Emily did well in a few classes and as usual, managed to pull her grades up at the last minute in several others. She swears that she has learned her lesson and will try harder next year to keep up her grades but I've heard it before and will believe it when I see it, as it has caused us no small amount of stress watching her skimming the line of passing and utterly failing classes.
Caitlyn has still been maintaining a 4.0 all year. She has had more homework than Emily had in Jr. High, so we are pretty pleased with her hard work. In fact, she, and few of her friends, were invited at the end of the school year to join a week long cyber security day camp held at Cal State San Bernardino. CSUSB received a grant from the National Security Agency and partnered with the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio to put our this weeklong free day camp.
Caitlyn was pretty excited. The cyber security camp taught them some of the basics of cybersecurity, they had guest speakers from Bank of America, Facebook and Google to name a few, they got to try their hand at hacking and protecting drones from being hacked and they had various obstacle courses they got to go through. They provided transportation to and from camp everyday from her school. Plus lunch and snacks while they were there. Plus, she got set up with a Raspberry Pi of her own at the end of the camp!
She didn't really get grouped with her friends but she met some new friends and looked forward to getting up going to camp each day. Now she has a tool to learn how to program. Hopefully she will take advantage of it and learn lots of neat and useful things.
--------Meanwhile, Emily stayed home and worked on trying to catch up on her piano. Now that her sister has kind of passed her up in their lessons, she seems more self motivated to catch up. I don't think it sits well with her that she is behind her sister in anything. She mostly stopped practicing regularly (not that we put that much work into it before) when she got into Jr. High. It was like pulling teeth to get her to practice. I usually regretted trying to make her and decided to just stop pushing. It wasn't as difficult to make Caitlyn practice still, although, it became less frequent when she went to Jr. High as well. Once they get issued those stupid Chrome books, we seem to lose all control of our kids.
Anyway, Caitlyn liked the idea of being ahead of her sister.
She also got a new bike. She bought it mostly by herself and with some help from Caitlyn. Caitlyn has outgrown her bike for some time now. We are not able to buy her a new bike at this time but she had enough money that she has earned and saved up to buy her own. She decided to contribute to her sister's new bike and inherit Emily's old bike instead since Emily has kind of outgrown hers as well. It worked out for the both of them as they are both happy with what they have now.
Plus, Christian taught her how to put her bike together and taught her some basics of maintaining her bike.
She loves tinkering mechanically with things so this was great for her. Plus, now she can maintain our bikes all by herself!
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The kids garden is doing much better this year, they got their first zucchini harvest, plus they have corn and melons growing.
It is also apple season, so we've been doing a lot with apples lately.
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Caitlyn gave her first sacrament talk on Father's Day. She did a great job and got so many compliments from people. Despite her nervousness, she spoke loudly and clearly.
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After a few weeks of hard work, Emily finally finished her first piano lesson (Alfred's Basic Piano Course Level 1A). Finally, on to 1B! Hooray! Hopefully, it won't take her another 9 years to finish the next level. She doesn't seem to mind it as much as before and she still has a little more to technically catch up to her sister. Hopefully she won't get lazy again if she catches up or once school starts back up. I guess only time will tell.
