A Birthday Celebration

Greetings,
A year ago we celebrated Hayden's birthday with his good friends in Seattle - eating and playing at Discovery Park. This year, Hayden has a new group of friends and many of them were able to join him for his birthday (though he misses and talks about his Seattle friends as well). We all met up at the secondary school to play basketball on the outdoor courts and tag on the playground, which was new for most of the kids who do not come to the secondary school often. Along with a lot of water, juice, and 7up, we ordered pizza to be delivered to the playground from the campus pizza shop, Pizza Inn. Later we headed to our house for chocolate cupcakes, more water, and a ping pong tournament. That evening Hayden said that the party had been awesome. If you have a group of boys, a ball or two, and a park or playground, you pretty much have a good, sweaty time. The boys were energetic, funny, and active. One of the coolest parts of our lives at the moment is the various nationalities and backgrounds of our kids' friends - Canadian, Filipino, American-Lebanese, Indian, South African, Ghanian-American, English ... Kids love to play - wherever they might be from - and they generally like pizza and chocolate too!

We are wrapping up our year. We have two weeks of school left, including final projects and tests and a lot of grading and report writing! School is done for the students on June 16, but we have one additional week of reports, meetings, and packing up for the summer. We are officially done on June 23. We will stay until June 29 when we head off for the summer.

Thanks for reading.