Spring Into Summer

Today is officially the last day of school. Summer is here! And Elise is saying goodbye to middle school, Jonas is saying goodbye to elementary school, and Wyatt is saying goodbye to preschool. Ethan's just continuing to hang out in high school, of course, although the idea that he'll be a junior next year kind of wigs me out. So to commemorate this momentous day, a few photos from the last little while:

Let's start with today, Jonas's last day of school and the 5th grade olympics. I got a nice little sunburn manning the hula hoop station, watching hordes of cute pre-teens cavorting, and quickly changing the iPod whenever it started blaring LMFAO songs without the expletives bleeped.

Jonas has also had fun playing baseball this spring. I finally have some pics of him in action:

Runs so fast, he's a blur . . .

Hey look, it's Coach Hallstrom!

 Speaking of Jonas and baseball, his school choir also got to sing at a Twins game a couple of weeks ago. We got tickets for the whole family (a discounted thing through the school) but man, was it a rainy, cold day. We had fun anyhow. All these photos were taken with my phone using Instagram. I'm enjoying the Instagram:

Seeking shelter during the rain delay. Ethan invited Josh (Elise was having a sleepover and gave up her ticket) and Jonas's good friend Jack was in the choir too and hung out with us.

Jonas's choir singing the national anthem. I love the pretty baseball field grass. Target stadium is spanking new and beautiful.

Wyatt's actually been out of school for a couple of weeks, so we've been hanging at home enjoying ourselves. But first, Wyatt's last day of preschool:

Wyatt and some buddies

A little neck hooping!

And more buddies

And his girls! Hannah and Ainsley have been his buddies for two years now: friends at church and preschool, and regulars   in our babysitting co-op group. They're going to a different kindergarten than Wyatt, and I think he's going to miss their feminine influence.

Wyatt and Mrs. Hulse

Wyatt and Mr.s Swanson

He has had such a great preschool experience. Good preschool teachers make such a big difference, and Wyatt was happy to go to school every single day. Although I think he will enjoy all day kindergarten, my heart clenches up just a little bit every time I think about it. My buddy, gone all day! He's ready though.

Bored one day? No preschool? All the other kids in school? Have mom make you a sock puppet. That'll kill 45 minutes!

You can also go to the zoo with your buds who are also done with pre-K.

The ubiquitous Como giraffe picture

Wyatt and the crew + a sleeping polar bear

We've also had a little family togetherness of late. First day out on the boat, for example:

The water looks colder than it was.

Wyatt got up on the kneeboard! And he loooooooved it.

Goofin on the boat

Posin' on the boat

Cuteness on the boat

It was a great night out on the lake: glassy water, hardly anyone else out. One real plus of Minnesota living is having a lake only 10 minutes away, stealing out on a weekday evening and tooling around for a couple of hours. And all three big kids (plus Forrest) had great runs on the wakeboard. Good times.

But even if you don't have a boat night, you can still just run around the backyard for kicks:

Spin your brother in circles

Put your arms in your shirt and run around like maniacs

What 14-year-old girl doesn't enjoy a little swordplay?

Speaking of the back yard, we've been doing a little yard work as well. Our bare, brown back of the house made me yearn for the beautiful yard we left behind in Utah, but at least now we've greened things up a bit more. Seeing the new tree outside our back window gives me an inordinate amount of happiness. 

Back yard before:

Back yard after:

It's not a ton of stuff, but enough for now. I've really enjoyed spending time out on our back porch in the evening, reading and listening to the birds. Oh, the birds of Minnesota! Blue jays, cardinals, little yellow dudes I can't identify but thoroughly enjoy. We also have a rabbit who comes to visit pretty often. Such a beautiful state; all the wildlife knows it.

I especially like this little bed (although we still need to cut down the big white irrigation pipe and put more bark down):

My front porch pots make me happy too:

Just to top off the Minnesota gloriousness, a photo I took with my phone when I was on one of my morning run/walks around the lake:

I mean, c'mon now. It's almost too much, it's so beautiful.

Oh, and Forrest and I have been up to a thing or two lately as well. Forrest is training for a tri this weekend, along with that whole work thing and being the baseball head coach and the YM president, but  we've done our best to squeeze a little us time into our busy May/June calendar. We had a ball going downtown and taking a sushi making class together. (Thanks, Mindy, for the awesome Christmas present!)

My cute chef date.

The sushi I made. Not perfect, but hey! It was tasty.

I also finished out my year teaching early morning seminary. It's been a challenging calling in many respects, but a very fulfilling and significant one for me, too. I'm going to miss my kids next year a heck of a lot. I'm looking forward to teaching the home study class in my ward, though -- no more early mornings (yay!), and the course of study is the New Testament (double yay!). Here's a shot of me with my two graduating seniors, Jeremy and Maddy, and Becky, my great friend and team teacher:

Now we have the whole summer stretching before us, which is something I simultaneously celebrate and dread. So great to have lazy days, time together, lots of fun on the horizon; not so great to have to become the video game police woman and feel that pressure of organizing something meaningful day after day. But mostly I'm looking forward to it. Stretch away, summer! It will be fall before we know it.

And speaking of stretching. Who's that enormous child stretched out on my couch? The one who's going to be a junior next year? Crazy.

A Few More Pics

Tonight all the boys are gone for the Father's and Son's outing. It's just me and Lou Lou.  It's been a fun night. We went an saw a matinee, Mirror, Mirror, the Julia Roberts Snow White movie. The costumes and sets were amazing, the story was meh, but it was fun enough. Then we went to Noodles & Co., because Elise loves her noodles. I had Pad Thai, but it was kinda meh too -- all Pad Thai pales in comparison to Pei Wei Pad Thai. I know I should probably say, "All Pad Thai pales in comparison to that one super authentic plate of it I had at that hole in the wall joint run by actual Thai people," but no. I simply love the Pad Thai at Pei Wei. With chicken. There you have it.

But I promised some photos that still haven't been posted due to my St. Lucia-induced backlog. First, Easter photos. Very late Easter photos. But better late than never!

First, the group shot:

I didn't try to make everybody matchy matchy, and actually had no idea Elise and Wyatt's shirts matched so well. Then Ethan's tie (not new) just happened to go well with Jonas's shirt. And voila! It looks like I put lots of thought into something I didn't think about at all. Love it when that happens.

And here are some individual shots.

Wyatt was having more fun on the monkey bars than posing for photos.

I did manage to snap a couple, though.

So dapper.

I love seeing those baby blues without the glasses.

Such a fun dress!

I love the sunlight in her hair.

I do have some smiling Ethan pictures, I promise, but all the other close up shots he was trying to get something out of his teeth, which rendered them unacceptable. Plus he looks mysteriously handsome here anyway.

See! He does smile. :-) And wear size 12 shoes.

And a pic of Forrest and me, just for kicks:

Good job, Jonas the photographer.

There are a few other photos I need to share, too. First, I forgot to commemorate Forrest's birthday here on the blog. He turned 41 right after we got home from St. Lucia and the day before the insanity that was Jonas' birthday party / Forrest's pulled pork sandwich extravaganza Priesthood session. Since we'd done so much in St. Lucia, it was generally understood that the birthday would be an understated deal. Still, I wanted to do something nice, so I decided to make him a cake from scratch from one of our fancy pastry recipe books. I'm usually a box mix gal, so from scratch? That means love. I chose one that had a homemade butter cream frosting. I figured I could tackle it.

Three hours and three boxes of butter later, after separating eggs for merengue and gauging the temperature of the sugar and cutting all that butter into tablespoon-sized pieces that I had to drop one by one into the mixer, I had my cake. Granted, it wasn't done by the time he got home, as I had hoped. But I did it, dang it. Voila:

The picture in the recipe book looked nothing like this, of course. No time for fancy frosting application!

Gotta love this picture. I am married to a supermodel.

Forrest was a great sport about the cake and said he quite liked it, but here's the thing: the frosting was weird. Instead of being luxurious and creamy, it just felt overly thick and tasted overly sweet. The kids didn't like it at all. Forrest had a big piece, the rest of us had a small one, then half of the cake sat and languished in the glass cake stand for almost a week before I acknowledged defeat and threw it out.

Lesson learned! Duncan Hines? I am a fan.

Finally, Elise went to her very first stake dance last Saturday. She went with her good friend Ashlee, and they both looked absolutely adorable. See?

How can my girl be this old? And beautiful?

Elise and Ashlee went to the mall earlier in the day and Elise bought this dress with her babysitting money. Isn't it cute? Poor Ashlee had a brand new dress she brought to our house, and then while they were getting ready she spilled fingernail polish down the front of it! But she was a great sport and ended up wearing some of Elise's clothes. Luckily, the fingernail polish came out.

The girls ended up having just an "okay" time, mainly because there was only one other person from our ward who attended and they didn't know a soul. (Ethan was at a cast party, and there were a bunch of other things going on that night. ) A few guys asked them to dance, but they said they felt kinda awkward because it seemed like everybody else already knew each other. I assured Elise that the next dance would be better: Ethan and his friends would go, and they would also get to know a bunch of MN kids at EFY. EFY! Just a few short weeks away.

And now that's where we are. Wrapping up the spring, ready to head into summer: EFY, camps, UTAH! I, for one, am ready to start sleeping in.