Five Brown Kids

I saw this photo online of the dam between Falls Lake and the Neuse River.  I walk, bike, hike or kayak around this area almost every day so I loved this birds eye view.

My last kid is finished with preschool. I started dropping off kids back in 2003 and finished in 2019. That’s a lot of preschool drop offs.  St. Andrews runs a fantastic preschool. The director is full of enthusiasm and energy. She created the most amazing story time room that changed themes each month.  Blythe’s teachers loved her dearly. And so many fun activities and so much art!  On the last day they had a little program with singing and marching to the graduation music and cake. The director mentioned what each kid wanted to do in the future and Blythe would like to be a doctor and live in Nova Scotia.  Blythe is headed to kindergarten in two months!! 

Taye’s elementary school class had a little reunion on Sunday. Twenty five kids showed up! Some of the kids I didn’t recognize at all - they had changed so much- some looked exactly the same. Kids looked around the school and reminisced, Ms.Martin made an announcement on the sound system, they talked to some teachers and played four square out on the playground. Childhood is coming to an end. 

Jaxon’s AAU team travelled to Indiana for an Under Armour tournament. Won first three games and lost fourth in the championship game.  They flew, stayed at hotels, ate out and generally had a great time. I love Jaxon’s enthusiasm and passion for this game and all the amazing opportunities -  and I love his coach who is equal parts tough, encouraging and fun! Win, win, win!!   (I refer back to this difficult decision ...) 

Carleen bought these photos and they round out my pictures perfectly. Big group dinners every night (only a few broken glasses) and Tyrone and Blythe climbed the waterfall with the Fosters. 

Blythe’s preschool hosted a wonderful Mother’s Day concert and luncheon. So fancy - so much effort into decorations and gifts. Preschool rocks!  I had such a great Mother’s Day. Tyrone was on call so the kids totally stepped up to the plate and made me feel so loved.  I work really hard to take good care of them and it was so lovely to feel appreciated. Scotia orchestrated a delicious breakfast which Taye suplemented with fresh coffee, flowers and chocolate he purchased himself. They made me stay in my room and then brought up this amazing spread - I shared!   I made plans to spend the afternoon at the pool with pizza for dinner. I picked up Derick and some of Taye's friends joined us too. The boys played serious pool basketball for hours. The girls swam. It was a happy afternoon with my favorite people.  So delighted with my often stressful, sometimes careless, mostly messy, very expensive, but fantastic, interesting, fun, talented and handsome kids...

This is such a fun story.  When I was a junior at BYU a local stock art/photo company contacted Dawn in Student Relations and asked for names of a few brown students on campus who could model for a photo shoot. (Provo/Orem was ridiculouly white and they were having a hard time finding diverse models)  Dawn gave them my name and I gathered a few friends for a first fun photo shoot behind the Maeser building.  Over the years Tyrone and I did a few shoots.  Intially we were paid in photos, but later they paid $25 an hour after you signed away your rights to the photos.

Oh man.  Tyrone was on his way to work early one morning last week - a few miles in he felt the steering was a little wonky, but pulled the car back into the lane and assumed it was user error.  A few minutes later he was passing a portion of the highway connecting 540 to I-40 at around 6 am when he tried to switch lanes and the steering totally went out of control.  He says it took over.  He went flying off the highway at 70 miles an hour, crossed the grassy median, went under the metal guard rail and stopped, miraculously, on the shoulder of opposing traffic.  He was unharmed, no one else was hit, the airbags did not deploy.  He was so incredibly lucky.  It should not have ended so well. The car mostly sustained heavy scratches from the guard rail and is totaled because repairs would cost much more than the value of his 7-year-old car.  We were planning that he would drive it for two more years and hand it on to one of the boys so a new ...

I took Georgia and Blythe to NC State Farm Days.  I've been going since 2004 ( see more here ) and it's one of my favorite mothering days each year.  It was not too cold or rainy or too hot.  Just right for wandering around and checking out all the baby animals and eating famous  NC State ice cream  at the end.