TEENagers and FOOD and HANGIN' out, OH MY

Marlise's 13th BIRTHDAY is TODAY!! I can't believe I have a TEENager now, how scary is that. She is the best daughter anyone could ask for. She loves and respects us as parents (not for long, right), and is a very beautiful, smart, happy, talented, honest, girl.

For her Birthday Party, she wanted to have a joint party with her friend Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn has been her best friend for five years. So they decided it would be fun to have their birthday parties together, at our house, in the back yard. We kept asking the girls what they wanted to do, and they kept saying, "food and just hang out". We tried to come up with games, and they wanted nothing to do with that. We have a park behind our house, so they kept going from my backyard to the park, back and forth! All in all, I think they had fun "hanging out", especially once the scorching, hot, sun went down. Next year, I told Marlise, we need to have a SMALLER, just girls, sleepover party. You can only hope!!!

A SPECIAL thanks to Carol for helping, and for making the cute cakes just how the girls wanted them! I couldn't have done it without you!

Teachers are the BEST!!

This last week was Teacher Appreciation Week. I'm very grateful and LOVED all of my kids teachers this school year. My kids have grown and learned a tremendous amount, thanks to their teachers. I was shocked when I saw on the Internet how much teachers make in AZ. They are definitely under paid and under appreciated. They are teaching our future presidents, engineers, accountants, police officers, firefighters, business owners, and so on. I think I take teachers for granted, until I stop and think about how important they are to our future generations to come. THANK YOU to all of the teachers out there!
Marlise's favorite Teacher, Mr. Little. He's her choir Teacher, and this was at their Choir concert they had a few weeks ago.

Cameron's Teacher Ms. Seymour, she's awesome!!

David with his PreSchool Teacher Ms. Stephanie and her son Bryson. What a great job she has done teaching David to start learning to read, write his name, and count. She's the BEST!! He's ready to start Kindergarten for sure.

NIGHT At THE MuSEUm

Yes, My kids kept thinking we were going to a Museum like the one on the movie. We went to the Phoenix Museum of Natural History. We had never been there before, and I got some passes from our library, so we couldn't pass up the opportunity to educate our kids on "Natural History". We got to see lots of Dinosaur fossils, LOTS of info on poop, yes you read that right. They have a room dedicated to poop, remember EVERYONE poops. We got to see real Jail cells, that they used in the late 1800's to mid 1900's (I wouldn't know but, NOT like the ones they have today). My kids LOVED digging for gold, they thought they were going to be rich for the rest of their lives, with all the gold they found. And last but not least, we got to visit "MARS". What a great time we had, BUT decided, we were glad we got the passes for FREE!! Next stop, Arizona Children's Museum.








They were TRYING hard not to fly away!