Someone is 9 Today!

Hard to believe that today is Grace's 9th birthday!  She's been sick the past few days but was able to go back to school today.  I'm going to meet her for lunch so we can have cupcakes with her class.  After school, we're going to go out for tacos before she has Pom.  Then she'll have more cupcakes before coming home to open presents!  Happy Birthday Grace!!

Vegas Trip

This past weekend, Marianna and I finally took our birthday trip to Vegas.  This was to celebrate our 21st and 40th birthdays - and was also a gift I promised her a few years ago.

We only had two full days to take in all that's great about Vegas.  We visited Madame Tussaud's wax museum, the Venetian, walked the strip, visited Caesar's and the Bellagio plus enjoyed our hotel the MGM Grand.  While in the Studio City wing of the hotel, we were able to preview and give feedback on a new tv show.  And of course we enjoyed fabulous food, drinks and gaming.  It was a shame it had to end but we did have a great time!

This picture was taken at the atrium of the Bellagio - they had a fabulous display of fall flowers and it was the perfect place to capture us.

Report Card Time

Third grade is the start of real grades in school and Grace just received her first report card of the year.  While there were a few changes from her mid-term report we're happy to report that Grace made the A-B Honor Roll with 2 As (Science and Social Studies) and 2 Bs (Math and Language Arts).  She also had perfect attendance for the first quarter but that won't happen next quarter since she was sick two days last week.  She did however make it back to school in time for the assembly to recognize students on the honor roll.  She received a certificate along with a bag of goodies.  We're proud of her and hope she keeps up the good work!

Halloween

While our family and friends up North have to wait a few more days before they can don their costumes and collect candy - things were on the normal schedule in these parts.  This year after spending weeks telling us he was going to be a dinosaur, Adam opted to be Ironman; while Grace, who is into mystical things and creates, chose Astrid from How to Train your Dragon.

They went out with David around 6:00 and circled the neighborhood.  In Adam's words "we rang the bell and it said ding dong, then the peoples gave us candy and we said thank you and happy halloween".  When they came home around 7:30 both kids helped me hand out the rest of our candy before calling it a night at 8:00.  That's the one thing I love about our neighborhood, we all seem to be on the same schedule when it comes to these activities as most people were out from 6-8.

September Wrap Up

We started the month with a trip to NJ for Labor Day weekend.  The kids had a blast visiting with their cousins and hanging out.  Once we got back we rolled right into our normal routine.

Adam is doing great.  He spends his days with our sitter Tanya but three days each week he goes to pre-school in the afternoon.  He's been doing well and we are hoping that we can get him back into a full day pre-school setting by his fourth birthday so he will have time to prepare for kindergarten.  Other than that he loves dinosaurs, trucks and driving his sister crazy.

Grace is a busy girl.  Of course there's school but she also continues to study karate and is taking Pom this year which is cheering with dance.  Her first quarter progress report came home yesterday and she is doing well.  Her current grades are reading 94 (A), math 97 (A), science 91 (B) and social studies 93 (A).  Hopefully she will keep her grades up for when her report card comes home the end of October.

This past weekend we took a trip to the beach with some friends to celebrate my last weekend in my 30s.  There were four couples plus six kids.  We stayed at Ocean Lakes campground in Surfside Beach which is on the south side of Myrtle Beach.  Now don't think I've gone crazy or anything - we didn't camp, they have houses there to rent and we had a 7 bedroom place that was a short walk to the beach.  The weather was perfect and we were able to hang out on the beach and at the pool.  Of course things got a little exciting on Saturday when someone caught a 3 ft shark but that didn't deter us from our beach fun.

That's about all for now.  We'll see what October brings with Fall Festival and Halloween.

DNC Update

I know a lot of you were excited when I shared the news that David & I were going to be attending the President's speech on Thursday evening in Charlotte.  A friend of mine from Coker is head of the Kansas Democratic Party and had offered us tickets and we jumped at the chance to witness history.  Regardless of political affiliation, this was an opportunity that we couldn't pass up.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature is rearing her ugly side in the area this week and as a precaution, the event is being moved into the Time Warner Cable arena which holds far less people than the stadium.  As a result, the tickets that my friend had to share are now voided.  So we will be watching from home.

But there is some fun news to share about the DNC - the group of third graders that opened the event yesterday with the Pledge of Allegiance was from Grace's school.  It wasn't her class but several of her friends took part.

Maybe we'll get to experience a political convention another time.

Back to School

Today is Grace's first day of third grade - can you believe it?  We did our traditional walk to school and took the obligatory photos.  This is going to be a big year for Grace - letter grades, more homework, a wider variety of subjects in the classroom - and I think she's pretty excited.

This is her leaving the house!

This is her teacher - Ms. Hunter