1st day of School pictures

Here's our first day of 4th grade pictures! Sorry it took so long!

Our customary pictures at the front Cavett sign. This year we took them the 2nd day of school, but that's ok. I still like how having a picture like this each year shows them growing!

Sail Camp

We are embarking on string instruments in 4th grade. Grace is playing the violin, Will the cello and Xander the viola. We rented them from the Violin Shop earlier this summer. So, we sent the kids to Sail camp. It is for beginning strings, they teach them the basics of playing a string instrument. It met every morning at a school and then they had a concert at the end of the week. It was pretty cool what they could learn in only a week. I was pretty impressed. They had a fun week and are excited to keep playing at school this year. Aunt Kara is going to give them some lessons this fall, so I think they will learn fast. 

Sleepovers!

For the kids' friends parties this year, they decided they all wanted to have sleepovers. We hurried to get the basement done so we could do that. Grace had hers, then two weeks later, the boys had one. I thought the girls would be easy and the boys would be a loud mess, but boy was I wrong. The girls were soooo much louder and more obnoxious than the boys! Holy cow! We did plan a few activities for all of them and I think they really had a good time! 

Grace and her friends eating pizza.

We made flip flops with ribbon. Here is a picture of their creations.

Grace and Samantha.

Opening presents.

From left: Mya, McKenna, Grace, Sam, Nyah, Teyla and Mackenzie.

Our cute food. WE made those nail polish bottles out of marshmallows and tootsie rolls!

The boys party was much more tame - maybe because they spent the whole time playing video games?? And there were fewer boys, as well.

From left: Justin, Will, Jared, Xander, Ian and Dylan on the floor.

Brian made a treasure hunt for the boys to get their party favors. It only lasted a few minutes, but at least it occupied them for a while. It was super hot outside, so they didn't play out very long.

This is what they spent a lot of time doing, playing Just Dance on the Wii. I think they played some bomber man and Mario Kart as well.

We had them all over at 6, ate pizza for dinner. Let them play for a while, open presents and eat cupcakes then we had them set out sleeping bags when it got dark and watched a movie. We borrowed Uncle Wes' popcorn machine, so we had real movie theater popcorn. We had to make the girls be quiet and go to sleep around 1, but the boys went to sleep on their own before midnight. The kids had a lot of fun and it was fun for them to have so many friends over!

An unfortunate event

Shortly before Mother's Day, we had a huge 8" rain here in Lincoln. Our stupid sump pump didn't work and our sump pit overflowed and flooded the whole basement.  I was at school on a Thursday morning when Brian called and said "get home, now!" I came home and we spent the entire rest of the day cleaning up everything on the floor in the basement and throwing away wet things. Brian had called the insurance company and 4 days (4 days of a wet basement!) later, they came and took out the carpet (see the 1st picture) and set up a ton of fans (21 to be exact) and a few dehumidifiers and dried everything out. You can see from a couple of the pictures, they even had to take out some drywall. What a mess! After 2 days of a lot of noise, the basement was dry and they took the fans back and we were left with a mostly unfinished basement!

Over Memorial weekend, Dale and Ellen helped us repair drywall and paint the entire thing (not necessarily needed, but I wanted to and it was the perfect opportunity). We painted a medium gray color and got everything all fixed up. With a new sump pump installed, we should be OK for any big rains again. It took a while longer to get carpet installed, but we were back to normal by mid-June, just in time for all the kids to have sleepovers for their birthday parties.

 The carpet pile by the front curb. Jeez!

 The mess that was the basement. And you can see below, what a mess upstairs was. We brought a lot of things up and even set up one of the computers.

Everything else got piled into the storage room to make room for the carpet layers.

All painted and fixed up and ready for carpet!

New carpet!

Finally, everything put back together! The one thing I can say about this is at least everything got cleaned up, organized, purged and put back together nicely! I even got a few new decorations and I'm sure will get more as I go but it nice to have all the paint colors matching and everything looking clean and fresh!