April 2011

April went by in a blur! But we did some fun things - here's a sampling:

Megan went with her high school choir to San Francisco for 5 days and had an amazing experience! She got to tour all over the city including Alcatraz, Union Square, Fisherman's Wharf, and Ghiardelli Square, and also got to participate in a choir festival in a really beautiful cathedral. Her choir placed high enough in the preliminaries to earn a spot performing at the evening performance for the public and Megan thought that was pretty awesome!

While Megan was in San Francisco, the rest of us went to St. George for the weekend for one of Autumn's dance competitions. Autumn's team did great and we all enjoyed a few days of warm sunshine!

Devin spent the month with rehearsals for "Fiddler on the Roof" and then performed in it the entire last week of April. I have to admit that I was surprised at how well Jr. High students did with the play, not only with the singing, acting and dancing on stage, but the orchestra as well. Devin had the best time and did a great job performing as a peasant son and doing the bottle dance. His bottle only fell off his head once in the 6 performances - not too bad! :)

Seth finished out the month earning his Arrow of Light award as well as the "All 20" patch. We are all done with Cub Scouts and Seth is so excited to move up to the New Scouts program!

We spent most of our Spring Break in Moab this year and had a great time hiking, biking, and enjoying warmth! We spent a full day hiking in Arches and especially loved Delicate Arch and

hiking the Fiery Furnace as well as playing around Sandune Arch, where we unexpectedly ran into our friends, the Gardiners. We also took a Jeep Safari tour on the red rock trails around Moab and we all loved that! Autumn of course wanted to go faster all the time, but contented herself through the slower parts by flirting with our tour guide, Meesh. It was warm days, beautiful scenery and some awesome adventures - the perfect spring break!

Megan spent the rest of her month trying to balance work, teaching piano lessons, tutoring math (besides her regular job), regular school work and studying for AP tests. She has been one little stressed out girl lately, but has her AP Calculus test done and will be done with her AP US History test tomorrow, after which she may slip into a coma for the weekend. :)

Seth finished up another year in the Storytelling club with an awesome performance. He also participated in the school's spelling bee and spent the rest of the month counting down to his 11th birthday.

Autumn finished up her dance competition season and is now getting ready for the recital in June. She was asked to be a soloist for the opening number, which adds another hour of practice each week, but she was so excited to get the invitation and hasn't minded the extra practices. She is tireless!

After years of negotiations, I was finally successful in talking Bryce into buying a Mac and the kids and I LOVE it! Bryce isn't so quick to switch sides, but he has at least stopped calling it the "stupid Mac" and will even admit it has some pretty nice features. I'll just say that putting together the graduating Laurels video was a breeze this year compared to the 2 previous years of trying to do it on the PC. It made me very happy! Here's a picture of Devin goofing off with the photo booth.

We finally had neighbors move into the house just west of us after it being empty for a year and a half, and that has been great except for the fact that the neighborhood kids were using their driveway as the neighborhood basketball court. Bryce decided it was finally time to add the cement pad for our camper that we have wanted to do since we moved here, and we also added a basketball hoop, which made Seth pretty happy. He is outside anytime the temperature breaks 50 degrees (in shorts) shooting hoops.

That's it for April - see you for May's update! :)