Euphonium player...getting so good!

 Claire has been working hard at learning how to play the Euphonium. She has improved so much since the beginning of the year and we are super impressed with how well she has picked up on playing an instrument!

Time with the bestie!

Claire had her bestie, Karsen, overnight last weekend. It was so good to see these girls get to spend some much needed time together. They have no classes together in 6th grade so this one-on-one time is so special. they did face masks and foot scrub socks...

worked on making God's eye project with sticks and yarn...

                       and got some time in the water. Claire chose to take a dare and jump in the pool!

Thankfully, the hot tub was open and ready for them to jump in when Claire came out of the pool very chilled!

 

Claire's Christmas party: Park time

Claire had 5 friends overnight for a Christmas party. It was suppose to happen on Dec 18 but one of the girls had to be home on quarantine due to possible exposure to COVID-19 at school. We changed the date and all of the girls could come. One girl had to leave for a few hours during the party so we took the rest of the girls back to their old stomping grounds...Black Elementary. It was so funny to watch them! They all thought the basketball hoop had been lowered and they couldn't believe they could stand and touch the top of the monkey bars! They definitely enjoyed reliving some of their past!

We all got in and played some Gaga ball! This was a first for Jeff and I but we had a blast!

I just love this group of girls! I pray that they stay close and can be each others rock as the challenges begin to develop.

 

Claire's Christmas party: Game time!

We had a few games for the girls to play and they were all great sports! The first game was getting a few minutes to look at the items on a tray ad a team. Then each team had 2 minutes to write down everything they remembered. Everyone seemed to like this challenge!

The girls had to stand on the ladder and drop candy canes onto the tinsel. This proved to be harder than it looked!

Then they had to take turns wearing oven mitts and unwrapping as many Hershey kisses as they could in one minute before passing the mitts to the next person on their team!

Who can be the tallest reindeer? Two girls on the team had to blow up balloons while the third girl, the reindeer, had to stuff the balloons into pantyhose. When the timer went off, they had to stop and put the hose on their head and see which reindeer had the tallest antlers! Super fun to watch this one!

How big is Santa's beard? The girls put vaseline on their chins and had to go to a bowl of cottonballs to try to collect as many as they could without using their hands. This was another fun one to watch but was the girls' least favorite game.

For this game, the girls had to follow instructions to draw a picture of a house with a tree, a wreath on the door, and Santa and his reindeer on the roof of the house...all while keeping the plate on the top of their head! They seemed to enjoy this one and had fun looking at everyone's artwork in the end!

The final game was the saran ball. This was fun to watch and even though the gifts were just little things, most of the girls said this was their favorite game!

 

Claire's Christmas party: Cookie competition

The girls drew names for teams and came up with plans of what kind of cookies to make out of sugar cookie dough. They started with making their own dough.

While the dough was chilling, the girls ate lunch and got time to chat!

Then while one group worked on their cookies, the other group worked on making a gingerbread village (a complete fail!)

Then the groups switched jobs.

Claire's group made these cool Santa faces and tried to make trees out of round cookies and frosting. I think the frosting was too soft so it didn't really look like what they were going for. Very creative though and proud of all of them for working as a team and working hard to bring an idea to fruition.