Rozenboomx5: May 2015

Aubrey - dance pics

Aubrey had her dance pictures last week. For her recital they have two costumes this time. One dance will be tap and the second will be ballet. Here is a sneak peek at what is to come :)

Last day of school!

Today is Nile's last day of 2nd grade and Hayden's last day of 4th grade. When they come home this afternoon I will have a 5th grader, 3rd grader, and Kindergartener! WOW it is going so fast!

last day of school 5/2915

first day of school 8/20/14

A month ago we borrowed my parents van to take the kids plus our niece up to an Iowa softball game and do a little shopping. I have been against buying a minivan since I was a kid and my parents always bought them. Well after taking 4 kids to Iowa City and shopping at Costco with plenty of room to spare I was sold. I started looking online and Jeremy and I talked about it. We knew we wanted to have a DVD player like my parents and a few other options were necessary. Between the options we wanted, money we wanted to spend, and the color requirements (has to look good with the personalized Iowa plates!) the search narrowed quickly. We thought we found one in Osky but it turned out that it did not have the DVD player. We continued looking through cars.com and found one in Des Moines at Car City. We had a few errands to run in Des Moines on Monday so we stopped by and looked at it. The dealership was closed which was fine, the kids loved it, crazy kids! I had transferred some money from a separate saving account we have and was waiting for that to come through and we also wanted to trade in our PT Cruiser. I talked to someone at the dealership on the phone Tuesday and he said we could post date the check and work out a deal with our trade in.
Tuesday after all my daycare kiddos were picked up we dropped our kids off at my parents and headed to Des Moines for a test drive. We were able to get a good price for our trade in and get the asking price of the van down a little to a price we were all happy with. We bought a 2011 gray Town & Country Touring L. I was super excited/nervous to write a check and not go through financing and monthly payments. It is a big deal to me that we were able to pay cash for our new van and still continue to not have any car payments. Now we need to get busy saving up again to get our savings account back where we like to keep it. Between that and trying to pay extra on our mortgage we are putting my new babysitting income to good use!

Tulip Time 2015

Well the weather forecast wasn't very promising but it turned out great for Tulip Time 2015! We attended all the parades and enjoyed some yummy food and shopping in the Dutch Market. The boys both marched with their classes and Nile's class was picked to ride the Sinterklaas float one afternoon and Hayden rode the Cadet float one night.

Baseball!

It has been a little while since my last post! Baseball is in full swing at our house and today is the boys' last day of school. Between our kids and their activities I have also been babysitting full time since March so things are much busier than they were earlier this year. But it is a good kind of busy!

Jeremy is helping with both of the boys' teams again this year. Both boys are playing well and enjoying the game. They have both learned from the joys of victory and the "agony" of defeat. Nile's team was undefeated until this past Wednesday so that was a tough loss for him.

We are down to a few more weeks of games and then the tournament for Hayden. We also have Aubrey's final dance recital for this year next weekend. Then we will be moving on to basketball camps, dance camp, and VBS!