Marching Band

It's not easy to be a varsity football player and be in marching band as well but both the older boys do it!  I'm glad they enjoy both activities.  Watching the marching band is right up my band geek/flag line girl alley.

Their show this year is Espionage and it's great as usual.  So far they have received a 1 rating at all three of their competitions with just the State Bandmasters competition left.

Band seniors 

Band Juniors

Yay for band parents who take more pictures than I do!

CHAMPIONS!

 Philip's football team was undefeated and made it to the division championship.  They played a great game, shut down the other team's star player and won the championship!  He was a pretty happy guy!

Final score:  Beef 26 Yellow Jackets 6

Congratulations on a great season Beef!

The Beef had great coaches and hard working kids.  Philip learned a lot about tackle football and got good reviews from the coaches on his work ethic.  He was the 1st string center all season and snapped for the "scout team" offense at practice too.  Pretty impressive for a kid playing his first year of tackle with kids who were on their fourth year on the tackle team!

Side note:  He isn't the first Beef champion in our family.  Check out this post about Sam's championship. Thomas didn't play for the Beef because the first year he was interested in playing football was 6th grade and I wasn't about to put him on a tackle team with no experience at all.

We Made it to the Orchard!

The softball team made it to the championship game (and won state!!) so we got the day off.  The littles and I took advantage and went to the orchard.

It was fun as always.  We picked three kinds of apples but refrained from picking pumpkins since we have so many at home. We just posed with some big ones instead!

They kids did all the things.

It won't be long before everyone is really too big for the orchard....

Family Football Night

My sisters, Greta and parents came to a home game a couple weeks ago.  We debuted the 6 year old hard hat Samuel big head!  His face when he saw the big heads after the game was priceless.  "I didn't know there were so many of them!"  (And he didn't know that there were 6 year old ones.)

It was Thomas's first varsity start so that was fun too.   At least we think it was his first start, it could have been the game Trent got hurt at...they all blur together for me.

In the Garden

School color flowers!

This big caterpillar was happy in the tomato bush.

Despite the cherry tomato plants growing into a big bush(y mess), we have had very few cherry tomatoes.  There were lots of flowers but not so many tomatoes and the ones we did get didn't turn red very fast.  I dried the whole harvest and picked a gallon of green ones to ripen inside because it was supposed to freeze.  The frost wasn't very hard so we didn't pull up the plants yet.  We'll see if we get any more red tomatoes or pick more green ones.

These purple cosmos have been growing since June and finally flowered.

And we accidentally grew TWENTY-ONE pumpkins!  This isn't all of them.  They grew in the field where we threw last years pumpkins.  We seem to be better at accidentally growing things than purposely growing them.

Volleyball for Julia

Julia decided to play junior high volleyball this year.  She hadn't played on a team since 3rd or 4th grade.  She played on the B team and enjoyed cheering on the A team as well.

They didn't have a ton of games but we were able to see two home games.  Go Julia!!

Homecoming Catch Up

When I requested Homecoming dance pictures this is what I got.

Thomas went stag and enjoyed himself.

Samuel took his good friend Kaysha.  She requested the all black outfit and provided the gold bow tie so they would look "snazzy".  That may have been Samuel's word and not Kaysha's.  They had a good time.

The dance was right after the homecoming game so no dinner date or class pictures ahead of time.  I liked the toned down Homecoming but I did not like the time crunch having the dance right after the game created. 

Down Two Teams!

 Nicholas finished up his flag football season!  He had fun and learned a lot.

The day before Nick's last game, one of the high school varsity linemen broke his hip bone.  He's a super nice kid, I teach with his mom and we're so sorry Trent got hurt...but it means Thomas moves up to full time varsity and won't play any more JV.  So now we're down to two teams to cheer on!