Yellowstone and Island Park

In June we spent a few days in Island Park, ID and Yellowstone. It was such a blast!!! My dad's entire family stayed in a huge beautiful cabin in Island Park. We had a great time and it was so nice to see everyone!

The first thing we did was visit the Wolf and Bear Discovery Center just outside the gates in West Yellowstone.  It is no secret that our kids (especially Chase) are animal lovers so this was high on our MUST do list!

They had a small museum type thing but the kids were not interested! They just wanted to get outside and see the animals!

These two are brothers that apparently spend a lot of time fighting. So many similarities between us and the animal world!

 It was so cool to see these grizzlies so close up!

We were watching the wolves and one of them was kind of fighting with this black bird. My dad was commenting about how the wolf and crow were fighting. Chase said "That's not a crow. It's a raven." We all believed him because no one knows more about animals than Chase.

 I had done my research and found that there were a couple times during the day that kids could actually feed the bears. Of course this was a must! You had to be 5 years old so only Chase and Emily were able to participate.

This place has several bears and they switch them out of the enclosure several times per day. In between the switch the kids get to go in and hide food and snacks for the bears to find. First they lined up outside the enclosure and got their instructions. One of the kids asked "How do we keep the crows from eating the food before the bears get it?" The keeper said, "Actually, those aren't crows, they're ravens." Chase was right!! 

Here they are after hiding their food. (On the left by the girl in pink.)

After the Wolf and Grizzly Discovery Center we headed into Yellowstone!

Our sad attempt at an Old Faithful selfie.

We took family photos....
My grandparents with all five of their kids!

We spent lots of time on (and in) the lake. I think for many of our kids it was their first time on a boat.

Pelicans! Every morning we would watch them fly by our cabin. We love animals.

Logan was absolutely obsessed with the lake. He had no fear, which is scary when he's barely 2 years old. He loved to jump off the dock.

We found a frog!

Tubing! Emily is a little hesitant in the water. She ended up getting flipped off the tube so that ended her fun! Up until she flew off she loved it though. I was proud of her for doing exactly what she should have done though. Thanks swimming lessons!

Painting rocks is a very important part of every Brady family reunion.

 One of the highlights of Yellowstone is the wildlife. Going into the trip Chase really wanted to see buffalo, Robert wanted to see bighorn sheep, and I was hoping to see a bear. We were lucky and got to see them all! We spent hours looking for buffalo for Chase. It was getting late at night one night and we had given ourselves a cut off time for when we HAD to turn around. It got to that time and we had only some herds in the distance, nothing very close up. We decided to drive for 4 more minutes! We turned the corner and there was this HUGE guy sitting right off the road. Hallelujah!

 It was so fun to just sit and visit with everyone!

 One night we all got together and shared stories and memories from our grandparents.

Love my family. Wish I could see them more often but everyone is all over the country! The kids loved Yellowstone, loved Island Park. We definitely need to go back soon!

First Grade!

This school year was amazing. We switched schools before first grade so we were unsure what it would be like. Em is also doing the Chinese Dual Immersion program where she spends half of her day hearing and speaking nothing but Chinese and the other half of her day in English. We were unsure how THAT would be! Turns out it was all AWESOME. She had such a great year and completely rocked it. We LOVE the school, teachers, the program, everything. It's just a better fit for us and we are soooooo happy we switched!!

At each parent teacher conference her teachers would rave about her. Her Chinese teacher in particular said she uses her often as an example for pronunciation because she just "gets" it. She got 100% on every single Chinese test throughout the whole year!

Her English teacher loved her too. She was such a great teacher and really tailored the learning to each kid. She developed advanced spelling lists for some of the more advanced spellers. Some of those words Emily would bring home were crazy! But Emily ended the year with 100% on every single spelling test the whole year! Even though she was doing advanced lists. She also ended the year on a 5th grade reading level with DIBELS scores waaayyyyy off the charts. So proud of her!

Perfect report card for the entire year. (which earned her her very own iPod!)

Her teachers use this behavior tracking app called "Class Dojo" that they update several times per day and parents can view it online. The teachers issue positive points for things done well like trying your best, participating, being respectful, etc and then negative points for negative things. Not sure what negative things because Emily didn't get a single negative point all year! I was proud of her for that. Behavior is more important to me than test scores!

Emily also received every award possible throughout the year! She was the first and only one from her class to get selected for the limo lunch which is chosen by the principal. She was the first Student of the Month from her class. She was the first to win the PTA Golden Apple Leader award. I felt like every week she was bringing home a new award! At the year end awards assembly she received and award for Excellence in Language Arts and Excellence in Math. One other kid in her class got the Excellence in Language Arts and she was the only one from her class to get Excellence in Math. And she hates math. :)

She is very naturally smart and school comes quite easily for her. At least up until now. :) I'm so proud of how hard she worked and the dedication she gives to school. She also made tons of new friends. I always had to laugh when we would walk to the car after school and everyone would be shouting "Bye Emily!" and running to give her hugs. I hope my kids are good friends and kind to everyone.

I also had a good experience with first grade. I was her Chinese teachers class mom so I planned their Halloween party, Valentines party, teacher appreciation week, field day, teachers birthday party and just helped with anything her teacher needed. It ended up being way more work and stress than I thought it would but it's totally worth it to see how excited Emily was whenever I was in her class. It was also fun to get to know the kids in her class and see them all interact. I also did a lot with the PTA which was way fun. I did teacher meals during parent teacher conference, book fair, box tops for education, art show, minute to win it, parent picnic, and I can't even remember what else! I met so many awesome parents and had a great time getting involved in my kids school. I figure we have about ten years at this school so we might as well get involved!

We all had an all-around good experience in 1st grade! Hope it continues in 2nd!

First day

 Last day

Preschool Graduation

Chase finished his second year of preschool and Carly finished her first year! They had a Pete the Cat theme for their graduation. So stinkin cute.

 This little girl is so in love with Chase. It's hilarious. I think she finally convinced him that he loves her too. :) She always talks about when they get married, when they have kids, etc. Too funny.

 These three blondies were in the same class and became friends. Cutie pies!

 With their teacher.

So much fun this year! Chase's teacher gave him a book full of pictures and stories of him from his two years in her preschool. So funny and such a great keepsake. I'm so glad he had such a positive experience in preschool. Now onto kindergarten!

Carly's First Haircut

Carly is almost 4 and has never had her haircut. It was out of control long. But she loved it. I really wanted to cut it into a cute little bob but she was devastated at that thought! She informed me she must have long princess hair! You can hardly tell from the pictures but we cut off 7 inches back in May!

Before

 After

Summer Reading

Every summer we participate in the library's summer reading program and we are actually already finished with it for this summer. Well I have one more book to read but I'm waiting until tomorrow because I pre-ordered "Go Set A Watchman." I've never pre-ordered a book in my life! But I'm excited for it. Who am I? Anyway, I was getting tired of my kids always wanting to read what I call garbage books (Barbie, Disney princesses, Tinkerbell, etc). I understand the need for those types of books because it's what kids like and gets them excited to read. But after 8 years of dealing with those types of books, I'm tired of them. So I compiled a list of books I wanted to read to the kids this summer. Several of them we have read before or we own but don't read too often. We read them at night all together. It's been great! I kept it mostly picture books since the majority of our kids are young and lack the attention span for chapter books. Emily has a list of chapter books to read. All of them that we don't already own I have found at the library.

• Where The Wild Things Are
• The Monster at the End of This Book
• Love You Forever
• The Paper Bag Princess
• Corduroy
• The Light in the Attic
• The Lorax
• Harold and the Purple Crayon
• Jumanji
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar
• Goodnight Moon
• The Giving Tree
• Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
• The Snowy Day
• Caps For Sale
• Madeline
• Ferdinand
• Green Eggs and Ham
• Oh the Places You'll Go
• The Little Engine That Could
• The Happy Prince
• The Rainbow Fish
• Aesop's Fables
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
• Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters
• The Cat in the Hat
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• Stone Soup
• Make Way for Ducklings
• Where the Sidewalk Ends
• The Stinky Cheese Man
• Frog and Toad Are Friends
• Clifford the Big Red Dog
• The Story of Babar
• Lon Po Po
• This Is Not My Hat
• The Little Prince
• The Hundred Dresses
• Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel
• Winnie the Pooh
• Little Bear
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
• The Big Orange Splot
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• Curious George
• Guess How Much I Love You
• Are You My Mother?
• Good Night Gorilla
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
• On the Night You Were Born
• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
• Wherever You Are My Love Will Find You
• Mr. Tiger Goes Wild

Oh the random things in a mother's purse

I was cleaning out my purse the other day and was amused at some of the things I found in there. And I thought this is one of those small and simple daily things that I want to remember. I wish I would have documented it in some way when my kids were younger and I REALLY had bizarre stuff in my purse! My kids are growing and I just don't carry as much of their stuff as I used to. This was made clear when my cousin asked if I had diaper rash cream this weekend and I don't even carry it anymore! So here were the contents of my purse....

Sofia doll, half empty box of yogurt raisins, loose change, hand sanitizer, Harmon's stickers, sucker, arms to an Olaf doll, beaded necklace, markers, playdoh can, 3 pens, wallet, hair elastics, carrot shaped eraser, comb, rock, 6 diapers (too many!), wipes, gum drop, dance and tumbling paperwork, toy elephant, oreos, coloring book, coupons, so many receipts, crap ton of garbage, half of a pencil sharpener, Logan's immunization record, 2 checkbooks, 4 notebooks with "Carly" written on every page.

I love my kiddos so much. Even though I would love to have a clean and organized purse, I'm going to miss the days of carrying their random crap around!