JeffKatieEmma.com

It’s been a little over a week now since elementary school became a part of our lives here.  Things have been going well and Emma continues to be excited about kindergarten.  Each day when I walk over to get her, one of the first things she says is, "We didn’t get to go in the big library today".  Yesterday, she was finally able to say that they did get to go in the big library but she was disappointed that they didn’t get to look at all the books.  Instead they just had to sit and listen to the teacher read them a story.  Emma’s reading skills have been advancing pretty rapidly and she’s now reading books that are not even categorized as "easy readers".  She has to take some time on a few of the bigger words but she’s doing well sounding them out and normally can figure out what the word is.  We are very happy that she loves books so much!

It has been nice to have such great weather over the last couple weeks.  It’s strange how the weather turns nice as soon as school starts.  We have been trying to take advantage of the weather by going out to the lake as much as possible.  We plan on going out there this weekend since it is supposed to be near 80 degrees.  We’ve been preparing both of the lake houses for winter by cleaning the gutters and putting away all the summer type equipment that we leave out each year.  I think we are just about ready for winter.

Polly and Vic made it back to New Orleans on Sunday evening.  They packed a lot of activities in to their visit.  They spent the night out at the lake with us, spent time at Sarah’s, went to Point Defiance park, hiked up near Mt Rainier, and also spent a couple days up in Canada visiting Bill and Renee.  We look forward to the day that they are up here all the time, although it sounds like that will be a couple more years.

The picture below is of Emma after school one day.  They have been wearing different colors to school each day and this particular day was "orange" day.

Today was Emma’s first day of kindergarten.  As soon as she woke up this morning she got dressed and put her backpack on.  She insisted on wearing her school backpack during breakfast and didn’t take it off until she got to the playground at the school.  Needless to say, she was very excited and didn’t show any signs of nervousness.  We started the countdown to this day last week.  Katie made a calendar that showed each day and Emma crossed the days off one at a time.  There wasn’t a day that went by that we didn’t know exactly when school started.

We decided to walk over to the school with Jena and her family.  The two girls held hands all the way there and I think they smiled the entire way!

On an unrelated note, all the Browns came over on Sunday afternoon and we had a bbq at the cabin.  Polly, Vic and Alex spent the night and I think they were all pretty comfortable.  Polly and Vic had the sleeper sofa and Alex slept on a mat on the floor.  Polly and Vic were anxious due to the approaching hurricane in New Orleans.  By coincidence, they ended up leaving New Orleans for their trip up here at just the right time.  It looks like the hurricane largely missed New Orleans and there wasn’t massive damage.  Phew.

On Monday, Katie and Emma went with all the Browns and they drove to Mt Rainier for a short hike around the Naches loop to see the mountain.  During the hike they even spotted a black bear feeding on berries.  It was quite exciting for them.  I was glad to hear that there was a ranger there too!

Here are a couple pictures of Emma’s first day of kindergarten and then there is a link below those pictures to the rest of them:

And here is a link to the rest of the photos:

http://www.jeffkatieemma.com/kindergarten