From Blog to Print

I recently bought a coupon from Living Social for a company that will print up your blog in book form. I decided to try it on a whim. After all, I used to put a lot of time into blogging, and although it is a good family record and good way to keep in touch with people, who goes back and looks at the old blog entries?

I decided that based on the number of pages I would need to print out the whole blog, I would only do one year at a time. So I started with 2007 - which is when I started my blog. It was really easy to do. I just had to sign into my blog and tell them which dates I wanted to start and end with. I chose a cover style, and they did the rest. I let them randomly pick a picture for the cover, although I could have picked one if I wanted to do that. Then I ordered it and forgot about it. When it came in the mail, I was pleasantly surprised...I loved it! I had forgotten a lot of the things that I had blogged about. I had thoughts and feelings recorded, family events, funny moments with my kids, memories of my grandfather...it was great! Now I had it all bound up as a family record for my posterity (and I didn't feel so guilty about not keeping a consistent journal). My husband and kids have spent lots of time reading through it and looking at the pictures, and they agree that the book was well worth the money. They had also forgotten some of the things we had done that year, and loved to see their younger selves. So, I will have to work towards printing the other years out too.
I am now recommitted to blogging. I haven't done much with it in the past year, only recording things here and there, but now that I can see what kind of record it can become I am going to try and do a lot better.

If this isn't your castle, then you aren't my prince!

I found this while I was preparing my Laurel lesson this week. I love it, and just had to share.

Star Wars Night at the Ems

We went to Star Wars night at the Ems baseball game last week.
It was a lot of fun! They had a star wars character representing each of the Ems players.
They had the "rebels" playing against the "empire" on the scoreboard, and they played Star Wars music and video clips.
We brought Grandma with us - she and Leilani did not dress up in costume for the occasion.
Benjamin, however, wore his clone trooper costume to the game.
Emily and Elisabeth wore jedi robes (they are actually padawans). Cousin Natalie didn't have a costume, but she still managed to have fun. :)
There were lots of different Star Wars characters to have pictures taken with. Leilani was excited that the Storm Trooper let her hold his gun!
Alan and I got in a few pictures too. He is not as big a Star Wars fan as I am, but he is supportive. Besides, how often does his wife actually ask to go to a baseball game?!!

One of the jedi masters asked if she could get a picture with my little padawans. I guess they don't have a lot of girls dress up?
My sister Kari and I were excited to have our pictures too. We even did it without the kids!
Benjamin was the most excited, however. He kept watching for more characters to come out during the entire game.
Little Tanner had fun too. He didn't dress up, but he did get a couple pictures with a Jedi and the wookie.
It was fun. At one point they had Darth Vader out on the field having a lightsaber duel with Sluggo the bear (the Emerald's mascot). They had some jawas race around the field, and they had Princess Leia and some other characters too. My kids are already to go again next year (it is an annual event), and have decided which costumes we need to get between now and then.

Graduations

We had two graduations in our family this year - preschool and 5th grade. Although some people feel that these type of graduations are silly, they do represent a big transition in a child's life. Ben will be moving on to Kindergarten, which means that he will start going to school on a daily basis and learning Japanese. Emily will be moving on to middle school, which means lockers, 7 different classes, changing clothes for PE, and many other changes.

Ben has enjoyed the NEHS preschool. He is the last of my kids to attend there...wow, who thought the day would come?!!!
He is very excited to be moving on to Kindergarten, but he enjoyed every minute of preschool.

He especially liked having his cousins Danny and Hailey at preschool with him. They looked forward to spending the time together.


Emily was not quite as excited as Benjamin to graduate. Her two best friends are going to different middle schools, and she wants to go with them. It will be hard for her to be away from them after six years of going to school together.
Who knows? Maybe they will meet up again at some point. We told Emily that she has to at least try Kelly middle school out next year (I do not want to drive my two middle schoolers to two different schools each morning). Then we will see if we want to make changes when Leilani goes to high school.
It was a nice graduation ceremony. They sang and did a tribute through skits and songs to their teachers in each grade. They are a funny class, with lots of personality. We really enjoyed the performance.
Emily's group did the tribute to the 5th grade teachers, and then Emily was chosen to give the farewell speech (along with a boy) to everyone. Her teacher told me that she chose her because she speaks Japanese so well. She really does enjoy the Japanese. Hopefully she can keep progressing...she is worried that the middle school Japanese class will be too easy.
We are very proud of her and all she has accomplished.

Urashima Taro - the fisherman

The 2nd grade play this year was Urashima Taro - which is the name of a fisherman who saves a turtle and then visits an undersea kingdom and then goes home to find out that 300 years has passed and everyone he knew is dead.

Elisabeth was a narrator and the sea princess.


The kids had to learn their parts in both English and Japanese, because they did the play twice - once in English and once in Japanese.



Elisabeth sang a solo in Japanese. She did a great job!




The kids also played the taiko drums.

A funny thing happened after the play. Alan had been on a business trip to Louisiana and just got home in time for the play that night. I cut my hair off while he was gone (above my shoulders). So, I was taking pictures of Elisabeth with her teachers after the play, and Alan came up behind me and said, "I'm embarrassed because I couldn't find you. I was looking for you and looking for you and then I remembered that you had short hair now." I asked him, "Don't you pay any attention to what I am wearing?" He answered, " That's how I found you. I tried to remember what you were wearing and then I saw you and thought - oh yeah, that is her with the short hair." It made me laugh.

Wicked

Alan took me to the musical Wicked for our anniversary (which was in March, but since the musical was in April, we postponed our celebration).

We got dressed up and made a night of it. It was fun to spend some time alone out on the town, and we really enjoyed the musical.

In fact, we enjoyed it so much that Alan decided to go down and try and win tickets for the two oldest so that they could see it. He didn't win any the first night, but the second time he tried he was able to get them. The girls were very excited! They didn't even care that they had to go by themselves and didn't get to sit together (they were 7 rows apart). I was nervous letting them go alone, but of course it turned out fine. Sadly (or happily if you were them), they had better seats than we did! (One was on 5th row orchestra and the other was on row 12 - we couldn't afford seats that close for ourselves! We were much further back in the orchestra section.)

It was a fun show to watch, and we were glad that it came to town. It makes you look at the Wizard of Oz in a whole different light, though. You will never look at those witches quite the same again!

Easter Finery - 2011

This is the first year that my kids have not been matching. It made me sad and nostaligic, so we probably won't do that again. Leilani is the hold out of course; not only does she not like to match anymore (especially on Sunday...that is VERY uncool for a young woman apparently), but it is hard to match her to the other kids because she doesn't wear kid sizes anymore. But, it can be done...even though they didn't exactly match at Christmas, they at least blended. I just was busy doing other things, and never got around to shopping for or sewing anything. I warned them that I didn't think it was too much to ask for 3 times a year - Christmas, Easter and Mother's Day. So hopefully we will do better in a couple weeks for Mother's Day. Nobody argued with me, so I think they have accepted that this is part of life with mom. :) It is obviously not a life or death matter, and it has nothing to do with the true meaning of Easter, but I like it, and it makes me happy, so why not?

They looked nice today anyway.

Here is my handsome little man. He was supposed to wear a pink tie to match his sisters (I did get them all to agree to wear pink), but he told me he would "absolutely die!" if he had to wear a pink tie. Not wanting to lose my only son, I relented and let him wear red, LOL.

Elisabeth has plenty of hand-me-downs from her two sisters, so it was easy for her to pick something out.

I have always liked this dress, so I was happy to see it worn again.
Leilani FINALLY wore the coat we gave her for her birthday today. I was beginning to think that we were going to just end up saving it for Emily. It looked really cute on her!

This is the outfit she chose to wear today. It matched her new necklace and earrings very nicely.
Emily has been waiting to wear this dress for a few months, so she was glad it was finally spring!
I didn't take any family group shots, since we didn't match, but I probably should have. It started to rain right as I was taking the pictures, so that is why they are all trying to stand under the porch as I take their pictures. Luckily we have a nice covered area out front. I hope that everyone had a nice day. Despite all the fuss about clothes, we do remember why we celebrate Easter! We are thankful for our Savior Jesus Christ and the sacrifice that he made for us. We are also thankful that He has risen, and that He broke the bands of death for us. We are very blessed!