All-state/Whitworth Trip

Over Valentine’s Day weekend we found ourselves divided…Ed, Sarah, Becca, & I headed east to Spokane and Bethany & Elise stayed behind in Lynden to go to school and partake in regular life. Becca had auditioned and been chosen for the all-state youth choir and we decided that since her practice & concert were in Spokane, the very city where Whitworth University is located, Sarah should join us and we should have a Whitworth tour. We left on Thursday afternoon and had a great drive 6 hours east.

Traveling with just four of us was pretty strange, but there was lots more room for our stuff!

On Friday we toured Whitworth…and somehow managed to not take too many pictures of the actual campus. So I borrowed one from their website.

That’s the HUB – their student union building. We had a great visit at Whitworth – good admissions talk, awesome meeting with the XC/track coach, great tour, fun class, lots of good information. Sarah spent the afternoon/evening/night with a XC/track runner and everything just went really well. Whitworth is now one of the top possible colleges on her list.

Becca was a trooper during the college visit as the tag-along, but she was richly rewarded.

Oh! I did take this picture on campus of their funny sculpture…

Calvin has “the cheese”

so Ed dubbed the sculpture at Whitworth “Squeezy Cheese.” I don’t know why, but that made me laugh. A lot.

Friday night I drove an hour west to meet up with my sweet friend who lives near there for dinner. So, so, so good for the soul.

The next morning we dropped Becca off for her rehearsals,

got some coffee (though I must admit…we think Dutch Bros. is a big hype…not nearly as good as it was ‘supposed’ to be), picked Sarah up from campus, and then headed to Riverfront Park.

Big strong Ed holding up the bridge.

We spotted a wedding happening on the far side of the river!

Unbeknownst to us at the time, we were very close to where Becca’s performance was to be that evening, and where all the music teachers were having workshops during the day. While we were at this park, this group of guys in suits came along, singing their school fight song, and climbed up the wagon and all slid down again. It was pretty funny. It wasn’t until we were at the concert and talking to our music teachers that we figured out they were part of the music teacher workshops…and I didn’t even clue in about the close proximity until after the concert when we walked to the van and walked right by the wagon!

After the park, we had to get our headlight fixed in the van, and when we picked it up again, the mechanic had left a rose on the windshield, because it was Valentine’s Day!

It was a wonderful concert and Becca really had a great time singing and meeting new girls!

Some of the kids from our middle school who also attended All-state.

It’s not at all hard to believe that these are the creative kids…

The concert wasn’t over until after 7:00, which is too late to drive 6 hours back home, over the mountain pass, so we got some dinner and the girls swam in the pool and we drove home the next morning. It was a great trip!

A Weekend to Play

Immediately following the baby shower, and I do mean immediately, I headed over to the middle school to pick up Becca and some little white lab rats for a weekend playdate.

Fifth graders do experiments on these little critters and the students can take turns taking them home for the weekend. When Sarah & Bethany were in 5th grade, Ed talked me into saying yes, somehow or another, so there wasn’t much chance I could say no this time around. I did, however, specify which weekend the rats would come. It was to be the weekend that Ed was single-parenting and I was jet-setting to CA for a grown-up girls weekend/auntie visit.

I managed to get the rats home and snap that picture. Then the next morning I was off bright & early for my quick flight to southern CA! First stop, my nephew’s basketball game!

Oh how I loved watching him play and being part of “regular life.” The second picture is after the game and my brother, their fantastic coach, is giving them some pointers and discussing their next practice. Nephew #2 is standing in the foreground listening in.

Then it was off to my brother & SIL’s house for some football and other fun games. Apparently I throw like a girl, but I improved with some good instruction.

No fun night is complete without some Ticket to Ride! I think my nephew has his game face on…

And then my brother graciously loaned me his truck and I drove an hour to Pasadena, to a hotel, to spend the night and the next day with this girl for her 40th birthday…

She’s my shopping superior as you can see (& there aren’t too many of those that I actually know personally) and we, along with two friends who drove over from Arizona, headed to the Rose Bowl Flea Market, which was just as cool in real life as it was to read about!

It was pretty incredible – booth after booth of awesome old junk, dumb old junk, awesome new stuff, and dumb new stuff. We found a few treasures…I bought another orange crate label from Redlands, which I’m excited to add to my collection, and an old tin laundry room sign with a Dutch woman on it, some milk glass, & some pretty Pyrex. Tam bought mostly frames to use for her business, and the other girls bought some windows and mugs and other treasures. While we didn’t have any major scores, we had some super fun purchases and a great time!

Sometimes the prices on things amazed me…

And most of the time I felt like I was on an episode of American Pickers and I might just bump into Mike & Frank at any moment!

After our day of shopping, we did some more shopping and walking in downtown Pasadena,

and ate at a place I think would be popular in Bellingham…

Happy birthday, my sweet friend!

I stole that picture from Tam’s blog, because I realized I didn’t have any of the four of us! Loved spending time with you three!

Then it was back to my brother’s for a short evening and morning with the niece & nephews before my flight back home again. Somehow I managed no pictures of my SIL this time. Next time, Susanne!

On the way to bring the boys to school in the morning, we drove down a familiar street and I said, “Let’s see if we can find Grandma & Grandpa DeWitt’s house!” Amazingly, we did, even tho it had been years since I had been there, and had only been there a handful of times, and Susanne had never been there, and it had been painted. When I texted the picture to Ed, he knew it was familiar and it didn’t take him long to figure it out. Such sweet memories there for him.

It was a great weekend away and when I came home, the rats had gone back to school!

Baby Tink

Elise’s third grade teacher announced just a month before school started that she was expecting their first baby! This was very exciting news and having a teacher who was expecting a baby was really fun for those third graders! As the due date grew closer, a few other moms & I put together a little baby shower from the class. These moms went above & beyond and did an outstanding job!

It was a book-theme baby shower…appropriately held in the school library. When I was pregnant with Sarah, my first graders also gave me a book shower. Each student brought in a children’s book, with an adhesive book plate on the inside saying who had given each book. This was the portion of the baby shower that I was in charge of. I emailed all the moms and handed out book labels and would you believe that with 19 students we did not get a single duplicate book?! Mrs. Tinklenberg looked at each and every book and who it was from and just delighted in it all. So fun.

The other part of the baby book shower I got going was the ABC book the kids made. There are 2 para-pros that work in that classroom each day, so they did the grunt work of getting each child to create a page for each letter of the alphabet. On the back of their page, they predicted if they thought the baby would be a boy or girl and wrote what they love about having Mrs. T as a teacher. It was SUPER sweet!

Then there were some moms in charge of food and decorations. I had sent them links to websites of examples of baby book showers and they just went for it!

Every food item had a coordinating book!

A couple other moms had games. The one Elise is doing here is drawing a picture of Baby Tink, which has nothing whatsoever to do with books, but it was fun anyway. One game had several book character pictures and you had to match them to the proper book title. Another was to write advice to Mrs. T about being a mom and those were written on pretty square pieces of paper and placed in a “pocket” from A Pocket for Corduroy.

Just a little over a week later, baby boy Tink arrived.

He is now almost 8 weeks old and Mrs. T will be returning to the classroom sometime after spring break. The kids have missed her, and she has missed them, but I know she will miss being with her baby every day!

#gohawks

As you know, the Seattle Seahawks played in the Super Bowl for the second time in as many years this past February. We aren’t really “12’s” as they say…we don’t even have cable so we can’t watch football at our house. But, throughout the season Ed (& sometimes Becca or other Ball girls) would watch the games with my dad at my parents’ house. So when the Hawks made it to the Super Bowl, we joined in the craziness.

The Friday before the Super Bowl was Blue Friday at school. Elise doesn’t own a Hawks shirt, so I made her this one with puffy paint. It turned out awesome, and she looked so cute!

Too bad for me the puffy paint all dissolved in the wash!! So now she just has a lime green t-shirt. Oh well, the whole endeavor only cost me about $5, so it was still worth it.

The girls made our favorite sugar cookies and we decorated them in the traditional blue & green and ate delicious “12” cookies for an entire week.

And of course you know how all ended…with the pass that “should have been” a run to win the game…but that is all debatable. I don’t claim to know what should or should not have been done, but I do know that the Hawks fans will be there for their team again in just a few short months. Because that’s just how “12’s” roll.