Eve's 4th birthday!

Here are the girls outside our townhouse waiting to go to IHOP for Eve's 4th birthday dinner.
Birthday kiss.

Top models!

Silly birthday girl!

I can't believe my baby is 4! She is getting so big (only a few inches shorter than Zoe and a few pounds lighter!). She is so beautiful, sweet, and a big goofball. What a blessing she has been to our family!

Second Grade Reader!!!

We had Zoe's student-led parent teacher coneference last night. We were blown away by how far Zoe has come in such a short amount of time. She read us pieces that she could barely read at the beginning of the school year through where she is now, 2nd grade level! On her DIBELS testing, she is off the charts! Yay Zoe!

Promotion for Aaron

Aaron is now the official "punch-list" guy at the job site in Cedar Hills! This is a significant improvement for many reasons, but also a lot more responsibility. For one, his commute is now only 20 minutes, not AN HOUR AND A HALF! Yay! For those of you that don't know, Aaron has been working at a job site in The Dalles, OR which is quite a distance from Hillsboro. He has been staying out there in a hotel during the week and coming home on the ocasional wednesday night and weekends. It has been a pretty rough few weeks for all of us. But thankfully, Aaron's work ethic and ability was finally noticed and he was promoted to this position. While he will still be doing some physical work, he won't be doing work that's as labor intensive as he was doing (like moving refrigerators up three flights of stairs). Now on to the part about more responsibilty...a $40 per month cell phone allowance means he needs to available at ALL TIMES to the superintendent of the job site and the owner of the company. So far no calls at home at 10:00pm. Also, the superintendent of this job site is known for working saturdays, lots of saturdays. This could mean Aaron might have to step down a little from church responsibilities (since we go to church on Saturday evenings). But this is another "wait and see" thing. No word yet on a raise but at least now we are all insured! Praise God!

Jackson Bottom Wetlands Fieldtrip

Today, I got to join Zoe and her first grade class as they visited the Jackson Bottom Wetlands near our home for their fieldtrip. It was a beautiful day! The bald eagle made an appearance as well as two turkey vultures. We saw lots of butterflies and birds. Fortunately, no snakes!

This is a picture of Zoe in front of an eagles next which was cut down from a 93 foot cottonwood tree that was in danger of falling down. It was really cool.

This was the sense of touch station. This were learning how to describe an object based on touch.

This is Zoe being the moth during the game, Bath and Moth (it was like Marco Polo). They were learning about echo location and how bats use their sense of hearing to locate their food.

Bats!

Her class getting ready for the talk on the five senses and how animals use them to survive.

The wetlands.

Learning about different types of vegetation and butterflies.

Zoe riding in the bus with her friend, Molly.

Rain slicker, check!