July Happenings

Our random events in July:

First, our sweet Tess takes after her daddy so much!  She is persistent and tries something over and over until she gets it.  I wish I had that quality!  I'm much, much too prone to giving up if I can't do something well, quickly.  Anyway, here's cute Tess with this ingeniously engineered contraption she came up with to turn off her lights from her bed.  It's got belts and neckties and jump-ropes and who knows what else.  Clever girl!

One morning the kids opened the door to take Parker out for a little walk.  There was a strange pause and then Miles said, "um, Mom.... there are gold things out here...."   What the?  I had no idea what he was talking about?  Bryan saw these little statues and started cracking up.  Apparently the story is this:  our old Primary President in the ward was getting ready to move out of state, so she bought these little gold statues of somewhat creepy children from a yard sale.  Before she moved she left them on a neighbors' doorstep.  So now the joke is that they are passed around from neighbor to neighbor.  Bryan just recently put them in our Bishop's garage while they were on vacation.  The garage was cracked just a bit to let their cat in and out, so Bryan gently wedged the statues under there, and then put them back upright so they would be creepily sitting there when the Bishop's family came back from vacation and opened their garage door.  Ha!

Bryan gave Parker a haircut the other day.  His fur has a big mix of colors...there are coarse black wiry hairs, and softer blond hairs, among the generally light brown majority of his fur, not to mention his white old-man dog hairs all around his face.  But when he was cut pretty short, he had a distinct racing stripe down his back!  Ha! (again!)  (And I like the little black tip of his tail that looks like it got dipped in paint.)

Bree has done UPSTART, an online preschool, this year.  It's an awesome program that Miles did as well.  (I really wish I would have known about it when Tess was 4!)  Anyway, here is her cute graduation picture with Rusty & Rosy Racoon, the UPSTART mascots.

We have great Activity Days leaders in our ward.  They had a Daddy Daughter Date at a fish farm a few weeks ago.  Tess had lots of fun catching fish with Bryan.

Blacksmith Fork Canyon 2016

I rave about Blacksmith Fork every year.  Once again, we camped there and had an almost perfect trip!

Our firepit area was surrounded by trees.  On our first night, after all the kids were put to bed, the grown ups were sitting around the fire when Bryan looked up in the tree above my head and joked that there was a wad of toilet paper above me.  We all looked at it and thought, ew, gross, how did a wad of used toilet paper get in the tree?  Then I wondered for a minute if it was a bee's nest or something.  It just looked weird.  Anyway, we got up and pulled the branch down a little bit to get a closer look and realized it was a bird's nest....

...and look what was inside!  Scrawny, little, ugly, teeny, baby birds!  They probably hatched that very day.  They had no feathers at all and their eyes were all still shut as you can see.  Super ugly but cute at the same time somehow!

 We were worried that with all the people, and noisy kids, and dog, and the campfire smoke, etc, that the mama bird might not come back....

...but she was a good mama who didn't really care about us.  She came and went for the whole 3 days, feeding her chirping babies.  Really sweet!

Here's Bryan and Parker, chilling out.  Bryan doesn't like to sit still for long, so this was a rare moment. :)

 Now this is more like it--monkey Bryan up the tree, setting up the zipline.

 He is almost always able to find a pretty decent spot for the zipline.  Each time it's a little different, and this time the zipline went over this little dip in our camping spot.  So, in order to ride, you had to have a friend pull the rope, while running along the dirt and down the dip, back up to the other tree, to finally let go of the rope for your ride.

Here's Tess:

Or, if you didn't want to find someone to pull you, you could just do it "Tarzan" style where you run and dangle over the dip, holding the zipline with your hands instead of sitting on it, like Miles is doing here:

Here's Bree:

And me:

And Bryan:

 Unfortunately here is where our trip took a turn for the worse...  Bryan's sister Johanna decided to do the Tarzan style and when she was over the dip part she fell and hurt her leg really bad.  She couldn't put any weight on it at all and she was in a lot of pain.  Burke decided to take her down to Logan to the hospital and unfortunately it turned out that her tibia was broken.  Dang!  We all felt terrible.  So Burke took her home to rest for the remainder of the weekend.  He came back up and the rest of the trip was great, but we all felt bad for poor Aunt Johanna!    :(

On a lighter note, Tess has become quite the little butterfly whisperer.  She and Adrienne caught a few and just held them in their hands.  So pretty.

 Bree was Bryan's Jeep riding buddy.  Here they are about to forge the river.  It's pretty fun with the doors off!

And a beautiful view with 2 beautiful cousins!

Another exciting ride in the Jeep, this time up the boulder field.

So the broken leg was definitely a downer, but the rest of us still had a fun trip otherwise.  (And yes, we banned "Tarzan" style after that! :)

Epic Ride!

Bryan just got back from a 3-day "epic ride" on the 4-wheeler with 3 friends.  Originally the plan was to take the 4-wheelers and ride all day, camp, ride all day, camp, ride all day.  But they tweaked the plan a little and stayed in one hotel and took 3 separate "all-day loops" from the hotel.  That was a much better option because then they could go back, shower, have dinner, etc.  

He had a great time--here he is with his friend Dale after day 1.  They are dirty and happy!  

 He saw lots of gorgeous scenery on the trail.  It was the Arapeen Trail (which we had just seen at Millsite a few weeks ago!  Ironically he ended up at the lake where we were, when we were a little bit lost on our Jeep ride.  Ha!)

 It was a great trip for Bryan to just relax and re-charge.  He is pulled in so many different directions right now with work, church, family, etc.  It was good for him to just have some "Bryan and the guys" time.

Splash Pad

One of the things on our list of "Things to do this Summer!" was to visit a splash pad.  Each of the kids got to invite a friend and they had a great time playing in the water and playing at the playground which is there at the same great Riverdale Park.

Here's Tess with Aimee:

 Bree with Ali:

 And Miles with Brigham:

And here's the best spot in the whole place:  mine!  I just enjoyed the shade, some snacks, cold water, and a good book for several hours while the kids played together.  Yeah, buddy.

Millsite State Park

Most of you know that we go water-skiing as a family every year on (or close to) July 6th to honor my mom.  Boating has always been something we've loved to do as a family and some of my very best childhood memories were of boating.  This year we decided to try an entirely new place.  We went to Millsite State Park, in Ferron (south of Price).  It was a pretty long drive (3 1/2 hours), but it was an awesome place.  There was a pretty golf course, fun trails, hills to climb, and the water was incredible.  (Super cold, but fabulous for skiing!  There were only about 3 boats on the lake ever.  Even on Saturday, even on the 4th of July!  I don't think I've ever skied on nicer water in my life!  Fun, fun!!)

Here are the boys, exploring the mountain side by our campsite.

 
There were some small "cliffs" to jump off of.  They weren't too high, maybe 6-8 feet.  Just right to be extra fun, but not extra scary.

We took a long Jeep ride up the nearby Arapeen Trail (longer than we planned on, in fact, due to us taking a wrong turn on the way down! Ha!).  While driving we saw some snow still on the side of the road.  So the kids got out a made a snowman (you can just see it on the left of the pic, they drew the snowman into the snow with their finger.)

It was fun to bring our Parker dog camping.  He continued to prove that he's really just a companion dog and nothing more.  He was not interested--at all--in swimming in the water.  When we threw him in, he quickly swam right back out and didn't get back in.  Bryan teases that he's really just another cat.  And he has a point; a retriever he is not.  But we love him anyway.

Here are the boys tubing:  Miles, Dylan (friend of our nephew Jared), and our nephew Aiden.

 ...and the girls:  our niece Brooklyn, Tess, and Bree.

 Miles is getting pretty good at catching lizards!  He caught 2 on this trip.  We now permanently keep this container in the motorhome for critters (lizards, frogs, tarantulas, whatever they find.)  The new rule is that he can keep whatever it is for the duration of our trip, but all critters get released when we leave for home!

Fun trip!

Logan

We celebrated the 4th of July on the 1st of July!  Logan always has their celebration a few days early, which is a little strange, but the fireworks are so dang good that we don't care!

We went to the Cache Valley Cruise-In first.  There are so many cool cars there!  Most people don't let you get too close to their cars or touch them at all, but we met a few owners that were nice enough to let us sit in the car and take a picture.  Here we are in a Corvette Sting Ray...

And I can't remember what this one was--it was from Canada and the owner said is was a make and model only sold in Canada, but it was similar to Cadillac.  The paint job was awesome!

These ones were pretty fun.  Not driveable, but really cool to see.  (The Ewok was one of those little "cozy coupe" toy cars."

After the Cruise-In, we drove up Logan Canyon to Second Dam, then visited with some friends who moved to Cache Valley.  After that we headed over to the concert/fireworks show at USU.  Their fireworks show is spectacular.  I love it every year.  "Happy 1st of July!"  Ha!