Beta Back-to-School Retrospective

Well, since it's the 2nd week of school I guess I should do the 2nd kid's photo retrospective. We got kind of busy last week. :)

I've got more digital baby pictures of Beta since we bought a digital camera right before she was born. So I'll include some early pictures, too!

The early months:
First Day of Mother's Day Out (she would have been about 18 months old here)
Pre-school graduation
Kindergarten
First Grade
Second Grade
Wow! I can't believe how much older she already looks! Doing these posts is going to make me cry.... *sniff*

Alpha Back-to-School Retrospective

Kindergarten
First Grade
Second Grade (or as close as I could get....I looked and looked and could NOT find any pictures from that year. I wonder if I didn't take any? That wouldn't be like me...)
Third Grade (didn't have one of Alpha by herself...oops)

Fourth Grade
Fifth Grade
And now, because I am feeling nostalgic, here are even earlier pictures of her:

Birth
Age 2
Age 3
Age 5

On the First Day of School, my true love gave to me.....

Well, here we are. Another First Day of School done. Ours went smoothly around here. Having been at our current elementary school for 5 years now, and beginning our 6th, we are pretty familiar with how things work. Both girls walked themselves in this morning. Jim even dropped them off, like he usually does. The only noticeable difference between June 10th (last day of school) and August 15th was the girls' backpacks.

I still wonder if I should have walked them in. There really was no point. They don't allow anyone but kindergarten parents to walk their students to the classroom. Everyone else has to go to the cafeteria for the "Rise & Shine" Assembly. Then, they walk together down the hallway to their class. So it's not like I could have taken any cool pictures of them at their desks or with their new teachers or anything like that. But it won't be long before they don't want to be SEEN with me. So maybe I should have taken advantage of one more year.....ah well. What's done is done. C'est la vie!

So here are the pictures of them from this morning:

Here is what kept me busy the rest of the day:

Cardboard Boat Races

This past weekend, I did something I've never done before. The fam and I attended the cardboard boat races in Heber Springs!

It all started when I got a call at 10:00 pm on July 2. We were sitting in the parking lot of the Northwest Arkansas Mall. The fireworks had just finished and we were waiting to leave. My brother starts telling me about cardboard boat races, math, formulas, and telling me he'll email me this thing. I'm like, what? My brother has a history of not really being a "math person" so I was a bit confused at first. I won't go into details here, but there are 2 formulas used to calculate how much the cardboard boat will sink when it's placed in the water with people in it. He wanted me to do the calculations for him. So I did.

And I had great fun! I made a spreadsheet and everything. I'm sure he thinks I'm even weirder than he thought. The truth is, I love doing stuff like that! Excel is my program for sure.

After putting in all that work, I told him he'd better not back out and that we were coming to watch. He said ok. So here are the pictures from that day. It was so much fun!

This is just a shot of the road we walked in on. It was a beautiful day. There were TONS of people there.

Here is my brother's cardboard boat:

It's the Delorean from Back to the Future. The races had an 80's theme this year.
The back of the boat. Note the license plate. :) They also put dry ice down the pipe when the race started so that it looked like smoke was coming out of it!


Here is his friend, Casey, dressed up as Doc.
He also had another friend, Drew, help him. I don't have any pictures of him, which is unfortunate. He was a real sweetheart.

Here is Matt. No pictures, please!


I got a few pictures of some of the other boats, too. This was from some Wal-Mart employees.

This was one of the other TV stations boats.

This was one of the other TV stations boats. (I have no idea which was which so I'm not labeling them.)
This one was just funny.
(it says "dead weight" on the side!)

The parenting highlight of the day came when I turned around and saw what was keeping J4 so quiet.
AACCKK! So THIS is what it's like having a boy. My girls never would have done that. Nor would we have let them. But he was quiet and I figured, if you can't play in the dirt when you're a 1 year old boy, then when CAN you play in the dirt? Besides, after the races, we washed him off in the lake. He got a bath later at home.

FINALLY, after waiting until the very last heat, they were allowed to race. Look at them go!
I'm sorry to say they didn't win anything. But it was great fun! My mother told me that Matt said it was the most fun he'd had in a long time. He plans to do it next year. We plan to be there!