas than others.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Gold Honor Roll and Leadership Award



Ashlee received two awards at an assembly today at school. She received this month's Life Skill Award for Leadership. And she also received a certificate for being on the Gold Honor Roll. This means she has a GPA of 3.8 or higher. (I think she had a 3.9) She missed the 4.0 by like 1 percentage point. Neither John or I were able to attend. We were both at work. I feel horrible. Another parent was kind and took pictures for me without me even asking. I am thankful for her kindness. Way to go Ashlee. We are proud of your achievements.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Family Updates

I feel as though I am really slacking on my blogging anymore. I really don't want to be a slacker. I want to keep this blog going so that we can have a blog book every year to share, document and remember what things were like someday. Since I am horrible about scrap booking pictures, I have to rely on this as a means to document what is going on in our lives. Here's a quick post to update/document what has been going on. Unfortunately there are no pictures!
John is doing well and constantly working. One of the things I admire about him is how hard he works for our family. He gets up everyday and goes to a job that carries a lot of stress along with it. Although he would like for things to be different and the situation to be better, he does it without complaining. He knows it's a job and times are tough right now, so he needs to make do with it and provide for his family. When he's not at the pig farm, he is busy with the rabbits. The rabbits seem to be going ok. Lot's of work, but going well.
Libby has resigned from her job at the pig company. January will be her last month there. Things have been really slow. She is only getting about an 1 hour a day if that and needs more than that. She decided to go back into substitute teaching, only to discover that the school districts are not accepting subs right now because they have too many. There is one district about 15minutes from us that is accepting subs. She has applied with them and is waiting to see what happens. In the meantime she was offered a job 2 days a week working at the Almond Huller in the off season, so she will be doing that.
Ashlee just turned 10. It's hard to believe she is 10 already. She seems to be doing well. She is getting good grades in school and is looking forward to doing swim team again this summer. Her teacher says she doesn't know what she would do without Ashlee to help her out in class!
Mikayla is doing well in school too. School isn't as easy for her as she would like it to be, but she does well. Mikayla is in the process of having lots of orthodontic work done (the whole process will take like 8 years). Her mouth is a mess. On December 23rd she had an expander put in her mouth to try to widen the top of her mouth. Every night her mouth has to be cranked with a little key like device. After 3 weeks of turning she started experiencing lots of pain and a gap in between her front teeth. The orthodontist made us stop. He said he only has one patient a year go through that kind of pain ( go figure, and it happened to be our child. I am telling you I think we have the worst odds). He said that kind of pain is not normal. He thinks John may have been turning the key too fast and caused her mouth to get inflamed. She is taking a two week break from turning and will start the whole turning thing again in two weeks (this time with dad turning much slower)!

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Sleep Over

Tuesday is Ashlee's 10th birthday. Wow where has the time gone? Instead of having a birthday party like in years past, we decided to keep it low key. She invited two friends over for a sleep over. At Ashlee's request we had taco's and nacho's for dinner and cookie cups for dessert (instead of cake or cupcakes).



I found this cute, inexpensive craft idea at Michael's so the girls made these.






Sarah, Alyssa & Ashlee

After they finished their craft they watched the movie Despicable Me and enjoyed some movie treats. This morning we went and got donuts for breakfast and then the girls played some games before going home.

On Tuesday the 18th Ashlee took donuts to school to celebrate her birthday with her classmates. She chose to have dinner at Hometown Buffet (of all places). Just so she could have endless ICEE'S!







Wednesday, January 12, 2011

4th Grade Mission Project

It only took approximately 20 hours of Ashlee's Winter Break to complete her California Mission Project. Here is the finished project. She also had to complete a packet of information on her assigned mission and do a brochure for her mission. She got a 100% on her project and I am very glad to say it is done and over with. Homework during Winter Break isn't exactly my idea of "quality family time."