The boys are off to Iowa

Tyler and Matt took off on leg 1 of their trip to Iowa this afternoon.  They drove from Bismarck to Fargo today & are staying over night with Joel & Heidi ( 3 hours).  Then they'll get up bright and early to head down to Ankeny tomorrow morning (7 hours).  I'm a little bit nervous, but I think Tyler will do a great job of driving.  It helps that they can break the trip up a little bit (thanks Joel & Heidi!).  Hopefully they won't fight in the car and will behave nicely while at Grandma and Don's (ahem...are you listening boys?). 

I Just Won 8 Swag Bucks on www.swagbucks.com

I Just Won 8 Swag Bucks on www.swagbucks.com

If you click the link above you can sign in under my name and I get the referral. :)

Sort of a goofy thing my gymboree board friends have gotten me into.  It's called Swag Bucks, and you can earn them by using their search engine (they tell you how to download it).  You randomly earn swagbucks with your searches....like the one above I searched for CVS memorial day hours, and I got 8 Swag Bucks.  I think I have 560 altogether.  Most people trade them for $5 Amazon gift cards...I think you can get those for 450 or something like that.  It takes a while to build them up, but it's all free...all you have to do is search!

And the Solheim Elem. Spelling Bee champion is......

BEN KINNEY!!!  Ben won the 4th grade Spelling Bee today!  We are soooo excited, I'm so happy something good happened for him :).  He wasn't overly excited about it, or at least didn't really show it.  The principal called and left him a message to say congratulations and that he'd been 'Cougar Caught'....they are the Solheim Cougars and you are 'caught' when you've done something good.  It was unsettling to hear the principal had called...the last (and only) time the principal called, Grace had slapped a boy on the playground.  Thank goodness it was for something good! 

Grace had her Girl Scout ceremony Monday and bridged from a Daisy to a Brownie.  She is so excited to be a Brownie!  They will start up again in the fall.  She got some patches and pins and a certificate, which she taped to her wall :).  Grace and her friend Lizzie....Lizzie's mom is the leader.

The lilacs are in full bloom here!!!  We're about a month behind Iowa :).  We have a huge bush behind our fence to the back, one over our side fence, and a gigantic one across the street.  I can smell them everywhere and it's heaven! 

Grace's soccer pics....it was in the upper 40's, windy, sprinkling and FREEZING the day they took them, as you can tell by the hat :).

Career Day

Today was Career Day at Grace & Ben's school.  Ben really wanted to go as an astronaut, but since we couldn't come up with something fast enough, he ended up going as Meteorologist Richard Kinney :).  He wore church clothes, a tie, and Rich's NWS nametag.  Grace decided to go as a Soccer Player (her friend Carli did too). 

This is Tyler's plaster-relief picture he did in art.  It's the Old Capital in Iowa City....he tried for the Iowa state flag but it was too small to get the eagle on, so now it's the flag of France :).

 

New bedroom furniture

In honor of our 20th anniversary June 2nd, we decided to get some new bedroom furniture.  We've never had an actual new matching set of bedroom furniture in our lives, so with our escrow refund check we bought a new bed, mattress and 2 nightstands.  The matching dresser and mirror will come whenever we get the next escrow refund check :).  I also got a new bedspread and curtains....instead of painting the blue, I decided to work with it.  We're going to move our old bed to Tyler's room so we can actually have a place for visitors that isn't a crappy bar-ridden hide-a-bed.  Grace really wants Tyler's bed in her room, but doesn't that sound like an awful lot of bed moving?  Not sure how that will all work out.

Indian scraper

Joel and the boys found a few pieces of flint and little things, but Matt found this cool scraper thing.  Joel, I hope these pics are ok, my lens doesn't like getting really close to stuff. 

Weekend with the nephews

We got to spend the weekend with our Eli and Noah!  Joel came over, picked up Tyler and Matt for a weekend of arrowhead hunting, and dropped off Eli and Noah to hang out with us for a couple of days!  Saturday we went to Grace's soccer game.  It was a beautiful day, but the fields were really soggy, so we all ended up with wet socks and shoes.  Ben and Noah sat in a chair eating and drinking the whole game, and Eli sat in a chair with a sweatshirt over his head playing his DS :).  After the game, we came home for a quick lunch then headed back out to the zoo.  Grace's Girl Scout troop was planting flowers in their flower garden at the zoo, so we watched them for a little bit then walked around and looked at the animals.  The boys got popcorn and a ginormous cotton candy.  As usual, the prairie dogs were the hit....there is a viewing tunnel you can go in to look at them up close.  We rode the train, then went to the gift shop for a little toy.  Next was dinner at McDonald's and home for watching The Tooth Fairy.  Lots of playing outside too, what great weather!  In the 70's all week here in ND.  Lots of pics ahead!

Eli freaked me out by saying "Look Jennifer, I can stick my head through the fence!"...I almost panicked, but thankfully his head came right back out!  Otherwise the mountain goats would have loved to lick a little face!

A few random tidbits

Dress up day this day was Physical Fitness Day.  Matt came up with another zinger...he took off his headband. 

Lucy found a Binky in the couch cushions and was sucking it like a baby.  So funny!

Tyler made lunch for the two little kids on Mother's Day for me.  This is the material he has to work with:

Ben's project

This was Ben's reaction to me asking him to please re-edit his paper and write in paragraphs like he was supposed to,

Ben had to do a North Dakota project for school, and he decided to make a keelboat scene.  A keelboat is the type of boat that Lewis and Clark rode up the Missouri to North Dakota.  Rich and Ben worked really hard on the diorama!  He also had to write a one page paper on his project, which of course he didn't want to work on -at-all- after his project was done.  So mom comes to the rescue and searches the internet, finding lots of info about keelboats and putting them all in bullet points for him to expand into paragraphs.  He reluctantly went down to the computer to type up his 3 paragraph paper, and came back up with a one page typed paper of bullet points, written word for word like I had done it.  So after some editing I sent him back down to redo it.  It came back up changed about 1%.  I was frustrated, Rich was frustrated, and Ben was frustrated and completely done with the whole thing, so Mom did something she shouldn't have done.  Mom went down and wrote the paper for Ben. 
Ben was actually very proud of his diorama, and was really excited to take it to school.  They each did a little presentation telling about their projects.  Ben brought his score sheet home, and Rich got 40/40 on his project, I got a 40/40 on my paper, and Ben got 15/20 on his presentation (only marked down for not making eye contact....a complete Asperger's thing that really he shouldn't have been marked down for, but whatever.  I'm really worried about how he'll do next year and in jr.high.  I think we'll work toward getting him an IEP or a 504 by next year....it would kill me to see him struggling through school.