Spring and End of Year festivities

End of school festivities are always busy and fun. All year I've been the PTA volunteer over the reading awards, so I was especially happy and proud of Mark for finally deciding he was going to earn "Rock the Halls" at school for reading, a little late in the game but he pushed through with several early mornings and was able to Rock the Halls with his best buddies, Bruce and Skyler.     Mr. Simpson was an excellent teacher for Mark this year and gave him all kinds of the right kind of encouragement.

 Hollie has now determined she wants to be a first grade teacher when she grows up,
thanks in no small amount to Mrs. Miller.   

This spring was punctuated with more flooding than normal, 

the kids enjoyed the canoe more than ever.  

I don't know why, but I sure love watching Jotham work.  Even sunday mornings, dressed in shirt and tie filling buckets of water in an attempt to keep the house dry.   You can't see it, but there was a pool of water at his feet.

...and speaking of water, it put a quick standstill on the fence.  Jotham was making good progress and teaching some valuable work ethic lessons to the kids, until the floods came.

  Hyrum learned how to dig hole using the same post hole digger as 6 generations of Hatch men, there's a whole lot of heritage in that post hole digger!

We celebrated 16 years together with a temple/lunch date.

.  We also spent several weekends at the soccer field this spring, but for some reason, I never think about taking pictures.  Spring soccer is always cold and wet, but especially wet this year (and I ask myself as I sit under an umbrella, wrapped in a blanket, why seven year olds even have to play the downpour?) and maybe that's why I never think about getting the camera out.   But as I scroll through my cell phone pictures I, never the less, find lots of self-ies of bored kids at soccer games:

 We also attended numerous orchestra concerts for both for Mark and Hyrum, (I did actually take pictures, but none of which are worth posting).  During Hyrum's end of year concert, I was pleasantly surprised because after almost 5 years of mostly torturous music events,  I was starting to enjoy the music, they were actually, finally, starting to sound pretty decent.  Hallelujah!  And then, as luck would have it, he doesn't have enough room in his schedule to take all the classes he wants and he opted to learn guitar and take choir next year and quit orchestra.  Kind of have mixed emotions about that.   

 Pinewood derby's are almost always monumental.

Hollie was fun to watch dance this year.  She was the only one in her class that could do the center splits the entire year, she's a pretty good little dancer!

I'll admit I was more than a little excited when she finally decided she'd worn her elastic hair band bracelets long enough, after weeks and weeks of wearing the whole family's elastic hair band collection on her wrist, she finally took them off the day after dance pictures and was surprised to see suntan lines and thought something was horribly wrong with her wrist.

But the most exciting event this spring would definitely be my parents homecoming!

We counted down for weeks and weeks! 

Seth and Suzanne conveniently hosted us all at Suzanne's parents house in Salt lake City and we went right over after I picked them up at the airport. 

this is how they say - Handsome in the Philippines. 

Mom's telling us all about her souvenir quilt she had custom made.

Six Grandbabies were born while they were gone.

Those toddlers weren't too interested in these new strangers, Grandma had to chase them down...

 but the babies didn't mind and Grandma was on cloud nine.

It is so good to have them home!