February (So Far)

February has truly whizzed right by! Ethan took the FCAT Writes in the beginning of the month. It is the writing portion of Florida's NCLB testing. They write essays in 4th, 8th, and 10th grades. He thinks he did quite well. I certainly have high confidence that he did an awesome job.

On Valentine's Day, we went bowling in the morning. I'm not a big fan of bowling and usually stay home when they go. Since it was Valentine's Day I went. Despite being a terrible bowler, I still had fun. While Chris was at soccer (yes, he left me on Valentine's Day to play soccer) we all made various shaped Valentine's cookies. The kids had a blast making them and decorating them. We also made heart shaped brownies and used the leftover homemade icing on those as well! We met Chris for dinner at Tijuana Flats before coming home to eat all the yummy desserts we worked so hard on!
On President's Day we went ice skating. The kids really seem to enjoy it for the first hour or so! After that, they are freezing and ready to go. They skated for 90 minutes, but the last 30 involved a lot of complaining!

Noah
Will
Ethan
The kids love seeing the blimps that come for all of the NASCAR races. They (park, dock, tether, land???) at the New Smyrna Beach Airport so we get to see them quite a lot flying around.
On Thursday night the kids participated in the Book It! Challenge. They had a pajama party and watched both last year's and this year's webcasts. We did our part to help feed Haiti!
Today Melissa and I went to watch some of the girls from school play in their tournament. Let's just say they won by a landslide! Carmella and Letrell are so fun to watch play. They are so timid at school and turn into entirely different creatures on the court! Carmella is 4 and Letrell is 40. Next year they will move onto middle school. Those two were in kindergarten when I started teaching at Read-Pattillo so they are the first wave that I have seen all the way through.
Carmella passes it to Letrell
Carmella takes it down the court. She may be small, but she is certainly fierce!
Happy girls after the game! Let me tell you, I have been there when they have lost and this is NOT how they look after a loss!!!! They beat Daytona Beach and will play Port Orange later this afternoon. We are taking the boys to ride bikes on the beach so I'll miss that game. They have already beaten Port Orange so I think they are on their way to the Disney tournament!
Speaking of Disney, we are going on Thursday. We haven't been in quite a while so the boys are super excited. They haven't missed a single day of school so we decided to let them miss a day and go on a weekday when it won't be as crowded. It is still supposed to be 10 degrees cooler than usual next week, but that should make walking around Disney comfortable. Well, at least until the sun goes down and we start to freeze.