Goodbye to another great year of school!

Someone in our house is excited to be finished with Kindergarten! He had a great year with a teacher he adored and he especially loved the social aspect of school, though he learned lots, and had fun while doing so, even if he didn't realize it!

 Our fourth graders had a great year too! This is one of the last projects they did in May.  They composted lunchroom leftovers and built a garden bed out of compost.  They wrote about the benefits of composting and gardening, and they had fun nurturing the little plants. I'll claim the two guys wearing shades and the girl standing in front of her daddy! Yup, Dad even helped make this classroom project a reality with his building skills! :)

 Here they are with their teacher showing off their compost bins.  My kids were experts since we've been doing this stuff at home for a couple of years now! heehee!

When it rains, it pours.....

We got to be with family recently for a reunion w/ Darren's side.   See Mark and Beckee's blog for pics of our actual reunion.  We didn't pull our camera out the entire time we were camping, mostly because it was pouring rain and blowing wind at us for the majority of the time.  We only got a few other pics at random times.  However, the kids got some great time w/ cousins and it was neat to have the entire family together for awhile. Here are a few shots of the trip:

The other girls their age were gone or getting family pics.

The whole clan above.

Posing with Grandma (or not posing for some)!

Since blogger isn't really my friend, I'll just quickly explain. On our way home, we wanted to divide our trip so we weren't driving all of those hours in one exhausting day. We chose to camp in Zion's National Park. We got a zillion nice landscape shots, many out the window of a moving vehicle.  Above are the few we are posting.  We loved the whole place and wished we had much more than just a late afternoon to explore the whole park, but we were on a tight schedule. The tunnel carved through the mountain was made in the '30s and is more than a mile long and they even carved out windows (see above). Our kids also enjoyed our campsite with friendly horses right over the fence!

Family vacations are memorable, but also take sooo much energy!  We came home and soon discovered a broken A/C, broken washer and broken van rack and pinion.  All three were major repairs that took us quite by surprise.  When it rains, often we are poured on many blessings, but there are often big trials at the same time.  We are grateful that this was a trial we were able to weather without too many setbacks (the purpose of a rainy day fund at work).