Luau

The girls' dance teacher threw a luau in honor of her granddaughter's 1st birthday on Saturday. It was to be our girls' first performance. The other three girls had previously been in another recital just before we started lessons. We didn't really have costumes, but they borrowed some things from other dancers at the last minute. It was a bit stressful but it turned out really great.

The Keikis did 3 numbers: Pearly Shells, a poi ball routine from New Zealand and a Tahitian number called the Keiki Otea  (I think).

I was worried if the girls would be too nervous or scared to go up, but when it was their turn, they marched right up and did their performance. We were so proud of them. I was also a bit worried about their performance because I had been trying to get them to practice all week before the Luau, but since they have been taking their sweet time to do their homework, it left pretty much no time to practice. We had them cram in a bit of practice on Friday night and Saturday morning and they did it very grudgingly. But it definitely paid off because they did a lot better than they had on their Monday class.

There were two other groups of girls that performed as well. I only got to see some of the older girls' performance because we had to get our girls off and changed for their next performance in between dances.

We mostly missed the Junior Wahines because they went on right after the Keikis. All the girls did great though and it was a lot of fun. Plus the food was wonderful!

I had some trouble taking pictures of the girls dancing though because of the movement and my camera kept focusing on the plants in the front! I was a little upset that we didn't get some better pictures. Christian was doing video and that came out really good, so at least we have that...plus I got to watch the performances that we missed!

We did manage to take a couple of group shots of all the girls before they went on stage though.

Their costumes were so beautiful. In the end, the girls said that the performances was not so bad. They were really dreading it. They like to dance and they were excited about the costumes but performing in front of a ton of people was not  something they were looking forward to (to put it mildly). I asked them if they were still interested in continuing with their lessons and they definitely are, so it didn't traumatize them too much and they ended up having a lot of fun.

Accelerated Reader

The principal at the girls' school has decided to try to motivate the kids more between trimesters by recognizing students more often. Caitlyn was awarded as the highest point earner in the 2nd grade at her school for the accelerated reader program. Hooray!

A belated New Year's Post

Happy New Year...it's about mid month now, so that sounds about right for me. We spent the rest of our winter break as recluses. We were recovering from illness and too much holiday craziness. We only ventured out of the house when we absolutely had to.

Christian and I spent a great deal of our free time working on our videos and pictures. The kids spent most of their free time playing with new toys and video games. It was a win-win situation!

After the new year started though, Christian had to go back to work. I got the kids back on some kind of schedule so that returning to school wouldn't be such a shell shock. Emily actually did have some assignments from her teacher that she needed to complete, so she worked on that while Caitlyn read and did a little First in Math. They also went back to having to do piano practice...such that it is.

On top of that, Emily decided to do a science fair project this year. We had not had the opportunity up until now. Originally, I thought I could do a fun little project with Caitlyn too to introduce it to her. But as the days left until school would start back up started to dwindle away, I started to stress out about it and in the end, decided that I didn't need that kind of stress and decided to forgo the science fair for Caitlyn this year. She can start next year.

I have still been fighting with the kids to get back to a regular schedule and get their work done so that they could do whatever they wanted and it wasn't working out so well (we've been fighting with them on this since the end of Thanksgiving break actually and nothing has worked). I've been having a  pretty miserable time of it.

Anyway, Emily went to work with dad on one of the last days of vacation to work on her experiment and she has spent the last week, writing it up and finalizing it.

She had a lot of fun working on it. It is due on Monday and Christian is sure glad that it is all done with now because it took a lot of his extra time to help her with it.