Officially Ellie's half birthday is today, but the kids are at my parents house all week, so we celebrated it last week.

As usual we started out with birthday donuts.

Wednesday was the kids' last day of school.

The last day of first and third grade AND their last day at Discovery Elementary. Next year they will be at the new school that's almost finished being built. Hannah cried because she doesn't want school to be over.

Matias, Joey, Adler, Ellie, Chloe, Hannah, Melissa, Yazmin 

Each kid was allowed to invite two friends over (and Chloe is always invited). I picked them all up after school, and we immediately headed to the pool.

And now for Part 2...

I went on a field trip with Hannah's class to the San Diego Children's Discovery Museum in Escondido. Even though it's close by, I had never been there before. It was really cute and the kids had a good time.

The kids had a lot of free play time inside and outside, but here they were doing an art lesson about landscape and perspective.

I'm so overdue for a camera dump that I'm going to have to do it in two parts. This starts way back at the beginning of May!

These girls loved going to Joey's baseball games but not really for the baseball.

Andy's birthday! The kids love when Andy opens presents. 

Joey made this Lego picture for Andy.

For lunch we had a surprise party for Andy. I invited our camping buddies and my parents over. It was so fun surprising Andy!

I had a post about Joey pitching almost two months ago, but I wanted to do one more post about his baseball season in general. He started out this season nervous about making the transition from machine pitch to kid pitch. He was really worried about getting hit by a pitch. The first half of the season was a little rough for him, and he got easily discouraged. We really had to build him up and encourage him to just try to make contact with the ball and not worry about anything else. 

About halfway through the season something clicked for him. It was really the night he pitched. Everything kind of came together: he started hitting well, looked much more confident in the field and pitched in every game after that first night. Of course as he did better, he started really enjoying playing and got more confidence so he kept getting better. The second half of the season was so fun to watch! 

We were so blessed to have an amazing group of coaches for Joey's team this year. They were such a great combination of being knowledgeable, instructive, encouraging and fun! They were very sweet to Joey and seemed to enjoy Joey's success at the end of the season almost as much as we did. They were very effusive in their praise for him and said that he made the most improvement on the team this season. 

All these pictures are thanks to a Dad on the team who took really great pictures of the team all season.   

 Here's a cool series of pictures of his pitching (if you click on the first picture and then scroll through using the arrows quickly it's kind of like a flip book!):

We're already looking forward to next season!

My 10 year anniversary of blogging is coming up this September, and Andy had mentioned that he wanted to update my blog at some point. Then my sister begged me to have Andy put a search bar on my blog so that she could search for old posts. When I asked Andy about it he started looking into it and decided it was going to be just as much work trying to figure out how to add a search bar as to update the whole blog. His exact quote was, "That would be like putting a band aid on a severed limb." He's so dramatic. ;-) So, he spent all morning working on it, and lo and behold I have a new and improved blog. I hope you like it. Let me know if anything is acting glitchy and I'll get my cute IT guy on it right away!

And now, to finally finish the posts about my trip to Indiana...

Tuesday morning we got up early and headed back to Valpo, this time with Rachel and the two kids. 

Benjamin helping Ben with a potty stop.

We were all glad to see Christina again, especially the kids!