Hanging with Nella

Beach babes

Sam was amazing!  I wish I had a picture, but this kid refused to get in a kayak or on a paddle board for almost a year... then just one day decided he liked it.  He paddled out in the kayaks tons and ended up on the paddle board for a while.  This is him drying out after being cold for a while.

Bear Lake face

Garden City

Because we were up there so long, we thought we'd do something new.  We all went to ride the Rickshaw bikes in Garden City.  It was so fun.  Ada and Sam loved taking turns steering the bike and Seth got excited and pointed to everything as we went by... especially the big construction trucks working on the road.

Evelyn Birthday

Evelyn said that now she is 5 and she can do anything.  She has been more willing to do chores at home and go to things, like Tball... She still working on not crying when she doesn't get her way.  She's a creative and spunky girl that we love so much.  She likes to play all by herself, but loves attention from Mom and Dad... Doesn't like when Mom tries to draw everyone's attention to her though.

Sweeping the beach.

Buried.

Seth even got into it.... I think he was excited about the shovel.

Evelyn loved playing with my cousin Liz's daughter, Ellie.  Sam loved spending some time with her brother, Aaron.

Saturday

Saturday brought the return of baseball to our house.  We asked Ada to let Evelyn have a turn playing this time... and Evelyn couldn't be more excited.  She says that now that she's 5, she gets to do things like Karate.  Saturday morning, Jer ran the Utah Valley Marathon.  Let me say, I have an amazingly goal oriented and determined husband.  Even though I kept him from running full marathons while we had our very clingy 4th baby, he trained consistently and put in all the work to be able to do it again.  Unfortunately, he was supposed to be coming in about the same time as our kids were supposed to be at coach pitch and Tball games... so we cheered from afar.  I told all the kids when I got the race text saying he'd come in.... Ada said, "I thought it was 29 miles!"  Sam likes baseball.  And he'd rather play well than look good.  We couldn't find his mit, but instead of using Dad's which is too big and bulky, he chose to use Ada's.  He said, "I don't care if they make fun of me, just if I don't catch the ball."  We got there when it was pouring and got pretty wet, but the kids didn't mind.  They had fun being in the rain.  I was trying desperately to finish Sam's quilt that I was making for his birthday... so Ada took pictures for Sam's game and Sam took pictures at Evelyn's.

I loved looking at the pictures after to see what the kids had taken.  Among them were about 30 of Evelyn with this kid in front of her.... and he was standing in a different pose on one foot in every one of them.

I finally finished and gave him his birthday quilt.  Sam has read the first two Harry Potter books and was Harry Potter for Halloween last year.  I've never made my own patterns before, but the one and only pattern online that I could follow had things like the Dark Mark on it.... I didn't think that was appropriate for my soon to be 7 year old... so I made my own.  It was hard the first couple blocks, but once I got the idea of it... I enjoyed making my own patterns.  I gave it to him this morning and he LOVED it.  He rolled up in it and kept giving me hugs.

Bear Lake part 1

Since Jer now has more days off after being released from Scouts, and we haven't really been camping with him for more than over night for a few years.... we did a 10 day camping trip up to Bear Lake.  It was still a little chilly for the water, but the days were between 70-80s and it was so nice.  I also only had my camera for 2 of the 10 days because I forgot my camera charger.  I used my phone for a couple days, but my phone permanently died last night after 4 years of service.   We got there, and the kids went right down to the water.  Even Seth, who last year didn't want to do anything but be held by me.  He was thrilled to get wet, throw sand, eat snacks, drink from water bottles.  This kid was made for outdoors.   Every time we tried to go inside he'd get grumpy and mad.  My sister Janelle went up with us for the first three days.  That was fun.  My kids wanted to love her, sit up and chat with her in her tent, star gaze with her and eat everything that she was eating.  Right before she left, we went to Garden City and had burgers and shakes.  A dump truck pulling a tractor pulled into the parking lot and Seth almost had a heart attack.  He ran as fast as his little feet could carry him across the parking lot and just jabbered at the driver.  The driver said, "Yeah, I know it's so cool huh!"  Seth had to go touch each of the dump truck wheels and inspect everything.

We were there for both Evelyn and Sam's birthdays.  Sam got this rocket as a present from Dad.  He was so thrilled.  It was perfect to shoot at the lake.... you'd watch it go up forever and then chase it down the beach to grab it and do it all over again.  It rained one day and we stayed up at the A-frame and played games.  We had a wind storm another day where we lost some branches from off the trees.  We also took a day to do some spring cleaning up at the cabin.  Ada said, "We always clean the cabin.  Remember when Grandma had us sweep everywhere?"  On Sunday, we took our skin kissed babies to the Laketown ward where we were surprised by a visit by Elder Quentin L Cook. We also took our kids on a drive around the lake and read the Winnie the Pooh stories.  So fun.

Last week of school

The last week of school we had Sam be named as student of the year, helped with grandparent's irrigation, saw a friend graduate from her business program, and went to Jordan's birthday at Chucky cheese's.

Divine Intervention

Yesterday was the end of our very long family campout.  It was heavenly!  We got to play with kids on both Sam and Evelyn's birthdays.  But apparently we loaded too much into the trailer and not enough in the van... Jer got the trailer balanced nicely, but we didn't pay any attention to if it was heavier than the van.  We had one scary moment going down Echo canyon, but Jer had it under control.  The scary part was when we went down the two big hills by the Jordanelle Resevoir.  We'd said a prayer to keep us safe, Jer had checked and double checked the trailer, but as we went down the first smaller hill we started swerving back and forth between the two lanes.  Jer said that he couldn't get slow down, the trailer pushed us from 60 to 80.  It was so scary, but here's where the divine intervention came in.  When the road started heading up to the top of the second hill, Jer was able to pull us to a stop on the side of the road.  A police officer pulled up behind us, checked out the trailer briefly and suggested that we use the emergency lane to go down the big hill.  If we hadn't gotten out of control on the smaller hill right in front of the police officer, we probably would have crashed at high speeds with all our sleeping children and not sleeping children.  God allows scary and hard things to happen to us so that we can learn and so that something worse can be avoided.  I'm so grateful that worse didn't happen! 

Next time we'll either take the emergency lane, or take the Salt Lake route to avoid big hills, and probably put the heavy things in the van and the bulky things in the trailer so that the van won't be pushed going down hill.