Renaisance, Stained Glass and Running

Emilee's class had a day long "Renaisance Festival" on Friday. All of the kids dressed up in period costumes and participated in activities and games. We bought the dress at a local costume store, but Emilee made her maiden headpiece!

Carter enjoyed hanging out up at the school for a while, especially since he got a cupcake for breakfast!

These are Emilee's friends. The four of them had a "store" in the "mideval guilds" portion of the day. We made dragon scales (a type of cookie) and the girls sold them, along with handmade bracelets and keychains. The girls had a blast selling and even made a small profit. I want to toot Emilee's horn here for a minute. The girl standing directly beside Emilee is blind (I'll call her Mary). Mary is mostly in special day classes, but is in choir with Emilee. Emilee has befriended Mary and has put TONS of effort into taking care of her every chance she gets. Mary's aide was sharing with me on Friday what a blessing Emilee has been to her and Mary. Emilee includes Mary in school in ways Mary has never been included before. Emilee often takes Mary from place to place at school, and sees to it that Mary is safe and knows what to do during choir (prior to having Emilee as a friend, Mary wouldn't let go of her aide's arm to do ANYTHING). At their guild store, Emilee brought Mary up to the front and had her doing the cash register. She helped her take the money, told her the kind of bill it was, and talked her through counting back the change. In this trying season of pre teen selfishness we've been dealing with lately, it was really touching to sit back on Friday, and watch Emilee be so kind and conscious of someone else.

Emilee's awesome history teacher also gave an extra credit project last week...find a church with stained glass windows and write a summary of the scene depicted in the window. First things first...it's HARD to find a church with stained glass windows nowadays. Many churches are in newer buildings now, built more "warehouse" style, and the time and cost of doing stained glass windows seems to have been skipped. We did find a local catholic church that had many beautiful stained glass windows and here are two of them.

This one is a scene of young Jesus in the temple with the teachers after he's "lost" to Mary and Joseph. The caption to this one was "Did you not know that I must be about my father's business?"

This one was of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus. The caption read "Joseph took the child and his mother by night and retired into Egypt."

And today was the 5k run put on by our school district. Joshua ran in this last year, just a handful of weeks after he made a resolution to lose some weight and get in shape. This year both Joshua and Trevor ran the race as Trevor has joined his school's Running Club, and his entire club ran it.

Before the race started...

Trevor making his sprint to the finish...

Joshua and Trev after finishing...

Trevor ran the 5k in 32 mins, 28 secs. Joshua came in right behind Trevor at 33 mins, 31 secs. Joshua kept a steady pace, running the entire race and he cracked up because Trevor would sprint some and then walk some...and Trev still managed to come in just ahead of him! Poor Joshua is wiped this afternoon and Trevor is going strong like nothing at all happened this morning. Ahhh the resilience and energy of children hahaha!