Goodbye Summer...Hello School!

Summer time, usually by the time August rolls around I am ready for you to be over and for school to start, that was not the case this year. Even though we had a week longer than last year, this summer seemed short and I felt that we were spending every moment squeezing out whatever fun and excitement we could. 

The girls made geeky skirts with Grammy. Laine even sewed her own. 

Modeling the cool Doctor Who skirts! 

Matt and Abby had a swim party at Grandma's and
Grandpa's. Abby had a lot of fun playing with her cousin June! 

Matt really wanted to go to Story time with Ducks, but when it was
his turn he wasn't quite sure about what was happening. 

He warmed up on the second try. 

I asked the kids what we hadn't gotten to this summer that they
really wanted to do. Tie dye was the response. I haven't tie dyed since
I was a teenager but we bought some dye and white shirts then called
the neighbors and had a tie dye party. 

I love our neighbors and how much fun we have with one another. It is great
to be able to have such great friends. 

Abby shows off her stair climbing and super cute
tie dye. 

After a Tuesday full of dentist appointments, haircuts, and errands it was time to head off for another school year. I was not ready this year, I usually am ready to send them back at the end of the summer but we had a really good summer and I hated to let it or the kids go. But off they went on new adventures, at least I got to hold on to Matt for one more week and Abby for a few more years.

Laine ready for the first day of 8th grade. We found out later
that her theater teacher was my student teacher 20 years ago.
I'm sure that I am not that old. 

 

Eve ready for the first day of 6th grade- the last year
in elementary school 

James, finally finding a hair style that he and mom
both agree on, ready for his first day of 4th grade. 

My elementary school buddies. It was fun watching them play games
waiting for the bus that first day of school 

One more school send off next week and we will be off to the races! Goodbye summer, I just hope the start of school brings cooler temperatures and peach desserts!

End of school craziness!

The first day of summer vacation seems like the perfect day to pay tribute to the crazy month of May and it's end of school extravaganzas. With four kids in school now our schedule was crazy but we had fun honoring our kids and celebrating their accomplishments. 

First off was Laine, she was honored at awards night! We were super happy for her and though we have no pictures I do have a picture of her "award- winning" pancakes, turns out the hours we have spent watching the Food Network as a family has taught her a few things.

I was lucky enough to get to attend Matt's first field trip! We took a visit to Wheeler Farm where Matt and his friends enjoyed the morning running around feeding ducks, checking out the animals and taking a hay ride! 

Eve participated in a school play where she stole the show as the funniest girl on stage. She just blossomed and came out of her shell, even the kids in James' class thought she was the best part. S

Matt decided that he was ready to graduate from preschool, I'm not sure if I was ready for that one though. He had a part where he spoke about the pledge then got to hold the flag while they said the pledge- he was super excited about that. 

James had an afternoon of singing patriotic songs....

...he was not happy that he had to sing or that grandmas and mom were there to support him. 

One highlight of our last week is that I won free meals at our favorite burger joint for a week.  

Everyone got a good burger and time with mom we had a lot of fun celebrating their accomplishments and planning what we were going to do with our summer vacation!

Matt's preschool adventure!

For about two years now Matt has been asking to go to school, each year he has watched as his siblings went to school and he would just wish he could go with them:

Well that little super hero has grown up now and it was time to send him off to school.  This kid was excited. So excited we made a paper chain to count down the days when the older kids went back to school ten days before he did. He is in a class with two of his friends and he is finding things to talk about like: Paw Patrol, super heroes, cooking shows, and Dragon Ball Z. All topics very important to this four year old. 

One big change was that he decided that he was no longer Matty but Matt. It breaks my heart a little and there are times that I keep forgetting the name change, but he is quick to correct when I mess it up. 

So off he goes on a lifetime of adventure! He's just glad there are snacks. 

Back to school

Since I was a kid I have thrived on routine. We attribute this to the flip chart schedule my mom put me on as a small child (it was awesome and epic and I believe still up in the her attic). Because of this love of routine I have always enjoyed the start of school, I am also a big fan of office supplies and shopping for office supplies. This is one of my favorite times of year and the kids seemed excited about it too. 

This year we had a big change in the back to school routine, we added in another school. For the past two years it has been one drop off and pick up. But we have added a seventh grader this year....

Laine started at Olympus Junior High this year. She is getting big fast, she was in first grade when Christian and I got married. She was nervous about starting junior high but also excited. She made a few friends in her first couple of days and was super excited that one of her new friends was also named Laine, something that she has never encountered before. 

Eve was so excited to start fifth grade that she was bouncing while I took her picture, it was hard to capture a good one. 

Eve has one of the best teachers ever hence her excitement. There are already plans for a spook alley, a climb up Mt. Timpanogos, and a pirate store. Eve was also excited that this year she can participate in FPS with her friends.  

James was starting third grade this year and while school shopping the only shirt he liked was this one...

He wore a Star Wars shirt last year too, so it must be a theme. James is still our quiet shy boy.  But he has a great memory and loves anything to do with science. He is so cute and was excited to start a new year. 

These two had quite an adventure the first day of school. They are bus riders and have been riding the same route for the past three years and were pretty good at it. Well the bus arrived after school and I watched kids pile off, unfortunately they were not my kids.  I went over to talk to the bus driver and sure enough the kids weren't on there. It being the first day of school the bus driver didn't remember them at all and at most of the stops she had been on the phone with district transportation trying to help a girl who had gotten on her bus accidentally.  One of my kids' school mates, who was on the bus, said he remembered seeing them that morning but not in the afternoon. By now I was freaking out a little (okay, a lot). The bus driver got the school on the phone and people started to look for them up there, then we were on the phone with transportation calling the other bus drivers for Morningside trying to see if they had any extra kids or if they remembered mine getting off the bus.While they were doing that I was on the phone with Christian, who was home with the three other kids, and my in-laws just in case the kids had missed the bus and decided to walk to their house.  After thirty minutes of no luck the district decided to involve their officers. While I waited for their call I started working the bus route backwards, as I was pulling into Olympus Junior High the officers called and started asking questions, I began answering them and then I saw two figures sitting on the curb. Sure enough it was my two kids had gotten off at the wrong stop and just sat waiting. Later when we asked them why they got off I heard, "because I thought it was Monday." (they used to get off at that stop on Mondays last year when taking kung fu) and "I got off because James got off".

So after several phone calls to the parties out searching for the kids, and to the secretary at the elementary school to let them know it was all okay, we laughed a bit and tried to let the kids know that in a few days they would see this as an adventure and have a great story to tell their kids one day about the first day of fifth and third grade.

Here's to hoping that the rest of the school year is less eventful!!!

And we're back

So summer seemed to come and go with little acknowledgement from our Bradley Family blog. We did participate in summer, there were swimming lessons, art lessons, cooking lessons, family reunions, travel, and movies. It was a pretty busy summer needless to say and there wasn't much time for chronicling the fun...I hardly got any pictures.

But with the start of school came the return of sanity and order and we are all loving it. 

We did snap back to school pictures though and the kids were all super cute, even if James had to wear his Sunday shoes, since he left the others out and the dog got to them...ah the things you find out at 7:30 Monday morning. 

Eve is our lovely 4th grader this year- go Utah History!!!!! I wonder if we have to memorize the counties and the county seats again? 

James is our second grader and right now everything is addition, subtraction, and eventually multiplication --gotta love those flash cards. 

Laine is the big sixth grader, big man on campus. She has finally decided that she no longer wants to grow up and stay in elementary school forever, I am okay with this. 

So there are my three back to schoolers off for 180 days of exciting learning. I just hope that we get our science fair projects done on time this year...but I'm not holding my breath. 

End of school chaos

End of the school year for some reason I will never understand we cram two or three performances per child during the month of May. This is all well and good if you have one child but when you have three children in elementary school you are going back and forth to the school and watching many many performances. 

We started this end of the year run with interpretive dancing. I would like to say that I am all for arts in the schools, I think that they are great but I have never gotten interpretive dance and I don't think I will ever will. We did three dances in two days, all at different times.  Laine's dance this year was about magnets and electrons. 

Eve's class did a dance about The Secret Garden, I was impressed that they crafted the dance before they had finished the book.

 James' class did a dance about the water cycle and every time I took picture of him he seemed to notice the camera and would wipe the smile off of his face. He also walked around like a duck (?) maybe for half the show. Wasn't sure what that was about.

 The day after the dances we got to go to James' first grade program. They wrote and performed an opera called 'The Flowers and the Hungry Snakes.' James was a snake and he loved it! It was a cute little program complete with subtitles.

 A few weeks later we went to see Laine in her American Revolution production. She was one of the students and so proud that she got to be on stage the whole time. She was fabulous though.

A few days after that Laine had he first band concert. It was tough to get a picture of her with the music stand in the way, but they did pretty well. 

I think that wraps up our whirlwind end of school programs. I have heard rumor that there is one more program but it hasn't been confirmed yet...we shall see. And maybe next year I will hope that they spread these things out a little more. Maybe through one of them in March or January. 

Science Fair Fun

So January in our house tends to be science fair month. Science fair is okay but man trying to help getting three projects done is hard. It also doesn't help when you have deadlines being moved and kids who forget that it is due until the day before. Yeah fun times. 

This year James decided to do work with electro-magnets. I let Christian take the lead on this one (as well as on all others) seeing as he knows a lot more about electro magnets than I do. James was trying to see how powerful he could make the magnets and did that by using extra batteries and extra coils of wire wrapped around a nail. He would then see how many paper clips he could lift with his new magnetized nail. 

 James had a ton of fun and even though he only gave us two days notice to get this project done.

Laine on the other hand was prepared for this project. She started a couple weeks before, she was also the one who we had a clear due date on.  Laine decided to see how long fruit could power a clock, much like a potato clock.

 Laine tried oranges, pears, apples, onions, peppers, bananas, and several other items I can't quite remember to see what powered the clock the longest and with the strongest current.

To her surprise the apple and not the orange was the winner.

Finally we come to Eve, we thought Eve's project was the last one due and were making plans to test some of her neighborhood friends about the power of taste. Eve's plan was to blindfold people have them smell something, like peppermint, then eat vanilla ice cream. She wanted to see if they could identify what flavor of ice cream they were eating.

Unfortunately about ten days before the due date while we were getting the family ready for bed Eve came in and said, "I have a problem." We asked what it was and then the tears started, through the tears we found out that her science project was due the next day and she just found out today.

Seeing that the whole family knew what her project was supposed to be thus eliminating them as viable test subjects. As it was after eight we had to come up with something new and exciting. Again Christian stepped in to rescue a project. He came up with the idea to use some different foods and blindfold Laine and James. At first they would be both blindfolded and plug their noses and try to identify the food they were eating. After the did this once they then unplugged their noses and tried the foods again, being able to smell the foods this time and taste them.

 Here experiment seemed to be a success. Both kids were able to identify more foods correctly after they had smelled them. And Eve was only up till 10:30 or so finishing her project board.

'The next morning Christian thought he would be nice and drive the kids to school rather than take them to the bus stop. While driving Eve's voice comes from the back of the car, "Oh, um this paper here says that I just had to tell them how I was going to do my experiment." Yup, fun times.

So that was our science fair adventure. I am glad it is done, we have our pretty green participant ribbons displayed now and most the project boards have found their way to the recycling bin, so until next January I bid science fair adieu.

Back to school

It has been a week and I keep putting this off but it is time to finally tackle the great BACK TO SCHOOL POST!!! 

I love having my kids at home but I also love the structure that school provides to all our lives. I think that is why I loved school so much as a kid and why I became a teacher. I am also a huge fan of school supplies so I chalk my love of back to school to that as well. Anyway the big day came and the kids were ready for it, mom was kind of ready for it, and Matty wasn't ready for it at all. But we dressed in new clothes, I made bread for lunches, and we were on our way. 

I know that there are people out there that do these awesome back to school pictures with props, chalk drawings, and a host of other cute ideas-I don't. I wish I thought of those things but we just take the picture by the front door.  So without further ado I present:

Miss Eve the super cute third grader

James- the over excited first grader

 And Laine- the collected cool fifth grader

These guys take good care of each other and love being together- most of the time that is.

There they go off to the car to catch the bus

Oh wait, here is one more monkey deciding it is his turn for school. He informs us he attends Disney Junior school- not quite sure what that means but we just roll with it here.

Happy back to school everyone!