Sisters at Grindstone

 Sam took the girls to Grindstone while James and I were doing something else! Ha!

Leah made a rock pile: 

Soccer!

Leah did soccer again! She's graduated from the little kids team (where it was co-ed, 4 on 4, and no goalie) to a U8 girls team that plays 7 on 7 with a goalie. They won a game! (Maybe two 😂)

At the first practice with the new team, Leah introduced herself as “Little Cheetah,” and voila! Everyone called her little cheetah for the rest of the games.

She was sick and unfortunately missed the last game of the season. Sam took these photos!

Middle School Band Night

 Amelie & the rest of the middle schoolers got to play with the High School Band at Hickman for middle school night. They were out so late!

Sam sent me a video. You can see her smack dab in the middle of the frame. 

There were a lot of instructions!

Grace Potter Concert

I was wondering why I didn't make a blog post about this & when I sat down to finally do it, I realized it was because I didn't take any good pictures. But here you go anyway!

Continuing our recent streak of winning tickets (& also Sam's rich history / unbelievable good luck), I won tickets to see Grace Potter for BXR's birthday bash this year. We went ahead & bought 2 more tickets so all four of us could go. Sam & James stood up front & Amelie & I thought it was too noisy and went and sat in the back. 

James did not want to cooperate with the photo, though he had a good time. It was a little chilly, definitely fall, but not bad at all. We didn't think you could bring chairs to Rose (it was against the rules the last time we were there - not too long ago!) but turns out you can. 

Video: 

School Picture Day

Why are school pictures so expensive?? $60 by the time all 3 kids got a digital download so I'm not breaking the law by posting them here. I almost didn't do it & just got the cheapest package (which would have been $8 each, $24 total) but I really do want to have them (they show their personalities so well even if it does crack me up how obviously little time the photographer spends on each one) & I'd rather keep them all collected in the same place in the event I want to go back and do some kind of compilation. 

Leah is in the 1st grade - 6 years old with Ms. Blades

James is in the 5th grade - 11 years old with Mr. Gray

And Amelie is in the 8th grade - 13 years old - last year of Middle School at JMS

All of these look SO REMARKABLY EERILY SIMILAR to last year!

I said to Sam (after he said "I thought you weren't going to buy them") watch the school district change companies next year.

Concert with Leah

Yesterday afternoon, an email went out from HR saying the library had 2 tickets to see the Liverpool Legends (the Beatles cover band) saying they’d raffle them off at 4:30 - so on a whim I put my name in the hat and I won! 

In retrospect, this was maybe dumb because James who would have really liked it was on a school trip, and then I'd forgotten Amelie had other plans (which meant she couldn't go & also that she couldn't watch Leah so Sam & I could go), so I took Leah! I did feel the need to tell everyone we knew that we ran into (and there were several folks) that I'd won the (really great seats) tickets so they didn't think I spent $70 so Leah could go to the show! Here's a photo from the advertisements: 

We got there early-ish & parked in a parking garage downtown and walked to the Missouri Theatre. And here are some low-light photos I took:

It was super fun! We did spend some time out in the hallway, where we could still hear just fine & Leah talked me into Reece's Cups from the concession stand. There were costume changes, & bubbles for "Yellow Submarine" & Leah sung along & did the twist. We left a little early!

Haircut

Leah’s hair got so long! It’s even longer than this, actually, since the braid shrinks it up some:

She is not a fan of having her hair washed, or detangled, or fixed at all, however. So I cut it. She moved around quite a bit during the haircut even though I was working so fast! and then the curls make it hard to see if it is even, too (so it’s probably not). She’s still never had a professional haircut. I wonder what a hairdresser would say!