June

June marked the end first grade for Teah. She had a great year and adored her teacher Mrs Noel. She achieved school awards for both academic achievement and citizenship (only one of which was given per gender per class). She also received classroom awards in just about every subject (except handwriting :) ). We are very proud of all her hardwork and the young lady she is becoming.

In June we also visited the zoo again, which in the summer months means spending a fair amount of the time cooling off at the splash pad.

In June Manu and I also celebrated our 10th anniversary. Some friends were kind enough to take the kids overnight for us and we enjoyed an evening in New Mexico. The next day they joined us with our kids and we participated in the annual Raft the Rio event. It is a fundraiser for the southwest environmental center and the idea is you build a boat/raft from recycled materials and float down the river. We had a blast and somehow out raft even managed to stay in one piece down the river. The greatest obstacle was that in some place there were sand bars that made the river super shallow. The sand bars both tried to tear apart our makeshift vessel and were exhausting to push the vessel through. Still it made for a great day and floating down the river in the deeper sections was quite relaxing (although the whole thing scared Marama quite a bit - apparently she did not think our vessel was very stable.)