Today was a culminating event at Mazy's school. The topic they've been studying for the last 5 weeks is cherry blossom trees. It was really interesting. I learned a lot! They picked cherry blossom trees because Iowa has a Japanese sister state, Yamanashi, that sent us cherry blossom trees as a thank you to a group of Iowa farmers who sent them 35 hogs and 10,000 bushels of corn after a typhoon devastated their state. It was called the "Iowa Hog Lift." You can read about it on Wikipedia here.
Anyway, the kids were organized into five groups and each group told us something different about cherry blossoms -- what the blossoms symbolize in Japan, where they are often planted, why they are celebrated, ideas the kids had for planting more trees in Des Moines, etc. It was very informative!
The Cherry Blossom Tree Presentation by Mrs. Buckner's Class
Mazy telling the audience the difference between cultivated and wild trees.
Cherry blossom tree pictures
Some of Mazy's leaf artwork -- this is a fire-breathing dragon.
Mazy always gets sad when he can't go out to lunch with me after the culminating event, or just go home for the afternoon. Today's event was at 12:15 -- he eats lunch from 11 to noon so we couldn't do lunch. Bummer!
Also today, Violet wore the cutest outfit ever!! I splurged and bought a fancy boutique outfit on Zulily.com. It wasn't that much of a splurge, I think it was $18 on zulily. I loved it so much! Big bloomer pants, an adorable peasant shirt and the colors were so great on a little ginger babe like Violet. Her red hair is coming in fast and thick now! It won't be long until we can put in hair clips and pig tails.
Oh little Violet! Her blue eyes just sparkle!
She has already learned to pose when the camera is on her. :)
Tonight was Friday Movie Night. We had chili dogs and tater tots for supper. Shawn didn't have game night so he was home with us to watch our movie. He rented "Arthur Christmas" -- none of us had seen it before. It was cute. The boys liked it, although Bo started to get tired toward the end. We got them in bed pretty late -- 9:30, but at least they can sleep in tomorrow.
After bedtime, I printed all of the advent calendar messages, cut them out and rolled them up so they would fit into the Santa advent calendar that mom gave us a few years ago. Tomorrow Bo will have the honors of getting the first message out. As I mentioned, they'll be a mix of "Pick a gift out of the present box." and fun experiences, like "go to Grandma's house to make Christmas cookies," or "go to the zoo to visit Santa and the reindeer." Tomorrow is an experience message. It says, "Your choice for breakfast! You pick the place and the entire family will go out to eat together!" Bo has been wanting to go out for breakfast to get pancakes with whipped cream on them for quite some time. So I am excited to get to take him! We never go out for breakfast so I am looking forward to it.
OK, so much for a short post. Hope you all have a great weekend ahead!
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