Pine Wood Derby

I've been meaning to post these photos for a while and finally found some time to do it. Jaxon had his first pinewood derby this month. When I found out that it was time for another pinewood derby, I was NOT excited. We have had such bad luck with this in the past and I want the scouts to stop doing it. But I knew how excited Jaxon was to build his car so I told myself to get over it and hope for the best!

Jaxon immediately knew that he wanted to build a Ute car. He made the design and helped Dale cut out the car. He sanded the car himself and painted most of it by himself. He needed a little help painting the "U". We bought a special kit at Roberts to help spiffy up the wheels in hopes that our car would do better than Jadon's did in years past.

The Pinewood Derby is always a very well attended event. All the kids, scouts and parents come to cheer their little scout and his car on. We were very nervous as Jaxon placed his car on the track for his first race. To our surprise, he won the first race! He continued to race against all the other boys and ended up tieing for first place because they were using two brackets. The 2 boys that tied raced against each other twice, and Jaxon's beat him both times! He actually took first place for the whole race! I don't know why I'm so surprised. Jaxon has that kind of luck.

It was fun to see him win. He was very excited to get his first place ribbon!

When I was posting these pictures, I realized that I didn't take a good picture of the car. I will do that and post it at a later date. Good job Jaxon!

Photo tag

My cousin, Amelia, tagged me. Sorry it took so long to post!

This is a picture of my son, Jake, on his first day of Kindergarten. This was the first year that our school let the parents come to the first 30 minutes of class. It was so nice to make sure he was all settled before I left him. Look how sweet he is putting his little name tag on.

Rules:
1. Open your first photo folder
2. Scroll to the 10th photo
3. Post the photo and the story behind it
4. Tag 5 or more people

I tag: Sharalee, Laura, Holly, Amy and Michelle

Junior Achievement City

Yesterday I had the oppurtunity to be a volunteer at a place called Junior Achievement City. It is located at Discovery Gateway and Kierra's grade went on a field trip there. Basically, they have built a little town on the top floor of Discovery Gateway. They have banks, newspaper and tv stations, restaurants, retail and wholesale stores and government offices. All of the students have been learning about these establishments in class for the last 4 weeks. They have also been learning about opening and maintaining a checking account.

So the kids had to apply for their jobs and every establishment had about 4-8 employees. They had to go to the bank and get a loan for their business, make profits throughout the day, keep track of expenses and get their loan paid off by the end of the day. They got breaks to eat lunch at the little restaurant and got to go to the retail stores to spend the money they earned with their paychecks. They actually got to buy things like umbrellas, flashlights, candy, little toys etc...

Kierra's job was being the CEO of JA TV, the local tv studio. She told me her job was easy. All she had to do was enter checks and print checks and sign everything. That was cute. I worked at Merit Medical. It was so interesting to see the kids get frustrated when things weren't going as they should. They all realized how hard it can be to have a job. Of coarse, everyone's favorite thing to do was write checks and buy things.

I think this is a wonderful place for kids to go and learn a little bit about the real world. It was the fastest 5 hours I've ever spent. It was so crazy to have to get so much done in too little time. It made me glad that I'm not in the work force anymore but grateful that our kids are learning what it's like, especially how to manage their money!

Stuffed animal lover

Kierra LOVES stuffed animals. I'm not sure how many she has but it is well over 100. She has two rubbermaid tubs full and when I say full it means animals falling out all 4 sides and no lid could possibly fit on the container. She has an animal holder hanging from her ceiling sometimes full of animals and sometimes art supplies. The favorite animal or animals of the week are usually sitting on her bed. More than once, I have gone into her room at night to check on her and Katie and find her like this. She gets them all piled up after Katie falls asleep. I don't know how anyone can sleep like that, but she loves it!

Double Doctor Visit

Today Dale and I took Kyson and Katie to the doctor. What fun that was! For some reason, I didn't take Katie into the doctor for her 1 year shots. I just kept forgetting to make an appt. and now that she's 15 months old, I decided to finally catch her up on her immunations. I decided to take Kyson in for his Kindergarten check-up at the same time. Everything went well, until the shots. Katie and Kyson are both very healthy and Kyson did great on all the kindergarten testing. Since I was such a bad mom and didn't take Katie to the doctor at one year, she had to have 6 shots. Ouch! Dale held her arms down and the nurse held her legs down while she gave her the shots. I got to watch her scream while all the needles went into her legs. It was so sad! It never gets easier to watch my kids get shots. So after all that, Kyson WAS NOT going to get his shots! We told him he had to pull his pants down so she could put the shots in his legs. He immediately bent over so that we couldn't get to his pants. Dale had to force him to take his pants down. At this time, we found out that Kyson didn't wear any underwear so he was embarassed to pull his pants down. We finally got the pants down and Kyson on the table. I was holding Katie, who was still crying, so I didn't watch this time. He cried when she poked him the first time and cried harder with each shot. So now we have my two sweet little babies, and me, crying. I'm so glad that they forget that we put them through this. After this wonderful experience, we took them out to Burger King and had a great lunch together. Oh, the joys of being a parent!

Brrrrrrrr!

We went to our first baseball practices tonight. All three boys had a practice tonight. Luckily they started at 5:00, 5:30 and 5:45. Talk about luck! Anyway, Katie was so excited because she LOVES to be outside. It was super cold so I got her bundled up really good. So good, she could hardly walk. She kept falling down. She didn't care though. She was just happy to be playing outside. Anytime she walked past somebody, she would say "Hi" with a big smile on her face. I hope she keeps her enthusiasm the whole season!

Let the games begin!

I can't believe that it is already baseball season again! Try outs were last Saturday and Jadon, Jaxon and Jake are all playing this year. Kyson is old enough to play but really really didn't want to. So I decided to make my life just a little easier by only having 3 boys play baseball instead of 4. Practices start this week and we were lucky enough to get them all on different nights. That means going to practice every night. At least I don't have to run them all to different parks on the same night, hope they are all on time, haven't forgotten any of their gear and their end times are staggered so I can get them all picked up without them waiting alone at the park. It can be kind of stressful when we have either a practice, a game, or both every night of the week but the kids love it so it's worth it! I love it also because I love to watch my boys play ball!