little artist

Gracie's watercolor paintings-

LOVE.

Summer goals:

It's so hard to stay on a schedule in the summer!!  We all do better w/a little structure around here, so I'm doing half-days of homeschool with the girls.  Kate is really wanting to come home for school next year, so we are prayerfully considering that.  I think it would be fine, but honestly, I'm nervous about her math---she's really good at math, and I don't want to mess that up!--She clearly got this math ability from Scott...not me.  Homeschooling moms---if you have advice here, I'd appreciate it!  She is working through Teaching Textbooks 7 right now, but I am also looking at SOS-6th gr. math, Saxon 7/6 or MathUsee.  They all seem okay.  TT is a little easy---but we really like it.  :)

When the girls woke up this morning---I showed them this awesome post on one of my favorite blogs:  http://www.71toes.com/2012/06/summer-goals-2012with-plan.html
and then they sat down and made their own goals for the summer....

Tonight we bought Angel a new dog bed---(the dogs had been sharing one)--Angel was so excited she couldn't wait for us to get it out of the bag-

Gracie pics...

Love this pic of Gracie-

More trampoline pics-  Blogger has made it much easier and less time consuming to attach pics to a post---yay!--that's why all the pics lately.  :)

Wonderful day...

Wow--I had a great day.  Feeling very blessed.  I was meeting my friend Rachel this morning at 9am in the parking lot near the tide pools----but what I didn't know was that she invited more of our friends for a little surprise b-day party for me.  It was a perfect morning.  Here are some pics:

an eel!!!

Here is Gracie feeding the eel!, --kind-of hard to see in the video:

Love these ladies.

This makes my heart smile!!  Gracie is in heaven here with her friends!

Can you see the island in the distance?  It's Rota.

Then tonight the girls surprised me with this wonderful cake.  My neighbor Teejae made it yesterday, and the girls had a blast decorating it....and totally surprising me.  :)

our favorite playground....

Today was the first day that Gracie let little hermit crabs crawl on her little hands.  :)

Oh man, I LOVE this place.  Can you tell?  It's only a 10 min. drive from our house to here.  Gracie requests to go here by saying, "Mama, can we go swim with the fishies?"

I like this pic of Kate...she was trying to cover her face so I  couldn't take the pic.  Silly girl.

summer days...

Today the girls went to the dentist---no cavities, yay!!  The only bad news is that Ella is going to make some orthodontist very rich in the near future.....however, the dentist said that we might be able to wait on ortho work till Cleveland, so that's good.  We saw these roosters when we got near the dentist office---a very common site in Guam-

On the way to the youth center---Ella can go there now too since she's NINE!!  YAY!

And then later they had a dry-land workout for swim practice-

I had planned on homeschooling just a bit over the summer, but we've been so busy---I've totally put that aside for the moment.....BUT next Monday, we'll get back into the swing of slightly more scheduled days.  The girls will have Math (Teaching Textbooks), Japanese (Rosetta Stone), Achieve 3000, and they will have to read daily for at least an hour.  If they complete their work and morning chores, they can go to the Youth Center at noon....or we will go to the beach or the pool.  :)  That's the plan anyways.  We've been in the water a LOT lately---and Gracie is turning into a little fish.

On a different note, I have switched to treadmill running for now....primarily because of the REAL ANGRY BIRDS on base that dive bomb you.  They are terrible right now.  I think this video was taken here on base recently---a lot of my Guam friends have posted it....these birds are NO JOKE.  They make me mad.  One day recently, I had 3 coming at me.

Pics-

Okay, I've got a million things to do---but updating the blog sounds like more fun.  Ella had a really great birthday.  We went to the Hyatt with some good friends, and then came home to eat some cake.  :)  Here are some pics:

Thanks Dad B!

Thanks Aunt Lacy!

Thanks Uncle Toby!



Kate took a few good pics from the tide pools the other day.

And a few more pics from the past couple of days-

We saw a big lizard coming home from the beach.

This is zoomed in. He was HUGE!!!  I think I found it on the net:
http://www.squidoo.com/varanus_indicus

Kate LOVES drawing with chalk...I love it.

This was cool---check out Tori's water loop hair trick.  :)