Preschool Graduation

Ellie graduated from preschool today! For the first time...she still has two years of preschool left :) But hey, we'll use any excuse to have a party!!

In fact, all she wanted to do was party. She was pretty mad I made her stop to take a picture...even with her best buddy Iylie. She came around when I bribed her with a cupcake though :)

Here are the graduates and her besties:

 Marlee, Jacob, Ellie, Addy, Iylie and Greg 

 She sure loves being with these crazy kids!

Ellie won the award for Ms Sharing, because she is awesome at sharing!! She loves to share and make her friends happy. Such a sweet girl!

Ashley put together a video to document our fun preschool year, and the kids loved it!!

Here are the amazing moms who taught every week and made all the magic happen. Love these girls!

It was a fun year of preschool! We are really going to miss all of these amazing friends!!

Kindergarten Field Day

We promised Cole we would make it back to Iowa in time for Field Day at school. I'm so glad that we did after seeing his huge smile in these cute pictures Nicole took!

  

Cole has absolutely loved his time at Eason Elementary with his teacher Mrs. Rogers and all of his kindergarten buddies!!

And the goodbyes begin...

Cole's best friend, Kale Flint, left today. They are the first family of students to leave and we are so sad to see them go. Kale was such a good friend for Cole. I hope he can find friends as great as Kale in Illinois!

Back to Reality

We spent our last day at sea relaxing, playing games, eating, and attending the onboard entertainment. It was nice, but I'm ready to get home to my kiddos!! 

Before we go though, I think I need to post a gallery of our awesome towel animals :)

(Sorry Ben, you have a lame wife that didn't get any good pics of you with the towel animals and they were one of your favorite things)

Thanks for all of the fun Danna, Ryan, Nicole and Mike!! And thanks to my awesome hubby who made me leave my kids and have an amazing week long date :) I love you Ben!!!

Now it's back to the real world. 

Grand Turk

 Our last stop of the cruise was Grand Turk...which was not so grand in my opinion.

Sure, the view from the ship was spectacular! 

But up close it was pretty dirty and rundown...and the shopping was disappointing. 

 There also wasn't much to do there. We started out at the beach by the dock... 

...but soon decided to walk along the island to a beach where we were told the snorkeling was good. Once again the view was great, but the beach and the water were pretty dirty. The guys tried snorkeling, but it was so murky they couldn't see much of anything. The worst part was that you had to pay for a beach chair, so were laying in the dirty sand with all of the pricklys and ants. It wasn't my idea of paradise.

You could say we had gotten a little bored when this girly photo shoot began :)

Ben was pretty intrigued by this wall and all of the big waves crashing into it. It was pretty awesome.

I'm sure we would have enjoyed this island more if it had been before all of the other amazing ones, or on a day that wasn't so windy and murky. We did have a beautiful highlight at the end of the day as we left port (There is a rainbow if you can't tell)