Charlie and Thunder

Charlie played with Thunder this year. What a fun team, several of her classmates played as well. They had tough competition and racked up the losses but they ended the season with a tournament championship! A perfect way to wrap up the year. 

Evy and the Orange Gators

After retiring from her club team we signed Evy up for the recreation league and were lucky enough to get two friends on the same team! What fun! The Gators won all of their games, most of them by 20 points or more. It was fun to see Evy's confidence grow, so much that during one game she dribbled behind her back to get around the defender. Ha! What just happened???

Florida Trip

We were on the same flight as Kate and Dave, how fun!

Everyone getting their devices connected to WiFi. 

We rented a tiny little car and the kids thought it was hilarious.

Fun stop for drinks on the water.

Suns out, guns out!

Dressed up for dinner out.

It was chilly so we all hung out in the hot tub.

Really cold and windy fishing trip.

Sparkle Squad Performs at Carver Hawkeye Arena

Charlie performed with her sparkle squad group at the halftime of the Iowa women's basketball game. 

Charlie and Julia

Bull Fighting

Will has a lot of energy to burn and one of the ways that he burns that energy is by "bullfighting." I have no idea how he came up with that name but he tells Scott "let's bullfight!" and that means he wants to wrestle. 

Will and the Purple Raptors

Will got his turn at basketball this year by playing in an age 5/6 league at our recreation department. After signing him up we received notice from the Rec Department that they needed parents to volunteer to coach so Scott took the role of coaching for the first time. Will was on the same team as his buddy Beckett which made it a whole lot of fun! 

The Iowa Caucus

This is the first time I have ever attended a caucus and it turns out it may be the last. My friend Liz and I decided to participate this year and were both undecided on our candidates when we arrived at our caucus location. I liked Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. Elizabeth Warren's free tuition plan turned me off and Pete Buttigieg had basically no experience so I decided to caucus for Klobuchar. I left the caucus feeling good about participating but when I arrived home Scott had been watching network news and said, "something is majorly wrong." The networks were all reporting that caucus results were not coming in from Iowa and this eventually turned into a huge mess. The app that the Iowa Democratic party decided to use this year wasn't working and precincts were unable to report results. This made Iowa, Democrats, and the caucus process look bad. Network news talked about this mess for an entire week and everyone was calling for an end to the first in the nation Iowa Caucuses. We'll see what becomes of the process in the future.