The perfect pet, a neighborhood mystery, and a tragic ending

My kids love pets.  Remember this post about how much Jacey loved her pet fish in Texas?  They keep asking us for a dog, but Dan and I just aren't quite on board with the idea yet.  So, Jacey took matters into her own hands.  Her and her cute friends across the street found a cricket one day while playing, and after finding an old laundry soap bucket and putting some sticks, rocks, and leaves in it, he had a new home.  They named him "Crickety Crocket"  Jacey dutifully checked on him several times a day, made sure he had fresh leaves (do crickets even eat leaves?) spent a little bit of time every day "training him:" (touching him with her finger to see how high he could jump, just to make sure he couldn't jump high enough to jump out, etc.  Unfortunately I never got a picture of him, but I did get a picture of this:

 Nope, it's not his house.  He lived in a bucket, remember?  This is his RV.  This is how Jacey and her friends would carry him to take him on walks every day.  They carried on this way for over a week, while all the adults marveled at how long he was surviving.  Crickety because famous on our street.

Then, one night Crickety went missing.  It was a mystery.  We knew he couldn't jump high enough to get out, but we couldn't find him anywhere.  Jacey was sad for awhile, but then the next morning he magically appeared back in his bucket.  The celebration was short-lived, however, and a couple days later he went missing again.  This time the girls decided it was time for an investigation:

This was the sign that they posted on our neighborhood mail box.  Serious business, this missing cricket stuff.  Pretty soon they got a lead.  It seemed like a solid one too, but unfortunately none of the moms would let them follow up on it.  Rumor had it that a certain 4-year-old boy on our street (we have a few of them: :) kidnapped him, and was holding him hostage in his garage in a jar.  Jacey's reaction to the clue was "Oh no!  Not him!  He kills everything!  He LIKES to squish worms heads off!"  Even though we wouldn't let the girls confront him directly, apparently there was a 10-year-old middleman who approached the suspect.  A couple hours later, while eating dinner we had a knock on our door.  We opened the door to find a very guilty looking 4-year-old boy hanging his head and his hands cupped.  When he saw Jacey, he said "Sorry Jacey." and handed her the cricket corpse.  We didn't have quite the meltdown that we had over the fish a couple years ago.  She was very forgiving, a little sad, but just glad to have the mystery solved.  The girls did band together to give Crickety a proper burial though.  His final resting spot is underneath a tree in our neighbors front yard.

What?  You can't see the headstone?

Just in case you still can read the inscription:

Crickety Crocket

He was a good cricket.

We loved Kindergarten

Jacey starts 1st grade in 3 days, so I guess it's about time for a post about her Kindergarten year, right? I've had my reasons for my lack of posts, which I won't bore you with.  One of these days I'll go into more details about what's been consuming my whole summer.  But for now, let's talk about Kindergarten.

Jacey was a pony in her Kindergarten Circus.  How fun!  This was a quick pre-circus shot with Jacey and a few of her favorite gal pals.

The bus.  Oh, how we loved the bus!

But not as much as we loved walking to school.  This is the trail that goes from our house to the school.  Well, almost.  We just have to cross the street to get to one end of this nice paved trail, and the other end takes us right to the softball field complex right by her playground.  Since she had afternoon kindergarten, we loved walking to school on nice days.  Too bad we just didn't have more of those nice days.


Our favorite part of the year by far was Jacey's teacher.  We loved Mrs. Garrett! I am kicking myself for not getting a picture of Jacey with her.  I might have to take Jacey to school early one day to sneak in and get one.  I was a little nervous at the beginning of the year, because I could tell from talking to others that the other teacher had a reputation for being a little bit more warm and fuzzy.  I couldn't be more thrilled with the teacher we had though.  Having a September birthday combined with the fact that Jacey had loved reading and playing "school" for awhile before Kindergarten started contributed to a lot of the Kindergarten curriculum coming very easily to Jacey.  Mrs. Garrett was so good to give compliments without going over the top.  She made sure that Jacey had extra stuff to do even when it meant more work for her.  She encouraged her, but expected a lot.  She made her feel special.  As the end of the year drew near, Jacey wanted to do something special for Mrs. Garrett, so we came up with this little book. (The green polka dot page is actually the last page.)  We can only hope that her next teacher is just as good!