April 2009

What a crazy fun month!! Where to start? We had a great visit to Oregon for Spring Break! We had fun helping Grandpa fix his computer problems, and loved going to the beach house, celebrating Easter with the Bakes and Grandma and Grandpa Ririe, going on a couple of hikes, playing lots of games, and relaxing and playing at Grandma and Grandpa's house - it was a great vacation and nice to take a break from the chaos of school and life!

After 3 months of practices, Megan performed all last week in her school's musical "Guys and Dolls" and even though she complained a lot that the production wasn't nearly as much fun as last years's "Seussical", the play was very well done and she ended up having a really fun time performing. It will be nice to have her around a little more often now that rehearsals are over. She also pulled off a really tough arrangement of "Cannon in D" for her piano recital - it was impressive!

Seth spent pretty much the entire month counting down to his 9th birthday, which we will be celebrating tomorrow. He is excited to move on to Bear scouts - he is so into cub scouting!! He has also recently fell in love with science and doing science experiments and asks me nearly every day if he can build a volcano and then watch it erupt.

Autumn stayed busy with school, friends, dance and all the usual things Autumn does. She is my little shadow and helper and my heart breaks at the thought of her being gone all day next year (never thought I'd feel that way!) Her kindergarten class is performing "The Little Red Hen" for their kindergarten graduation and Autumn totally has her heart set on playing the little red hen or one of the chicks, but she's still waiting to see what part she will get. She really doesn't want to be a narrator because "they don't get to be on stage and don't get a costume" - we shall see.

Devin had the most exciting month of any of us! On top of his piano recital (did a great job), he performed as "Drake" in our city's children's theater production of "Annie" and did a great job and had fun performing on stage.

The same week of the play, he started the two week testing process for his black belt in karate, so needless to say, he was pretty busy and stressed out. He had to pass his karate school test, a regional test, and then the all-schools test last weekend in conjunction with his karate tournament. Plus he had to write a 10 page thesis about karate and pass a physical fitness test that I'm pretty sure I couldn't pass. Anyway, the great news is he passed all of his tests and is now officially a black belt in karate - WOW!! It was pretty exciting at the all-schools test to watch a gym full of black belt candidates do kicks, punches, self-defense and forms all in unison - pretty cool. His SWAT team also took first place in the team demo division, and Devin won 2 personal silver medals - one in weapons for his nunchucks form and one in self-defense techniques. Way to go Devin!!