Teacher Gifts

I have so many posts to catch up on! There was tons of stuff that happened w/in the last month like 2 kids birthdays, end of the school year field trips and kindergarten graduation, our annual trip to Avila, and more.  I figured I'd start with the simplest one... end of the year teacher gifts.  I already posted the gift recipe book we did for Mrs. Braga (Emmy's teacher)--which she loved!!!  This one is what we did for Mrs. Fox. It is actually a repeat performance of the one we did for Mrs. Braga when Zeke was in kindergarten.  

I took pictures of each kid in Zeke's class on our various field trips, used my handy dandy cricut to cut out flowers, had each kid write a note to thank Mrs. Fox on the back of their flower, and had parents donate gift cards (or cash).  The parents were very generous and in addition to the thoughtful notes from the kids (yes, we did succeed at bringing tears to her eyes!), she got over $300 in gifts!

I found this flower pot at our local Walmart, as well as the other needed supplies of floral foam, green moss, flower stick/stems, and paint pens.  I used orange, yellow and red cardstock from my stash and double stick tape to get the flowers around the stems.  The gift cards were wrapped in the wire on the floral stems and stuck into the foam.  I wrote the quote on the ceramic pot with a red paint pen.  Zeke asked if it had come like that or if I put the words on--he couldn't tell (which was a compliment that it turned out so well!)

Everyone--and especially Mrs. Fox--loved the gift!  I'd better start looking for gifts for next year, I'm running out of good ideas!!!

What I've been working on this week...

Click here to view this photo book larger

A combined idea of a recipe book and a photo gift, I spent this last week putting this album together for Emmy's teacher, Mrs. Braga.  She's a fabulous teacher and thought that this could be a really cool class gift.  Thankfully, other parents thought it would be fun, too, so we got together pictures, recipes and monetary contributions and I went to work. Thankfully, we got enough donations to cover the expedited shipping! I just got it done today and the fastest shipping gets it here on Monday--last day of school is Wednesday!!!  Yikes!

Create your own personalized photo books at Shutterfly.com.

Girls Trip 2012

For the 2nd year in a row now, I have gotten to get away with my friends for a weekend to Capitola!  This year we had a great, relaxing time--scrapbooking, walking the beach, enjoying amazing weather, trying out the famous Gayle's Bakery, playing games, reading... it was awesome!!!  Cap that off with some shopping at the Gilroy Outlets on the way home and my girl tank is full!!!

Highly unlike me, I left my camera at home (on purpose)... I had my phone and took just these two pictures.  Another thing highly unlike me is to not get pictures of the people on the trip.  So... I doctored up the picture to show who I was living it up with for the weekend!  Echo was the drink master--aren't they pretty?

Spring Break & The Living Desert

During our visit to Idyllwild over Spring break this year, we took a day to drive down to the desert and check out the Living Desert.  It's basically a zoo, and we had a great time seeing all the animals and watching the shows with Grandma and Pa B.  Ethan's favorite was the giant train display they had in the middle of the park. I think he probably spent a total of 2 hours throughout the day just watching all the train action and running around the whole thing.

 My favorite was the baby girafe.  She was born in October, so she was only 6 months old or so.  We also got to watch a girafe drink from the water hole... never have seen a girafe do that before... it's quite a process!

Performance Week

Well, I'm a bit delayed in the posting of this (what's new?), but now with my semester at the college done, I can turn my thoughts toward other (and more fun!) things... including downloading all my pictures off my camera and updating our blog!  Also, I'm looking forward to being able to go on field trips this month with each of the kid's classes as well as catching up on things around the house.  Hopefully, many more fun posts to come soon! :)

In March, we had what I called 'Peformance Week'--super fun!

Zeke's class (along with all the Sonora El 2nd graders) put on the annual 2nd grade "Garden Hoe-Down" on March 21. They practiced for weeks and each class had a part of the action.  This was so very cute and it was great to see Zeke up there on stage.  I video taped the performance, so the pictures are all from after the show, but here are a few of the shots I was able to get.

 Then on Friday, March 23, Emmy's dance class through the Mountain Youth Children's Theatre put on their Spring Recital. Emmy's class performed three routines. Again, I video taped instead of taking picutres, but I have to tell you this was absolutely priceless. 

Emmy LOVED being on-stage and stole the show!  She had a smile, she did her very best, and she was glowing!!!  There were many acts from the other classes they offer--the whole show was so impressive and it was so fun to watch all these kids, it got me excited for Emmy to continue with this organization--everything from voice lessons to acting to dance, all age appropriate and encouraging. 

So afterward, I asked Em if there were any other classes she would want to do.  Her response?  "You know those girls who stood up and sang by themselves with the microphone?  I want to do that."

My kitchen floor this week--train mania for little Ethan :)

March 4- Table Mountain w/ the Pfeiffer's & Moberg's for Keely's birthday.  Beautiful and fun!

Many of you may know that our little kitten, Anakin, who was only 6 months old, got ran over by a car a few weeks ago.  These pictures were taken just before that happened.  It was a common sight for Anakin to be snuggled up with Emmy where ever she was.  She drew lots of pictures of him, too.  This one was one of her best.  She addressed it to Mrs. Braga, her teacher, and the writing to the side says, 'Anei is my cat' (in her best spelling on her own :).  We miss our little Ani, Em keeps asking when we can go get a new one.

Zeke has got his nose in a book almost every free moment.  March is 'Hat's off to Reading' and he gets a prize for every 2 hours of reading.  He has pretty much turned in a page every day!

Valentine's Day Prep

Inspired by a post on Pinterest, we created these cute Valentine's Day cards for each of the kiddos classmates.  The kids had fun doing this--from taking the picture, deciding their own wording (just did this with the text feature in Picasa) and then putting the lollipops in (I punched the holes so it would work right).  I loved how they turned out and it was a fun and creative craft project we did altogether.  Now the kids are enjoying the leftovers! :)

These were the original pictures of each of the kids.  I think they felt silly standing there with nothing in their hands, but they were good sports and let me take lots of pictures to try to get it just right.

It was a little hard to capture great shots of the final products because the lollipops made the pictures bend, but I think they turned out pretty darn cute!

Now to turn my thoughts towards their class parties...

Happyy Valentine's Day!