Season Wrap Ups

As we wrap up the school year, the kids are keeping us busy with fun activities to fill up our evenings. This week Carrigan got to go on a trail ride for her horseback riding lesson as an end of the year treat. It was a 2 mile hike through the hills of Tryon Creek State Park. I got to walk along and it was great, other than it was probably a bit more than I should have done on my ankle. All the horses were cooperative and the ride went off without a hitch.

Merrick also had a big week, wrapping up baseball for the spring season. It was a tough season for Merrick personally in a lot of ways, but he fought hard to earn the starting first base spot in most games. Overall his team went 23-1 on the season. One of the moms from the team brought her camera to the last 2 games so I actually have some quality photos to share.

C.C.'s Choir Concert

Not too much to share this week. We are starting the push for summer and our evenings are full of baseball, softball, horses, and volleyball. CC finished track, which has freed up the schedule and been nice. 

This coming week Merrick will wrap up baseball and that will really free us up. He has already started gearing up for summer baseball and basketball, but right now it's just open gyms for that so we don't have to attend. 

Since school year wrap up has begun, we had CC's year-end choir concert this week. They did a great job and I might be biased, but I think her choir group sounded the best of all three choirs. It was also nice because I was able to do double duty and go early and do some recruiting done and meet my recruiting goal for the year. It's always great to do double duty.

This is really "buckle down and get through it" season, but we have just 3 1/2 weeks left of the school year. We can do this!

She's a Star

The other day, CC was making videos on my phone for each member of the family. She accused me of loving Elsie the most because I have the most pictures of her on my phone. I assured her that it's just because she is the only one who isn't too cool to hang around her mom and the only one who wants me to take her picture. She is right though, the pictures on my phone do heavily favor Elsie recently.

Elsie may typically be the star of my phone, but this week she truly did get to be a star. The Cedaroak talent show was this week and she sang the Taylor Swift song "Sparks Fly". I'm biased but she was the best singer in the talent show. The talent show was all videos that were submitted ahead of time, but it still took a lot of courage for her to put herself out there in front of the whole school. I was very proud of her for being so brave.

Since I am leaning into the "it's all about Elsie" thing, I think I will take the opportunity to do a photo dump of some of the other photos I have taken of her (or she has taken of herself) recently. 

Despite what all the photos say, Elsie's older sibling actually take up the majority of my time. I guess I just need to be better about taking their picture, whether they like it or not.

Carrigan's 12th birthday

 Today is Carrigan's 12th birthday. We have had such a great time celebrating her this weekend! The festivities started yesterday with a friend birthday party. We started with pizza at our house before heading out to the Clackamas Aquatic Center. The girls had a blast in the wave pool and sliding the water slides. Since our whole family came along, Elsie and Merrick spent much of their time sliding the slides too. Elsie was nervous at first, but decided she loved it. Jeremy took Elsie on the slides a couple times too, but then tapped out to Merrick and hung out in the hot tub.

After swimming, we came back to our house for presents and dessert. C.C. chose brownie sundaes and they were are huge hit with her friends.

Once her friends went home, we went to dinner as a family and then finally accomplished C.C. and Elsie's goal they have had for several month, to go to 7-Eleven while they were 7 and 11-years-old. We made it just in the nick of time. C.C. and I capped off the night with a girls night eating junk and watching Gilmore Girls in the basement.

Today is Carrigan's actual birthday. We started the day with church because, you know, Sunday. We then had family brunch and she opened her presents. She liked them all, but I think the Lululemon crossbody bag and the the Sol de Janeiro perfume were the favorites.

Nana and papa will come for dinner soon. Of course she chose soft pretzels and cheese. After dinner, the family is all coming over for dessert.

It's been so fun celebrating Carrigan this weekend. She has really blossomed into a little lady this year. She is so fun to be around and, despite having some serious health struggles this year, always has a smile and happy attitude. We are so blessed to have her in our family.

Celebrate

This week was a bit of a roller coaster. We took two trips to Urgent Care, for x-rays of Elsie's arm and my ankle. Elsie hurt her arm at school and I finally went for x-rays of my ankle that I fell and hurt three weeks ago at Merrick's baseball game. Luckily, neither Elsie's arm or my ankle are broken, but she is nursing some significant soft tissue damage. I get to go to an orthopedist to discuss the results of my x-ray. Yay!

On the bright side of things, this week we got to celebrate the end of an awesome dance season with Carrigan's year-end dance dinner and awards ceremony. C.C. had a great night and won the "100% award" from her coaches and the "determined diva" award from her dance team captain. I would say the evening was probably the highlight of her week, be she did also have a track competition and did a great job competing in her first relay race.

As I mentioned, Elsie had a rough week. She has had limited use of her arm all week and subsequently could not participate in her first softball game. She did get to have some fun this week celebrating others. She enjoyed C.C.'s dance celebration and she got to celebrate her friend's birthday yesterday.

As for Merrick, he has a lot to celebrate this baseball season. He team is currently undefeated and on a 6 game shut-out streak. They have not allowed a single run during league play. It has been pretty amazing. He personally is in a bit of a hitting slump, but I'm confident he will turn it around this week.

We are looking forward to another busy week ahead where not only do we have our regular busyness, but we also have something big to celebrate, C.C.'s 12th birthday.

Easter 2025

Happy Easter Sunday. What a beautiful day we have had already. We started with day with the secular Easter stuff. We had a visit from the Easter Bunny right away. He hid our Easter baskets, as that tricky bunny always does, but most everyone's was in a visible spot. Everyone, except Elsie's. I think that is because our Easter bunny is smart enough to know that she would be up starting at 6am and if her basket was visible, she would have visually identified everything in it before everyone else was up. Elsie was not pleased.

Everyone got mostly eggs with candy, but the Easter bunny also brought small gifts for each of us. Elsie got three new summer dresses and lip gloss, Carrigan got a dress, hair clips, and lip gloss, Merrick got cologne and socks, I got shower steamers and an automatic pumice file, and Jeremy got a massage gun.

While everyone was happy with their gifts from the Easter bunny, it was nice to quickly put them away and shift our focus to more important things. We had a lovely church service today with beautiful music. All three of the kids sang during the service, Elsie with the primary children and Merrick and C.C. with the youth. Actually, since Jeremy is over the youth group, he sang with them as well. I guess everyone but me sang in church today.

After church, we had a family brunch and this evening we are going to the Browns for a special Easter and Christ-centered LSF. It has been a great day.