Prom and soccer

A lot of big stuff happened in April!!



Like Abigail turning 18!! (This was maybe my favorite celebration ever, we invited all of her friends in the stake back to our house after "Mormon Prom" and everyone sang to her and devoured a Costco sheet cake). 

Abigail chose her dress based on one that she could easily swing-dance in and be twirled around someone's head (she wore bike shorts underneath); Juliet chose hers based on one she could redesign endlessly with big swathes of fabric (I think she told me she can make 80 different configurations?). 

Kids in our ward taking photos at our house before the dance. (It was really cold!)

Love this outtake of Juliet:

We also had the Pinewood Derby the day after I flew home from Utah! On the same day as Abigail's birthday and a couple days before prom--it was a very busy week.

Matthew, Luke, and Juliet really had fun soccer seasons this spring--Jules hasn't played for a few years but her friends talked her into playing on their rec team and she had a blast. Luke's team won the tournament, woohoo!! And Matty scored a LOT of goals so fortunately I am no longer paying him $1 per goal. 

Juliet's team had a hard loss to a really good team and their coach (our good friend Aaron) gave them the best post-game pep talk that also ended with some advice for prom night, because we had like 90 minutes to get home from the game, clean up, and get kids out the door for prom!

They had such a fun night!! 

 

End of the school year milestones

Oh man, so much happening at the end of the school year! I'm not even going to try to keep it in in order. Above: Luke, Abigail, and Isaac all competed in the state piano competition AND they all made it to the finals, woohoo! (Note: we did not actually *compete* in the finals because it was scheduled when we were out of town. Bummer, but it was amazing that they made it so far!)

Abigail competed on the school robotics team, which was a TON of time (she didn't get home until 7 pm every day during build season), made lots of new friends, and had a great experience! We loved watching her compete (especially Matthew, who was VERY into waving flags, yelling chants, and sporting badges). 

Abigail also went through a pretty rigorous interview process for her summer job, working full-time as a camp counselor for the local parks department! 

Luke had his fifth-grade promotion ceremony and was on the 6th grade!

These guys are the best of buddies. 

And Matty finished up three years of preschool!

He has been with the same teacher for all three years (she came back from maternity leave for the last day!) and Nathan had her before that and man I don't know what we are going to do without her this year!!

These three boys had an awesome spring soccer season! (And I may or may not have been hugely relieved when Juliet and Isaac decided not to run track in the spring...)

And we started hosting post-pandemic birthday parties again!!

And ran our first post-pandemic half-marathon!



And got to chaperone our first post-pandemic field trip! (This is our cute little neighbor who is in Nathan's grade and Matty was soooo happy to see him!)


And suddenly it was the last day of school...

And on to summer!

 

Fall sports

After the last couple of years, it felt kind of amazing--and crazy--to be back full swing with fall sports! (Last year Juliet and Isaac both ran track and cross-country, but we opted to take a pass on soccer for the younger kids since it was much closer contact than the running sports.)

Juliet got up at 6:30 ALL SUMMER LONG, Monday-Saturday, for two hours of daily pre-season practice! Whew! It was a lot for all of us, but gosh did it pay off! In her very first regular season meet she ran a sub-25 5k on a very difficult course (it's the NCAA championship course). 



She worked her tail off all season and finished her last meet with not only a new PR for the 5k, but also a new mile PR mid-race!! So so so proud of her. She qualified for club season but had kind of a nagging hip thing and so her coach advised her to sit club season out so that she didn't aggravate it further. 



On that note, I loved her coaching staff so much!! They were so focused on the girls' health and started the very first parent meeting by talking about the importance of sleep, nutrition, and recovery, and reminded us multiple times to get our daughters' ferritin levels tested and really keep an eye on their physical health, not just push them to go faster and harder. I really appreciated all the work the coaches did in pre-season to build team community and really cared for the girls as people, not just athletes (which is a tall order when you're coaching a team that has been state champs so many times!). 



One day the coaches changed practice to required attendance at the city meet for all 3 of the middle schools so that the teams could show up for the middle school kids. Did I cry? Of course. 

Isaac also had a phenomenal season. He worked really hard (his primary motivation might have been ensuring that he could outrun the girls who were not shy about their crushes on him and came up at the end of every meet to compare their times to his) and ended up chopping four minutes off his PR by the end of the season. 



I don't think that anything makes me happier than watching my kids exceed their own expectations and the joy that they feel at surpassing what they thought was previously possible. 



Matthew was really into going to the XC meets and I loved seeing how excited he was to cheer everyone on!



Here's Isaac at one meet reaching out to give Matty a high-five. Oh gosh, my heart. 

Luke was so excited to get back on the soccer field! Luke is definitely there for the running and the soccer is kind of second, so I'm excited to watch him in XC next fall. He's so fast! He got so much better at ball handling this year and had a great season. 

And got absolutely SOAKED at his last regular-season game!!

I only have one good picture of Nathan from the whole season (so hard to get good soccer pics!) but this was a great one of him playing goalie and blocking every shot! Nathan also had a really good season and in typical Nathan fashion made friends with every kid in the league. (We also had a lot of overlap with soccer and high school XC meets, so generally it was divide and conquer with one of us driving a couple hours away to Juliet's meet, another at the soccer field, and Isaac running over to the soccer field after XC practice since he mostly had weekday meets and Saturday practice.)

This was Matthew's first season of soccer and gosh he was so cute! He also has the distinction of being our only pre-K player to ever score goals during games--everyone else was totally there for the snacks, haha. Matty always referred to the opponents as the "bad guys team" so yeah that was fun trying to keep him quiet about that while quietly rephrasing it. 

Standard pre-K pack wandering around but not actually in front of the goal...

Bless their coach! Totally herding cats and he was a fantastic sport and made all those kids feel so special and wonderful. 

Matthew and Gus were on the same team and loved it!!

The older kids came to as many of Matty's games as they could. Total entertainment for us all. Nathan would often pack a giant bag of snacks just for the spectators (and like 50 Hot Wheels cars). 

Cheers to another great season!