Eleanor's Confirmation

During kids' sixth grade year at PRUMC, they participate in the confirmation class each Sunday during the Sunday School hour.  This past school year was Eleanor's big year to decide if she was ready to be confirmed into the church.  She was pretty certain about it all along and after a brief meeting with our church Youth Director Jon Jones, she was committed. 

Sunday, April 26 was Confirmation Sunday.  Eleanor joined 80+ other confirmands from her class in joining the church family.  All of her family was there to support her

 

 including G & G

 

and Papa. 

Some of her oldest and best friends participated in the class with her which made the day extra special. 

We can't wait to see where Eleanor's faith takes her!

E's Collage of Mimi

Before Eleanor flew down to Melbourne with Thomas and the boys for Mimi's funeral back in March, she spent a few days gathering pictures and ideas to create this bulletin board collage honoring Mimi.

 

Our good friends Susan and Selle James were driving down to Melbourne for the funeral so they offered to load this up in their car so we could have it on display for the visitation and funeral.  Mimi would have been so appreciative of Eleanor's creative efforts, and I know Eleanor valued the time she had in remembering her Mimi in this manner. 

Spring Break in Park City

For Eleanor's spring break this year (we pulled the boys out of Morris Brandon for most of the week), we joined two other families, the Cummings and Maskes, in Park City, UT for a few days of skiing.

 

Our kids had never been skiing before so we were eager to see what they would think of the sport! We arrived Saturday night and hit the slopes first thing Sunday.  All three kids were in ski school for our first three days (Sun - Tues) and then we aimed to ski with them on Wednesday, our fourth and final ski day. 

The hardest part of each day was getting the kids dressed for skiing.  Man, those boots were so hard to get on!

On the way from our house to the slopes on our first morning, we spotted this hot air balloon as it flew right over our minivan.

Here are the girls getting ready for their first day of ski school . . .

and Ben.  I think he was pretty pumped up to try it!

 

I must admit that I love this picture of Ben taken on day two after ski school.  He just looks too cool for school!

(For some reason, I missed capturing photos of the other four boys.)

While the kids were in ski school each day, the adults spent the hours on the slopes

 

and cherished our kid-free lunches.  

After spending the day skiing or (learning to ski in the case of our kids), the young ones loved the time they spent in our rental house's hot tub.

Though we were all in one house together (8 kids and 6 adults), everyone got along swimmingly. 

On our final day of skiing, we had the kids try to ski with us.  We began the morning at the coffee shop just inside from the main lift. Everyone is geared up and ready to go!

Here is a picture of Eleanor just beside the beginning of the Detonator trail through the trees.  She discovered some of these hidden paths and tried them all out with the more experienced kids of our group. 

Hayes and I followed most of our group down a blue slope, and that decision did not have a happy ending. 

 

Hayes lost his confidence once we hit some icy steep patches.  He cried for over 30 minutes before we finally were able to have someone call ski patrol to come to our rescue.  He then got a ride down to the base of the mountain.  Thankfully, after lunch, he got his nerve back and skied green slopes for the rest of the afternoon incident-free. 

For our final night in Utah, we hired babysitters so that we could head out to an adult dinner.  Here we are before leaving for the restaurant. 

Though the trip was during an extremely difficult time with Mimi entering Hospice while we were in  Park City, we were grateful for the fellowship of good friends to help us through the week.  Everyone agreed that a return trip was in the cards in the next few years. 

Moving is Work!

At some point in our years at Beaverbrook, the boys both decided that it would be really cool to put all sorts of stickers on their bedroom doors - Skylanders, NBA stickers, letters, etc-  that reflected their interests at the time. The boys were good sports when I told them that in order for us to put our house on the market, we would need them to remove all of the stickers from their bedroom doors. They were less-than-thrilled with the idea but once we got going, they accepted the challenge. Each boy worked on their own door with a toothbrush and some Goo Gone.

 

I cannot recall why I didn't take an "after" photo and also wish I had a true "before" one too, but I was grateful that I did capture them hard at work.  Well done, boys!

Thursdays

This post was from February. . . While I was in Melbourne visiting Mom and Dad, the kids had a snow day and were all at home with Thomas.  When I chatted with Ben on the phone,

 

he said he was happy to have a snow day on Thursday because Thursday is the worst day of the week at school. Why? "Because we have music and art and we are terrible at both of those."  I asked him what he meant by "terrible" and he said, "We always get in trouble in both of those classes." 

Catching Up

Well, as you can see, life got in the way of my keeping this blog up-to-date.  Mom ended up dying on Saturday, March 14 after Dad had called in Hospice that prior Monday.  I had arrived in Indialantic on Thursday to join Dad, Steven and Helen in watching over Mom, and was grateful to share her final hours with her. 

Since then, I have been taking one day at a time, just trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of life.  Volunteer work at the boys' school on top of parenting took up most of my time this spring.  On top of everything though, we moved the week before school was out at the end of May.  Phew!

I will try to catch this blog up with more big picture items but the beginning of 2015 will be my least productive in terms of this blog and that is a-ok.