Halloween

I know you guys have been waiting for this so here it is. Our family halloween zoo!
There will be several pictures of all of them together in their costumes because there is not a single picture where they are all looking at the camera and smiling and you can see all their faces at once. Some of the expressions are priceless though if you click on the pictures and enlarge them.
Just in case there are any questions I'll tell you what each one is. Emily is the bunny, Jonas a coyote, Adrianna a tiger, Preston a lion, Lydia a zebra and Adam a giraffe.
One of my favorite shots is Adam's face in the next picture.
Then check out Lyds with the tongue out and Odie and Pres grinning till their little cheeks hurt! I love it!!!
Ok many of you have heard the story, but through sales and and coupons I ended up with an insane amount of candy and spent the same or less than I usually do (which isn't much let me tell you). So after taking candy to a party last weekend and to the ward trunk-or-treat Friday this is how much candy I had left to give out on Halloween. Yes that is a wicker laundry basket, not a huge one, but still big enough for 8 big bags of candy. If the basket doesn't look very big compared to Adam look again at the above pictures to see how much he's grown. The boy is getting big!
We ended up with only 2 handfuls leftover. Our neighborhood is a good one for trick-or-treating, people really get into it. Jason and the kids walked less then half of the neighborhood and when they got home we combined all the candy. (This makes it easier for mom to control the sugar intake.) We just dumped it back into the basket. I think we ended up with more than we started with.

Report Cards

Well it has been an eventful weekend at the Guffey house. The kids brought home their first report cards of the year on Friday. They all are doing very well.
As a third grader, Emily got A's in language arts 100%, science 95% and social studies 98%, that's everything except math, she got a B. All her other subjects she's doing great! Her teachers' comments were, "Excellent class participation. Attentive in class. Conscientious worker." We also got back the official scores for the Measure of Academic Progress tests. She scored well above the average in Reading and also above average in Math.
In the second grade they only do numerical scores for Math and Language Arts. Jonas got 100% in language arts and 99% in math. He's getting high marks in all his other subjects also, they just score them on a different scale. He also scored well above average in both Math and Reading on his MAP tests. His teachers' said, "Joy to have in classroom" (he got that comment a couple of times) and "Excellent class participation."
In first grade they use a completely different grading scale. There is actually a whole code to understand it because they get graded not by subject but by standards in each subject. For example in Language Arts she was graded on 11 different things from writing legibly to reading independently to identify and producing rhyming words, ect., ect. It is similar with each subject being broken down into smaller incremental things like that. Suffice it to say she is doing very well and got high scores in all subjects and is progressing nicely. Her teacher's comments were the funniest! "Adrianna is an absolute riot! She keeps me smiling all the time! She is doing fantastic in all areas of 1st grade and I can always count on her to lend to class discussion!" Translation: Adrianna is hilariously random and off the wall but comes up with things that actually go with the class discussions, you just wouldn't normally think of a six year old saying them. (That is pretty much what her teacher told me at our parent/teacher conference a month ago.)
Jason and I are very proud of how well they're doing and how hard they work. The family even got to have pizza to celebrate on Saturday. Ok and that way we didn't have to cook before getting ready for Halloween either. So it was good for everyone. I know it will amaze you all, but up next the Halloween post!