It's me...Mrs. Burch.

And we're all back in school. The summer DID fly by, as it tends to do, but we're all officially and happily installed back into our "early-to-bed..." routine which feels great.
(except for me, obviously. midnight isn't terribly early)

My five kids are attending five different schools this year.

Yeah....good luck to us.
Bret ventured into the land of lockers and gym clothes at the middle school, Tate's joining 20 or so of his fellow smarty-pants kids in a G/T magnet class at a different school, Whitney is my buddy out in Kimberly, and Abby's living it up in Kindergarten locally. Kyle starts preschool next week and has no idea, really. I hope he's alright going along with that plan.

Whitney had a birthday!

The great number EIGHT, and was glad to finally get that coveted oreo cake and use the letter candles she picked out several months ago.

We celebrated her big day and the official end of the summer with a big screen movie on the back of the house under the stars with a bunch of friends.

After her pyro-brother almost burned the house down trying to fill and light the tiki torches, we enjoyed the movie, the company, the popcorn, the great weather and the chaos.

Summer, we'll see ya in another 9 months.

We've got some fact families to catch up on.

It's good to be Mrs. Burch again. I'm teaching K-5 Music and Computers full-time in Kimberly this year. This kind of came up out of nowhere, but I'm really excited to be there, and love it. We really feel like (while a significant sacrifice in many ways) it is a huge blessing, and is working out how it's supposed to be.
Gotta love faith.

My classrooms have been fun decorating projects. The computer lab is decked out in giant keyboards and CDs hanging from the ceiling.

I went with polka-dots in there. Why? Well, pretty much because I had NOTHING two days before school started and then found some circular placemats and they seemed to help de-drab the orange burlap-ish wall that I had to work with in the front of the room.

My theme suddenly morphed into
"D.O.T.S - Discovering Our Technological Surroundings."

Love it. I've got dots candy, dot numbers on the computers, dot stickers for management, "dots of rules," and "dots of fun things" planned. It ended up working out to be really fun!

I share the music room with another teacher and it's {AH!} way fun. I get to be Mr. Rowader! More on that later. I'm so tired. After I lost Tate this afternoon and got in a car accident on the way home !?!?! (all is well, not serious - except for the bashing in of the other lady's car that I did with my front bumper when I tried to change lanes while she was hanging out in my blind spot) then with soccer practice and "missing school supplies" shopping, when we finally got home at 8 I realized we should have started sooner.

p.s. Guess how many out of 150-ish kids that came through my class today thought that a MONITOR was actually a COMPUTER.

About 149.

apricots schmapricots

I got really tired of the apricot slime underneath my fingernails yesterday, so being that we're now neck deep in the August of Kerrianne, I enlisted the assistance of my aspiring baker boy and we accumulated all that we needed to attempt a Bakerella.
This one.

Granted, ours don't look nearly as perfect, but considering I tend to shy away from such projects, I counted it as a serious victory. Everyone at Office Max and the kids school enjoyed them as well. Oh, and we ate about 10 of them. We have since run out of candy bakes, but have great plans on making more for the first day of school. That and about 20 more gallons of apricot syrup.

My girls, the giving in and the Apricots...

First let me preface this post by apologizing if you read both of my blogs and/or follow my facebook rantings. You must really be interested in my life if you do, so...WOW, thanks. I'm flattered.
But honestly. As you know, most of these pictures are repeats now...posted on all three.
K, so sorry, but they ARE cute, and it's my blog, so I'm okay with it.

Whitney asked for a picture of herself in her new favorite shirt that she got for school. So, I agreed and we brought her "Little White Dress" that was going to be used in a photo shoot anyway before her baptism. I figured it was as good a time as any and off the three of us trotted.

True story: Abby is usually QUITE awkward in front of the camera and REALLY hard to photograph. Thankfully, she's a sucker for phrases reminding her of how she snores at night and her feet smell. These things (while really quite un-true) do cause her to produce a legitimate smile.

I'm thinking of printing this up on 24x36 canvas and never take it down from their room. Maybe it will help them remember how much they do love each other when they'll be tempted not to in about 5 years. (or sooner?? heaven help us.)

After dinner, we meandered over to a ward member's home to pick some apricots that were said to be spouting in mass quantities from their tree. This statement was ABSOLUTELY accurate. We made the tiniest ding in it and STILL ended up with probably fifty pounds of apricots.

Everyone helped (to some extent) and we exhausted much effort in using various methods of getting them off quickly without letting them fall.

I refrained from using inappropriate language at my husband in front of the nice old couple but REALLY got irritated when he started (and repeated) shaking the tree. They're little but they pack a punch and really HURT when they hit you on the back of the head.

Kyle played on the swings, and took the liberty of watering the rock garden when no one was looking.

We came home, tucked and kissed everyone into bed, whereafter we tip-toed downstairs and tried our hands at making Apricot Freezer Jam. No fresh lemons handy, and not enough sugar, so we used bottled lime juice and only (?) ended up with 80 ounces or so. Oddly enough, the basket still appears untouched.

It's now 4:45. I should probably go to bed before the sun comes up.

altered plans, wedding jams...

Last Friday, I got a rather last-minute call back on a wedding bid I did a couple of weeks ago. It was for a wedding that night.

It surely seemed worth the finagling of plans and so after some shuffling, I gathered my gear and a trusty assistant and headed out in the drizzly conditions for the occasion.


It turned out to be such a great time! We all got along schnazzily.
The families and bride & groom were awesome and the wedding party was really fun to work with.

I thought I'd post a couple of the images on here, since I seem to be significantly slow in getting the editing done on the pics from our big trip last month.

More soon. Really. I promise.

Bruises + Opportunities + Water = Girls Camp 09

per prior warning, here's "the rest" of the Girl's Camp pics.
WHAT an awesome gaggle of people I had the pleasure to be working with.

Booya! Tri 5, we're alive.

A fun new twist was added this time for my Tri #5.

When I recruited some friends several months ago..it slowly morphed into
Girl's Weekend in Poky 2009.
It was great fun. Including (but not limited to) the flat tires, forgotten essentials, searching for and leaving certain restaurants, sleeping pills, disappearing lemonades, bouncing on the bed, waiting for rides, getting locked out of our room, the list goes on, but I'll spare you...

The race itself was awesome, and I'm so proud of my lil' recruits who (whilst thinking I was crazy) still committed to doing it, trained hard, and didn't give up.

They all did AWESOME!

Because we were almost all lacking family support personnel, I don't have as many pictures as I normally would. I swiped the first two from Julie (whose husband was there) and only had enough battery in my camera for these two shots at the hotel the night before.

Can we say..."what was IN that lemonade?"

...and I'm obviously (see previous post) having fun capturing my subjects mid-air.

The best part about the whole thing was learning how to fix a flat on my Suburban.
Seriously...how did I think I could ever do that alone?
Enrichment leaders everywhere...why isn't learning this task a SERIOUS midweek activity?
I could probably teach the rotation on the GMC YukonXL if you need me.

The worst part about the whole thing was just a moment ago when I saw the email that said I was FOURTH in my age group. FOURTH!!! One minute faster or whatever, and I'd have gotten that cool medal? This amidst the nausea, stomachache, getting kicked by and trying to pass the scissor-side-kickers in the pool, the wind blowing my bike almost over and sending the (ahem) drainage shooting sideways out my nose, pedaling on my clips with my shoes off because I couldn't feel my feet, I mean REALLY...next year - I better get the medal.