First Day of School

On August, 20th we started the first day of Third Grade and Kindergarten!  We have all been excited about this for quite some time! It is a bittersweet year for us beginning this new chapter of our lives having both boys in school. I was so hoping it would be better than Tate's first day of Kindergarten (absolutely awful) and it was! The nosy mom in me signed up to help with some PTA stuff on the first day of school just so I could be in the building if we had a runner in the Kindergarten wing. Thankfully, that was not the case and he went in, with some hesitation, but not too much. Here he is the morning of wearing a smile and his cars PJ's.

  The big cool third grader happily let me take his picture out front before we got in the car. The little one got cold feet for a few minutes and said he didn't want to go to school with Tate anymore and he would just stay home with me. We talked about it and he decided he would go but did NOT want his picture taken.

Here he is outside of the school, I snuck a picture. Looks nervous, doesn't he?

We made it in and he found his name tag. He looks bored in this pic, just a little nervous still...........

I finally got a smile when his cute, YOUNG, teacher greeted him.

I "happened" to walk by the cafeteria when his class was at lunch and sat with him for a few minutes. He was much happier and said he was having fun!

Oh yeah, and Tate did great too. Here he is with his cute, YOUNG, teacher Mrs Crawford.

And while walking the halls at meet the teacher we discovered that Tate made the wall art! You can see how excited he is about it.

Tate is 9!

Monday, August 20th, was Tate's 9th birthday. We took some friends to LaserQuest to play a couple of games, eat pizza, and have fun!

Tate on his birthday (also the first day of 3rd grade)

The Field and Stream Cake

Eating pizza

The party....bad picture but best I could get of 7 wild boys!

Actual birthday morning opening some presents that Nana sent

Colorado

We went to Colorado the week of the 4th. We left Denver to head up to the mountains for the week only to realize we didn't have a key to the condo! It belongs to David's uncles family so he had someone meet him an hour away to give him the key. This is most of the family standing outside wondering "how could we get in without a key?"

We got in and the kids wanted to go fishing.

Ai Pei had never fished before and she caught the first one!  She wanted to go back every day .

 We had heard about a 5K the family could run do in WinterPark. We all got excited, especially Tate, he really wanted the tshirt. We later found out we were mistaken and it was actually WinterPark Florida! So, we got creative and decided to have our own 5K. We called it the First Annual Dilling 5K and Fun Run.

Team TCU
Matt, Emily, Ella, and Lily

Team Texas
Nana and Tate

Team CU
David's cousin Dierdra and her boyfriend Chad, AKA Grant's new best friend

Team White
David's Aunt Judy and Tony, cousins Brett and Ai Pei

Team Blue
Papo Ron, Grant, Julie and David
( we all happened to be in blue, no real meaning behind blue)

The Starting line.....Tate is serious.

After a few yards Ella wanted me to hold her hand and walk with her . We had time to stop and take a picture. We weren't really competing, just looking at the gorgeous houses on the streets around the condo.

After Brett won the race we had a waterballoon tossing contest. My
Mother in law and I were the champions of each game!

David won the watermelon contest

One night we were there David, Tate and I went on a very long hike to a river. It was beautiful !

On Tuesday morning everyone, except me, went horse back riding at the YMCA of the Rockies.

I did go fly fishing with David one day. Not my sport but he liked having me there and I didn't fall down like someone did.
I like staying dry:)

On our way home we stopped in the village of WinterPark. We rode a gondola and Tate and David rode the Alpine Slide down the mountain. Tate loved it!

Getting off the Slide. Tate said next time we come he wants to ride it all day long!

Pictures of Spring

Disneyworld...the last day and a half

On Monday, Presidents Day, we went to Magic Kingdom. I had read that Friday -Sunday were the most crowded days at MK so we waited until Monday, forgetting completely about PD and most of central Florida was there! However, we got there right when it opened and had an hours worth of no lines and crowds in Tomorrowland.
Of course we had to get the obligatory picture in front of Main Street USA.



.....and the one at the entrance.

("Let the Memories Begin" was on every resort entrance, trash can, napkin,etc.)

One of the boys favorite rides was the cars.

Tate was my chaueffer

Grant and David were in the car behind us.

While David went to ride Space Mountain, the boys and I rode the Astro Orbiter. It went a little faster than we thought but we all liked it!

We found Buzz Lightyear! He was the only character we stood in line for, yes we aren't patient parents, there were miles of lines to stand in for all of the characters, but we didn't need to "talk" to them all, right?

The boys enjoyed high fiving Buzz.

Another area the boys enjoyed was Tom Sawyer Island. We took at boat over to it and their were trails, and forts to play in.

Later in the afternoon, Grant fell asleep on David so they went back to the hotel and Tate and I stayed. We had gotten fast passes that morning to ride Peter Pan's Flight at 3:00 so we got to do that- twice! Here we are about to get in our flying chariot.


We didn't have reservations for dinner Monday night so we went into Downtown Disney. It was really cool, if we go back again I would like to spend more time there. We went to a seafood restaurant that took the Disney Dining plan we had so we didn't have to spend more money. The boys were really tired.....

On Tuesday, our last day there. Tate and David decided they wanted to play at the pool all day. We had promised Grant the first day at Hollywood Studios, that we would sign him up for the Jedi Training Academy that our friends, Carter and Ben, had gotten to do when we were there. In order to do this you must get to the Jedi sign ups first thing in the morning to be assigned a time to come back later that day. Fortunately, we got to the park at 8:15 thinking it opened at 8 but it opened at 9. I was surprised to see so many people there an hour before the park opened! When they opened the gates G and I ran to the Jedi training center ( I was scolded by and employee for running.... he must not have kids!) They only do the training once an hour so I really hoped that our time would be before noon so we didn't have to stay there all day and it was! We got the 10:15 time! We had time to go back and ride the Toy Story Mania ride again!

Getting suited up

Getting ready to fight Darth Vader using what he learned

The class of 12 dwindled to 9 when Darth Vader came out, turned out a few kids were afraid of the Dark Side even though they asked when you sign up if you can handle it.

The whole class passed! We got a diploma and everything!

The last night we went to Epcot for dinner and a few rides. The boys were worn out by this point...and so were the parents!

At the Orlando Airport the morning we flew home. They didn't want to leave.

I actually told them to give me a sad face, this isn't really how they looked that day.

We had an absolute BLAST! Three of us would like to go back but the man who paid for it says that was it. We might be able to work on him, though!