End of School Frenzy

Between Girl Scout meetings, Day Camp training, school activities, and softball we have hardly had time to breath. Last Wednesday, we had a round robin pre-summer season softball tournament. This was my first outing as "the manager". [Yes, I volunteered for yet another lead position. Hopefully, it will just be for the summer.] I slid into third during the 3rd game and got a nasty abrasion on my leg. It's still a little oozy, but it's getting better every day. One of these days I will figure out that I am too old to be doing that. On the bright side, I was safe and scored later. Unfortunately, we lost the game. In the end, we won 3 out of 4. It was good enough for 2nd place, but not enough to win the $50 prize.

One of the highlights had to be taking the troop to see High School Musical on Ice. We went opening night so it wasn't too packed. We had good seats and I think everyone enjoyed the show. It's interesting how they condensed the story from both High School Musical and High School Musical 2 into an hour and a half show. The movement of the props and the skating were great.

The last session of day camp training was Saturday. I took the opportunity to try my hand at making a pizza box solar oven and used it to make s'mores. It worked okay, but would have been better if the sun had been fully shining while cooking. It was plenty hot, just partly cloudy. We are going to give it a try during to day camp and see how it goes. So far, it looks like we will have plenty of sun. The theme this year is "Science Matters at Camp Howdy" so you might imagine that I am very excited about the programs and activities.

The summer softball season started last night with a double header. We won both 13-7 and 30-2. We hit the ball very well all night. I hope that keeps up all season! Did I mention that our soccer season will start on Sunday? We have some new players on the team so it should be interesting.

Tomorrow is the last day of school and Nicole's 4th grade graduation. It's hard to believe that she is leaving elementary school. Sounds so cliché, but it seems like just yesterday she was starting kindergarten. Next year, she will go to Oakwood and she is so excited. Apparently, there are a number of extracurricular activities that she is interested in trying. She is already talking about the chess club, the Scrabble club and the choir. I'm glad I have the summer to get ready for all that! Ryan's class is having a picnic and games for the last day of school. I think he is ready for the break. Did I tell you he lost another tooth? He is now missing all four top front teeth. He is having a heck of time eating apples and corn!

Tela's Graduation!

We made a whirlwind trip to Oklahoma this weekend to see Tela graduate from high school. We didn't leave town until Friday after the kids got out of school so you can imagine it was a long 6 hour drive, which included 4 trips to Wal-Marts. You may ask, "Why 4?" Well, let me tell you. . . first, we stopped at the Bryan Supercenter Wal-Mart with the objective of buying a gift card to pay for gas (don't we all need that extra 3¢ off at the pump) and filling up the tank. Getting the gift card was no problem, but when we approached the gas pumps, it was packed AND there was a gas truck delivering gas. I had heard that it is not a good idea to put gas in your car while the truck is there filling the underground tanks so we passed on the fill up. No problem, we had enough gas to make it to Waco. The kids fell asleep so it was smooth sailing to Waco. That brings us to stop #2 - food, fuel and anti-itch medicine. We stopped at Wendy's to eat because the kids were "starving", then hopped across the street to the Supercenter Wal-Mart. I ran in to get some itch medicines for Terry and me as we were still battling poison ivy rashes while Terry filled our gas tank. All-in-all it was a smooth stop, just a little long, but on the bright side our bellies were full, our tank was full and we had stopped itching for the time being. A movie later, Nicole starts complaining about her tooth hurting. This was a loose tooth that the dentist said not to pull it yet (although that was a couple of months ago). Anyway, that leads to stops #3 and #4. We found yet another Wal-Mart where we picked up some toothache medicine and some junior strength Tylenol. We also found a few snacks which we didn't buy enough of the first time in the store so we had to go back into the same Wal-Mart a second time. Who knew that Slim Jims were so popular? We finally made it to my sister's house around midnight.

Tela's graduation was at 10 am on Saturday morning. Who has a graduation at 10 am anyway? Not to mention that she still has a week of school left to attend. Since I don't make the rules for Edmond schools, we just had to roll with it. Fortunately, Tela advised us to arrive at the Cox Center (in downtown OKC) by 9 am in order to get decent seats. Boy, traffic horrid around the convention center. She has over 400 kids in her class so you can imagine the number of cars trying to park in the parking garage. There were people completely ignoring the stop lights, while others would just cut in front of you because they were obviously in a bigger hurry than you were in. After fighting the traffic and making our way into the Cox Center, we found some decent seats. Knowing that we had to entertain 4 kids age ranged from 10-years down to 14-months for an hour before the graduation would start, we had a plan. We grabbed breakfast on the way and ate it while we waited. Worked out pretty well; and I must say, the kids were fabulous throughout the entire ceremony. The ceremony was nice. Not too much fluff and took right at two hours. Our second good plan of the day was to send Donnie and Papa home with all the kids right after Tela crossed the stage. They had zero trouble with crowds or traffic. And afterwards, when it was time for the rest of us to navigate through the crowd of people to find Tela, we did not have any rugrats slowing us down. . . I mean. . . darling angels to protect from the masses. It took wading through the entire pool of people before we finally found her. I really hope it didn't embarrass her too much that we yelled her name (there was only one Tela) and asked random new graduates if they had seen her. Of course, I would expect her to personally know all 400+ of her classmates, wouldn't you?

Tela hadn't taken her senior pictures yet, so we went out and took some nice ones with my camera. Can I just say, I love my Kodak? We took lots of shots. When it's digital there is really no limit (except the memory on your SD card). We had some of the pictures printed at Walgreen's and they turned out great. Walgreen's actually has picture packages that you can buy that are really affordable. Here are a few of my faves from this weekend.





The rest of the weekend flew by with fixing meals and playing with kids. Tela opened her graduation gifts. She seemed to like all she received. We ended up heading home a bit early on Sunday. We needed to get home before urgent care closed so Terry could see a doctor for the poison ivy which is now covering about 50% of his body. Hopefully, with the meds he is taking, he can finally shake the rash and stop itching.

May 12, 2008

Where does the time go?? I haven't posted for two weeks! So you may ask, what has been going on? Let's see if I can summarize.

Our end of season softball tournament was on April 30th. Short Bus had a good showing. We had a bye in the 1st round, then, beat Those Guys in the 2nd round. We won our 3rd round game and went to the finals. We played The Other Team, a team we play twice in the regular season. Sadly, we lost 4-3 in a hard fought game. Playing 3 games in one night was tiring, but boy, was it fun. We are going to play a round robin warm up tournament next week and the summer season will start the next week. Stephanie and I are managing the team this time so that should prove to be an interesting experience.

We also finished up the spring soccer season last weekend. The last game was sweet as we played K2 United. Just a little background, this team sent some distasteful emails regarding our team (Hit and Miss) a week or so before the game. I mean come on, we are playing Division V soccer. . . no contact. . . out there to have fun. If you want to be that competitive move up to Division IV. Anyway, it was too bad for them, as the emails reached the president of the league (his wife plays on our team). Let's just say there was some highly apologetic words flowing from them soon after that. So we didn't really know what to expect when it came to game time. All in all, it was a clean game and the beauty of it was we won 4-3. . . sweet justice reigned.

Ryan's soccer team is doing really well. We have had some issues with the referees and the league, but the boys are doing great. They are undefeated for the spring and have one game left. They are starting to pass to each other and really picking up on their footwork. Go Green Dragons!

Nicole and Girl Scouts have kept me busy. We have had so many events going on, it's hard to keep up. We had our service unit leader banquet. That was nice. I received a "Key Person" award. I also had the opportunity to announce the "Thank you! Thank You!" awards. That was an unexpected surprise that I enjoyed. We had a troop campout last weekend. We had 5 girls and 2 adults sleeping in tents out at Camp Howdy. Overall, I thought it was a good time, but apparently there were some issues that I was just oblivious to. The girls are 10- and 11-years-old and in the 4th grade. Probably not much more needs to be said, except they were definitely acting there age. A few of the girls in our troop went to an awards ceremony for another troop. The other troop was bridging from Brownies to Juniors and asked if our troop could come and do a flag ceremony. Then, this Saturday brought the first of two day camp training sessions. Day camp is coming June 2 through June 5 and I will be a unit leader again this year. Looking forward to it as it will be my last year to lead Nicole's unit. Next year, she will be in the camp craft unit and the next year she will be an Aide in Training (AIT). They are all growing up so fast. Kathy and I are toying with the idea of being Assistant Day Camp Directors next year. I'll keep you posted on that if it comes to fruition.

Oh, there is one more thing that was interesting. Nicole had to do her first science project complete with a poster for the science fair. Her project was based on something we learned at day camp last year. Termites secrete trail pheromones and it turns out that there is a chemical in ink pens that is similar to these trail pheromones. So if you draw a circle on a piece of paper with an ink pen, the termite will follow the line. She set out to see if the brand or color of ink pens made a difference to the termites. We found the termites out at Camp Howdy and she tried several different pens. We finished collecting the data for the experiment on Saturday and finished putting the poster together last night. It was a neat experience and I was proud of how much work she put into it. YES. . . it was due today and YES. . . we have known about it for several weeks and YES. . . we waited until the last minute, but what more would you expect from me. Hopefully, she won't pick up all my bad habits!

Well, that catches you up what we have been up to lately. I'll keep posting so come back soon!