Date Night....

Chris and I have a date night once in a blue moon.

But when we do, the kids get just as excited as we do.

Perhaps they get excited because they are parent free for a few hours.

Perhaps it's because they are allowed to watch tv & play video games while we're gone.

But I seriously think it's all about the photo ops!

Ways to promote literacy...

A coin drive to raise money for books.

A Book Fair to buy the books.

Giving the kids a reason to read.

These past few weeks I've been a busy beaver trying to infect the school with my love of reading.  We have a yearly book fair but I wanted to shake things up a bit by adding a coin drive & reading challenge.

The coin drive was a huge success. It was enough that we were able to give teachers extra support to purchase books for their classroom libraries. These purchases just added to the overall book fair totals which meant more cash back for our school's library!

The reading challenge was more complicated then I expected. I gathered the tracking sheets at the end of each day and posted the totals on a banner the next morning. It was slow going at first, but by the end we were oh so close to our goal of 100,000 minutes read. I am still very happy with the results and I know that when we do this again, we will bust through that total!

The funny part of all of this? I've been so busy I haven't been able to read. Thankfully Thanksgiving is right around the corner!

Ghostly pursuits & soccer fun

This past week we saw the end of the Fall Soccer Season.

When asked if she wanted to do this again, Blake said "meh".

For Halloween Blake busted out as Lady Liberty! She ended every trick or treat with "FREEDOM!"

For an overnight party time, Chris constructed this cardboard fort.

But it just ended up being a life-sized game of whack-a-mole. 

And we ended the most amazingly dryish weekend with a walk in the park.

Life is good.