First Day of School

August 7th was kind of a tough day for me--It was Amy's first day of Kindergarten, & Ryan's first day of High School (Grade 9)... pretty big milestones!! It was also the day that I was leaving to fly to California for my nephew Jeff's wedding and from there heading to Utah for the birth of Natalie & Jack's baby, then Jordan & Shawn's wedding!! I had put a lot of thought and time into planning meals and putting them in the freezer, making menus, getting school supplies ready, writing out the schedules, making packing lists for me and the kids etc. etc. I was kind of torn between being excited for all of the upcoming events, & realizing that I wouldn't see the rest of my family I was leaving behind for the next 19 days! I have the best husband who is always so supportive and encouraging. He kept telling me to go and relax and have a good time. I hated leaving him with all the responsibilities of getting Ryan to Seminary by 6:30 a.m., then getting Amy to school by 7:30. fixing lunches, doing laundry, driving to dance & piano giving Amy a bath & getting her to bed by 7:30 p.m. keeping up with the dishes, and on and on. I know he is a very competent daddy, & I have nothing to worry about. In fact he has that whole routine down so well that they have been getting to Seminary and school early!! I hate to ruin that when I get back home ;) .
Since Seminary starts at 6:30a.m. our traditional first day of school pictures were taken in the dark for Ryan....hence the "deer in the headlights" look in a few of the shots-ha I always take the pictures in the same spot every year so I can look back and see how much the kids have grown from one year to the next. I'm glad I have had these pictures on my camera to look at while I've been gone.
School has been going very well for both Ryan and Amy. Here is a little bit of a letter that Kevin sent to his Mom & Dad--

"Ryan has a lot of neat classes this year.I went to the back to school night on Tuesday. His biology class is completely computerized. The text book is on the internet. He reads it at home on his laptop. The teacher gave us a demonstration of everything. Even I was impressed! He is taking his unicycle to his speech class for "show and tell" next week. I talked to one of the teachers about 3D modeling. He told me all of the pre-requisites that Ryan will need to take before taking that class as a senior. He is excited about that!

His math class has a set of TI programmable calculators for the class. They are bright school bus yellow so they don't walk off. It is the same model that Ryan has. He if very proficient with programming it. Yesterday, he said the teacher gave them an in class worksheet. She told them to just do every other problem. Ryan did ALL of the problems and turned the paper in fifteen minutes before anybody else did in the class. His secret? He programmed the problem so all he had to do was plug in the variables. And then it was just a matter of click, click. I guess if you understand the problem well enough to program it, it doesn't matter if you do your assignments via programming. :)

Amy is excited to learn to read. They don't really expect that the kids start reading until 1st grade, but the teacher said that many of the kindergardeners are excited to start reading so they encourage it if the kids want to. She took her first "AR"(accelerated reader) test today to see if she "remembered" the story that she read. She got them all right. She goes to the library at school every day and checks out a new book to bring home and read at night. She loves reading!"

It sounds like they're all doing well at home, but I'm looking forward to them joininig us here for the wedding next week!