Dragonboat Races

Nate joined HOSA (Health Occupations Students of America) his sophomore year.  One of the events that he got to go to was the dragonboat challenge. YMCA hosted the event at Lake Woodlands.  They spent a day doing several different challenges, and one of them was racing dragonboats.  Nate was the drummer in his dragonboat.  They did really well in the competition, but didn't win first place, but they sure had a lot of fun.

 

Young Men's

    Nate had an eclectic group of young men that were in his Teacher's quorum with him.  The leaders did a good job of finding a diversity of activities for them to keep them all happy, especially since there were kids that hated any physical activity mixed in with kids who were football players and kids who loved video games and those who didn't so much. Nate almost always looked forward to going to activities.                     

Ellie's 18th Birthday

For Ellie's 18th birthday, she wanted to go on a trip with her friends. She decided that since there was an apartment she could use for free in Austin, that she would take her friends to Austin for the weekend.  I got to be the chaperone.  They went up on Saturday morning and went to brunch at Snooze.  Then they went to Lady Bird Lake to ride paddleboards with her friends.  That evening, they got all dressed up and went to a nice restaurant in downtown Austin for sushi.

On her actual birthday, she invited a ton of friends over and had a big cookie cake. (She specifically asked me to put something funny on it). 

Happy birthday Ellie!  She brings so much happiness to our lives.  She is always kind and grateful to us.  She says thank-you as soon as you do something nice for her.  She keeps her room and bathroom clean.  She is really good and calming Joe and I down when we get worked up about something- usually by pointing out "It's not that deep."  She's very funny and pretty cheeky.  She's the best burper we have by a landslide.  She's everybody's friend and easily joins social situations where she makes everyone feel comfortable and also helps them have a good time.  She works hard at her grades and does really well, but doesn't stress everyone out as she does it.  She's buddies with most of her teachers and with her counselor and some of the AP's.  She definitely has a silver tongue and knows how to use it to make you feel good and to get what she wants.  We will have a big whole in our daily lives when she moves off to college next year!
 

National Merit Commended Scholar

When Ellie took the PSAT her junior year, she did really well.  She ended up being recognized as a commended scholar. They had a special recognition ceremony for her at the school.  Amazing job Ellie!

 

Ellie's High Jump Junior Year

Ellie trained hard the summer after her sophomore year with Coach Ray in preparation for having an amazing jumping season her junior year.  Shortly after school started, her coach let her know that he was moving to coach jumping in Arkansas, so he wouldn't be around to help her this season.  That was pretty devastating to her, but she had trained hard so she felt like she could still do really well this next season.  She spent the fall going to the gym and working on jumps when she could.  Then we traveled to Lubbock and University of Houston for indoor meets.  Shortly after that, the outdoor school track season started. She worked really hard, but she never felt as confident this season as she had last season and she didn't go as far this season.

She also started the season doing long jump so that she had two events for college recruiters.  It ended up being really hard to do the two events because often she had to run between events and she would just be exhausted by the end of one of them.  She stopped doing long jump after a few meets.

She had a lot of fun this season, especially with her high jump friends!
 

Ellie's Senior Year

We blinked and Ellie is a senior!  She's super excited about almost being done and moving on with life.  We are not quite ready! First day of school:

Picture for her senior banner:

A big head for track competition season.

A fun exercise they did in seminary one evening.

 

Ellie's tour of Texas A&M

Ellie went on a tour of TAMU in early October.  She was already in and accepted to the Business major, so she knew if she liked it that she could go there.  We decided just to go on the business tour, and Adam said he would meet us at the business building and also go on the tour with us. While we were on the business program tour, Adam told Ellie a little about his TRIP program and she thought she might be interested in that.

After the business program tour, we rented bikes and Adam showed us several of the rec centers.  We got someone to show us around one of them, and then we found the one that had the gymnastics gym in it.  There was no one at the front desk there, so we gave ourselves a tour until a nice professor saw us and opened up the gymnastics gym so Ellie could look inside. 

  

   

Then we went on a dorm tour, and Michael met up with us.  Afterwards we saw Michael's house and met all his roommates.  We also went to a not-very-good burger joint and Adam made us great meme faces when we were trying to take a selfie picture.

 

Homecoming 2023

Homecoming started this year with a parade.  Ellie was on the track team float.

Nate was on the wrestling float.

Ellie reluctantly agreed to let me make her a mum.  Then she wore it to school on the day of the homecoming game.

For homecoming, she went with a group of friends down to Galveston.  They went on Friday night before the game was over and stayed until Sunday.  Some of the people that went had dates and some were dating, however Ellie did not have a date, and she wasn't interested in anyone in her group. This is the whole group.  On Saturday evening they got dressed up in their formal attire, and the boys put on Hawaiian shirts.

They went to a nice dinner together at the Grotto Restaurant.  A couple of days before the formal event, the girls had all gotten together and gone to Trader Joe's and gotten a bunch of flowers and everyone made themselves a bouquet to hold.  It was a lot of fun and the house smelled amazing for a couple of days!

Nate also went to Homecoming. He went with a group that included some sophomores he knew from church.  He decided he wanted to get dressed up super formal so he found a tux we had and got a nice bow tie to wear with it.