Monkey Toes

I am quite lucky in that I am generally able to escape from work to attend school events for the kids. Over the past few weeks, I have taken full advantage of this and have made it to several different events for Ree and the boys.

For Ree, I first went to her class's end-of-year party. The room moms had planned to hold it at the park directly behind the school. However, surprise! We got a (very minor) tropical storm the first week of June, and it messed with the plans. So the party was moved indoors, and the kids still had a fabulous time.

Among other activities, the kids had a contest to see who could pick up the most pennies with their toes. I am quite proud to say my monkey-toed daughter was the big winner in her group. (She didn't have the highest score for the whole class though. There are some truly talented kids out there!)

They briefly got to play outside, and they rotated between stations where they hula hooped, blew bubbles, and drew with sidewalk chalk.

They also had an informal award celebration, and the teacher gave out awards to all of the kids. The teacher read the description of each award, and then she had the kids guess who the award was for. Rebecca seemed to have her named called out for nearly every award. I'm not quite sure what that meant (The kids liked her? They thought she was a good student?), but we went with it. And I am happy to say that she was one of two students to get an award for being a great reader. (Although clearly not nearly as proud as I am of her penny-grabbing prowess.)

This week I got to go back to school for part of the school's fun day, which was basically a field day where the kids participated in about 15 events. Ree is clearly my child, and not nearly competitive enough (or big enough) to excel in sports, but she had a great time. Everyone in the class even wore matching shirts. Their teacher loves the Wizard of Oz, and so they all had Dorothy and Toto on their shirts. The girls even had little red bows on Dorothy's hair. (I hear the teacher was still hot glueing bows as the kids were coming into school that morning. I like how she works. I am pretty sure there are few things in this world that can't be assembled with hot glue or duct tape, and it's good to know I'm not the only one assembling at the last minute.)

Her shirt was a little big, but you have to love the head band. She was a serious athlete!

She loves sack races.

Not quite dominating in hockey.

And the very fun looking water relay. (I wanted to participate!)

And now, after all the fun, we have a first grader.