Category: Our Family

We went on a pretty awesome adventure today. When we talked about the options for the many things that we COULD do while Mom, Tiffany and Wendy were here, and I mentioned the Norman Rockwell scouting exhibit at the Church History Museum, Mom blurted out that she would DEFINITELY want to go to that. So that became the plan for today, but I HATE driving around downtown Salt Lake and I HATE trying to find parking even more, so we decided to take the train to Salt Lake!

Lydia was so cute “reading” the train schedule.

We got off at the North Salt Lake stop and then we got to do some walking.

The Church History Museum and Temple Square aren’t really very far from the train station, so it didn’t take us long to make the walk. I am SO excited that I got to go see the exhibit celebrating 100 years of scouting in the church. I am very much into scouting and I like to push Ethan to achieve more within scouting. I am just sad that Kyle couldn’t come with us to the exhibit.

We went inside and started wandering around to find the scout art.

Before we found the scout paintings we found another exhibit of art depicting children.

The kids found a computer screen/graphic tablet type thing where they got to draw for a bit.

Then we went around the corner and that’s where we found the scouting exhibit.

I tried to take pictures of every painting, so Kyle could see them too, but that means I didn’t get many pictures of my kids looking at the art. I did NOT take pictures of every cover of the Boys Life Magazine though. 😛

In the room next to where all the paintings were, there was a room of a more hands on exhibit.

This quilt was like an “I Spy” under it there was a list of things to look at the quilt and find.

These pictures had levers at the bottom. If the lever was all the way to the right, you saw one picture but then moving the lever to the left flipped the panels around to reveal another picture.

There were stations for knot tying.

Then at the very end of the room, after watching a brief video about Lord Baden-Powell and why he started the boy scouts, the kids got to design a neckerchief on a triangle piece of construction paper.

After leaving the Church History Museum we decided to go eat lunch at the Crown Burger that we saw on our way from the train stop to the museum.

Once everyone was finished eating, we split up. Wendy walked up the street to go to the LDS Business college to meet up with John, and Tiffany, Mom and I took the kids back to the train station to come back home. I think everyone enjoyed the trip and I only wish that Kyle could have been there with us, but alas, he had to work.

While Kyle was at work today, Mom and Tiffany and Wendy and I, worked on helping the kids with their school work for today, and we worked on rearranging furniture and tried to clean up the house. I had a meeting with Michelle to plan some Brownie meetings out, and after she left we tackled taking apart the entertainment center. Mom moved the tv that was on it to the desk in my room. I said that I could just take the entertainment center to DI this morning if they would help me load it up, and Tiffany said that she wanted it, and so after it was disassembled, it was loaded up in the trunk of Dad’s car. Then we got to move furniture around. I didn’t think that I could get much more big stuff done before my Junior girl scout meeting and so I tried to focus on cleaning up the main living area of the house. During girl scouts, it got really cold, which wasn’t good because we were planning on having dinner and then going miniature golfing afterward. Instead, John came over for dinner as planned, and then we discussed our options for the night. Everyone agreed that it was too cold to go miniature golfing, and so we had to pick between watching a movie, or setting up the Halloween tree, which was the whole reason for moving the entertainment center out and moving the furniture around in the first place. Setting up the Halloween tree won and that is what we did.

This is Adam’s first Halloween tree. Last year we weren’t able to set it up because we had moved everything out of the basement to the garage, so that we could get the basement finished, and that meant that the tree was buried, in such a way that we couldn’t get to it.

The cat had to get in there and check things out too:

After awhile Adam became counter-productive, and started going to the tree to take things off. This is actually why we set up the Halloween tree, so that the little ones can be taught early in the season to leave the tree alone.

Finally, we finished with Kyle putting the big pumpkin on top.

It’s so exciting to be able to have the tree up this year, and it was so nice to have some extended family here to help get it done. 🙂

We have some visitors! Mom, Tiffany and Wendy drove up to spend the week with us. Wendy went to hang out with her boyfriend, John and the rest of us decided to go bowling tonight.

We decided to get two lanes this time, because one lane last time was pushing it for the size of our family. Kyle put all the kids on one lane, and all the adults on the other.

Kyle got this wild action shot of me:

Adam was a great cheer leader. He sat in his stroller making excited noises as he watched us send our balls off down the lane.

Mom and Tiffany tied for first at the end of our first game.

We began a second round while we waited for the kids to finish their game, and we had 19 minutes of lane time left so we thought we might as well use it!

In our second game, mom got three strikes in a row! She was excited and was laughing super hard. Ethan told her that she laughed crazy, because he had never heard her laugh like that before.

On the other hand, I was not doing so well at all.

The kids didn’t get to finish their game before our time was up, but they still had loads of fun. Every time Lydia pushed her ball off the ramp, she started jumping up and down with excitement as she watched it roll down the lane. She didn’t care about knocking over any of the pins, she only cared about watching her ball roll.

A few minutes after we left home to go to the bowling alley I realized that I had forgotten the camera, which means all the pictures that were taken tonight, were taken on our cell phones. I definitely prefer my camera. I couldn’t get a good shot of anyone releasing their bowling ball because when I clicked to take a picture, it delayed a few seconds before snapping the picture.

Chloe came up to me while I was coming out of my room and asked me, “Mom, what will I wear when it’s my wedding?”

Taken by surprise, I answered, “Chloe you don’t need to worry about that for a while yet.”

She answered more urgently, “But Mom! I NEED to know!”

So I told her, “Well you will probably wear a temple dress.”

Chloe asked, “What temple dress?”

I said, “Whatever temple dress you choose when you are getting ready for your wedding.”

Then she asked, “Will it be this temple dress?” (Pointing to a red dress on the chair in my room)

To which I said,  “No it will be white.”

I don’t know what brought on this sudden worry over her wedding. But being only four years old, she has PLENTY of time to just be a kid before needing to think about wedding details. I felt that I handled the situation pretty well. I really wanted to laugh that she would be SO worried about her wedding, but I held it in and patiently answered her questions. Hopefully, she will relax and think about something a little more age appropriate next. 🙂

One of our apple trees and our plum tree produced fruit this year! The last time we got fruit from any of our trees, it was 2011 and we got three peaches and two plums. The trees bore more fruit than that, but that was what survived the crazy winds we had that year. This is what we got this year:

Fifteen apples, fifty one plums and one pear. There were a bunch more apples and plums that had bird and wasp damage, and earlier in the season there were a few more pears but they fell off (or Jango ate them) months ago, and I didn’t really expect the last one to last to the end of the season.

It’s not really enough fruit for canning, but it’s plenty for fresh eating. I am just really excited to be able to harvest some fruit off our own trees. It lessens the sadness that I have when I think of the peach tree and cherry trees in my backyard that have died and need to be replaced.