The girls and I did some back to school shopping on our last days while Christian was off to work. Caitlyn spent a lot of the time trying to finish her summer homework. She had a lot to do and dragged her feet with it, so she pretty much spent the last days of her summer working like crazy to complete all of it.
The only time off she got was when she decided that she wanted to volunteer again at the HEI camp as a camp counselor. Unfortunately, it is always scheduled during the kids' last week of vacation, so they are unable (or unwilling) to do the whole week. The kids had school registration to attend on one of the days. But Caitlyn likes to meet a lot of the Chinese girls that come for the camp, plus she knocks out most of her service hours. Emily was not so interested in going because it doesn't seem like a very well run camp. We convinced her to at least attend on the first day so that Caitlyn can get comfortable with going without her afterwards. They usually meet some nice girls and try to keep communication with them for a while like pen-pals except they do it through WeChat.
Emily spent the last day of her summer, hanging out with a few friends at Castle Park.
I spent a lot of time in the first few weeks of August shopping for school supplies. Mostly for Christian's classes, although I did pick up a few things for our own kids. He needed a lot of things to set up his classroom.
I also had to set up new insurance for us. New health insurance through Christian's new job and also new car and home insurance because our old company was trying to jack up our rates.
The biggest thing to happen though was that Christian passed the last part of his TPA's (teacher performance assessments). He also completed his last Masters class. What a relief that was. Having to go to school to teach and come up with new curriculum and then come home to work on his own class work was definitely taking a major toll on him. Add in all the meetings and learning how everything works at the school, correcting and logging in homework and quizzes and it was quickly getting out of hand. His days have been really long, to say the least. But he finished his MA with all A's! He kept telling himself that he just needed to finish that last class with a B, but still did A work and got in all his assignments.
Emily joined back up with the Girls Soccer team at school. She will be a senior this year.
Caitlyn has decided to try out the Dual Enrollment program at school and is taking an extra 7th period RCC class two days a week. It's a pretty sweet deal since, the class is still held at her high school, she gets high school and college credit, no tuition and no added cost for books. I'm just a little worried that she has bitten off more than she can chew as she has a very demanding year ahead of her.
We've been without an organ all month since they took down our old one. We are supposed to get a Hauptwerk organ soon while they are building our new one. We've been trying to take the kids out to the stake center once a week so that they don't get out of practice too much but they aren't really progressing much in their lessons meanwhile.
That's pretty much the whole month. I'm sure I'm missing a few things, it's hard to remember everything when you only make one post a month. It's just been a bunch grueling, busy and hot days. I'm so ready for the summer heat to be over.
