School Projects

I think I need to dedicate this post to my mom, in honor of all the ridiculously complicated school projects that she helped me complete in the wee hours of the night, because I either forgot all about them or just couldn't face them until the last minute. Mom, remember the miniature log cabin which counted for half of my grade in Interior Design 305? Remember helping Jody and I (yes, I was a grown married woman for crying out loud!) glue individual floor boards on until 4:30 in the morning? Even Cody helped me with that one -- his Styrofoam chimney rocked!
At least Breje has given me some advance notice so far, this year. She had me puzzling over how to create a scale model of the earth's crust for at least a week. Here's what we came up with.... ... yep, that is an enormous brownie, covered in several flavors of chocolate chips. Leave it to me to make a science project out of chocolate. Breje and I were carefully placing chocolate chips until early the next morning, and yes, that's to scale baby!
The next week she gave me the entire weekend to help her with her project for English -- a poster decorated with at least five symbols that represented her. She even convinced her friend MacKenzie to come help. I figured it would be a piece of cake.

Clearly, during all those late night creative sessions, my passed along her "seriously this is not problem and it'll be done in no time and we can still make it way cooler than any one else's" gene. At some point I convinced Breje that it'd be way easier to build a tree out of packing paper and silk leaves than to draw one. It spiraled a little out of control after that, but the good news is that she did get manage to get both projects turned in on time and received w A's! We make a great team.

Preschool

Brielle finally got to start preschool this week. It is her new favorite thing. She had butterflies and nervous giggles for an entire night before-hand and woke up with explicit instructions as to her attire and hairdo. (Not a control freak at all!) She begged for lunch at 9:00 because she knew she was supposed to go to school after lunch. She couldn't wait for pictures--apparently this is the official "I am old enough and cute enough to go to preschool" pose. Maybe Sienna taught it to her?! She went in with hardly any hesitation and gave school glowing a review when I picked her up. She told Breje that the only time she was "nuhvus" was when they did "that scout thing, with the flag, you know, the plex a burlegence"! I guess we'll be practicing that one at home for awhile!
Since she's getting so gosh-darned old these days, I find myself hanging onto her more naive moments. One of my favorites was when she demanded curly hair for our Labor Day party. When I finished she said "People are going to say that I am so beautiful, but (noticing my straight hair) they might think you just didn't do your hair!"

New Schoolyear

So, school actually began for my children last week and I am just getting around to this. Don't judge me! I currently have 3 kids in 3 different schools. One in EARLY MORNING SEMINARY. Brielle starts preschool in yet a 4th school next month. Throw in 3 kids in piano, one in Young Women's, one in scouts, groceries, play dates, exercise and seriously crappy Internet, and it is an outright miracle that these pics have finally made it to the worldwide web.

Breje's picture was taken on her first 5:30 am day -- she looked gorgeous, but let's face it, neither one of us is at our best at that time of day! At least she's smiling!The best part of taking the boys to school is that it is actually looking like daytime when they leave -- at least for now. It is also possible to take them both at the same time, and they are actually both willing to get into the car --bonus! (Do you love that Kutter looks like he's going backpacking in the Uintah's or something? This kid needs his stuff with him!)Although Brielle doesn't actually start until September, she had a way fun open house. She was seriously looking excited about it until she got there and saw all those people. She had a death grip on me until she saw the hermit crab, the fish, guinea pig, and a gecko! Then she found a slide and some dress ups. Twenty minutes later she was outright refusing to leave! Seriously? This time of year always makes me feel like they are getting way too old way too fast, so I'm trying really hard to remember the funny, innocent things they say. Brielle had a great one the other day. She woke up completely distraught, saying she had a bad dream. Now, Brielle never actually remembers here dream, but this one left a mark and she couldn't wait to share the horrors with me. "We were going camping and boating (sob, sob, sob) and we were in the truck with the windows rolled down (crocodile tears) and suddenly my necklace blew off and out the window and it got crunched!" (way more sobs). It was a bit difficult to hide how amused I was at her "tragedy", but I couldn't help be a little bit thrilled that she is still young enough that this was the most awful thing her little brain could conjur!

A Farewell to Summer

to swimming lessons -- and to learning that we'll all learn a lot more if the girls have a cute girl teacher, and the boys have a cool boy teacher.

to thinking you're the bravest kid in the world for being able to dunk your head under the water "10 times!" and believing you're floating even when some one's holding on!

to finally being brave enough to jump off that high dive

and even attempt a real dive!

to family reunions (the one's you're really really looking forward to, and even the one's you're not)

to dirt in your fingernails, your nose, your food, your bed -- and not noticing because your cousins are right there.

to the sweet imagination of childhood, that can turn a bunch of tree stumps and sticks into t "the coolest rock and roll band ever"! (the "blue bandannas" in case you were wondering!)

to making some new friends, and reconnecting with some old ones.

to slip and slides-- to those who rock that thing on their very first try (Sienna) and those who will probably never really get it (Brielle) but are having too much fun to notice.

to Popsicles, sunscreen, wet towels, picnics, and way too much candy.

to last minute camping trips, just cause the summer is almost over. to the smell of campfire permeating everything, the joy of marshmallows cooked perfectly (or not) to discovering that french fries can be had in the wild and bacon should be cooked with everything. (bacon fried pancakes -- oh yeah!)

to sleeping in way too late just cause you can, shooting stars, sleep-overs at Grandma's house and movie night smack dab in the middle of the week!

Family Fun

The kids and I were lucky enough to get to spend a whole week at my parent's house before school starts up again and ends all our fun. The kids were kind of ticked that they couldn't get rid of me the whole time, but we managed to have fun anyway!
My awesome parents. They totally spoiled us!The first order of business was my little sisters' 30th birthday party. Hayley LOVES her birthday and it just wouldn't have felt right to miss such a big one, especially since my mom and friends decided to throw her a huge surprise party. It was so fun getting surprise her and to finally meet all her cute friends.
Isn't she just beautiful! We spent most of the rest of the week just being lazy -- watching movies, eating good food, shopping. Most of my favorite pics of the week involve all the kids snuggling together. I love this one of the kids all crashing on Grandpa while they watch a movie!

My cute brother totally stole Brielle's heart this trip. She forced him to snuggle with her half the week, and she's still trying to convince me to let her live with him!

The kids spent hours playing in the backyard pool. It was just one of those things that totally took me back to my childhood, playing in a pool in the exact same spot in the yard, playing some of the exact same games.

My mom always manages to cook up a few extra fun activities for all the grandkids-- this year they had a blast tie-dying t-shirts together and then they got to wear them to their surprise "snuggle-up" movie in the back yard. Too fun.

We wrapped up the week with a fun family reunion with my dad's side of the family. These are the people I spend most of my childhood with and we are still really close. It was so fun to sit and chat and watch all of our adorable children become friends that I nearly forgot to take pictures.

I'm thrilled that I got this one of Brielle and Sienna. Priceless.

And I actually remembered to get a couple of my kids attacking the seriously overstuffed pinata!

I hardly saw Breje the whole day, because she hardly ever gets to see my cousins adorable daughter, Courtney. I love that they have such a sweet friendship even though they only get together a couple times a year.

Cheap Thrills

So I have seriously been needing a project lately. Like bad. The problem is that I'm feeling more picky about my projects these days. I needed to know that I could actually complete it. I needed it to be quick. And I seriously needed it to be cheap. Usually I'm looking for some ugly wood to paint, but I found this bad boy at the thrift store the other day and it was irresitable---mostly because it was only 65 cents! It was even uglier than my picture shows. Tons of ugly rust and they hadn't even dusted off the cobwebs. The hardest part of the entire project was convincing myself to pick it up and put it in my car. I dusted it off and dug through my spray paint and totally hit the jackpot. I'd forgotten all about the pretty green paint I'd found on clearance that matched the pretty bench on my porch. I didn't have a use for it at the time, but it was only a dollar and sooo pretty!

I did a little antiquing with some black paint and voila! Brand new plant stand for $1.65!

Yellowstone

Watch out for this post, folks. I may have busted my "add anthother image" button forever, but I just had to share every second I could of our trip to Yellowstone. I'm not sure how I have this many pictures, since my camera batteries seemed to have developed a severe allergic reaction to my actual camera and kept popping out whenver I needed them most, but somehow I still managed to reach picture overload.

First up is our awesome cabin. It looks a bit dubious from the outside, but it was the complete opposite on the inside. It was beautiful, clean and fit us all perfectly!

We had a little bit of time after checking out the place before dark, so we hopped into our cards and checked out some lovely falls. I am clearly not a master photographer, but trust me, they were breathtaking.

First stop the next day was Old Faithful, of course. Fortunately we didn't have to wait too long, but I did mange to get some shots of our good-lookin group to fend off the boredome.

Grandpa and all his grandsons. Too great.

The Brielle with her beautiful cousins.

Then we took a jaunt to fishing bridge, where we did some shopping and got to hear the story of how Grandpa got chased by a bear while fishing there. The kids were in heaven. So was Grandpa.

Of course, no day at Yellowstone is complete without at least one tour of hot pots. Brielle kept finding ingenious ways to not have to actually walk the trail...

The buffalo, however walked right across the path just before us! I've never seen them actually hanging out at the hot pots, but they were snuggling up with them like they were hoping for a facial or something.

Day two was all about some guy time (fishing, where no fish were caught--so I guess it's ok that the camera wasn't there) and some girl time (shopping and eating, of course)

We had to get a picture of our girls with the giant stuffed bear, just in case it's the only one we saw all trip.

And we coudn't get through the day without admiring all of Hayley's handiwork-matching hairdos for all the girls (minus little Lucy, who's just not quite there yet)

When the guys finally gave up on fishing, we met up with them and visited the bear and wolf center, to make sure the kids could all scratch those animals off their lists.

And later we were completely surprised when Island Park put on about the best fireworks show we had ever seen. We were lucky enough to be able to watch from our cabin and it went on forever!

The kids would probably say that the best part of their trip was all the surprises from Grandma. I loved this shot of the boys using their brand new binoculars. We had to look at everything through the binoculars for the whole rest of the trip!

Our last day in the park was full of surpises, including a very up close look at this black bear! Our very first ever in-the-park-bear. Hooray!

We saw tons more hot pots.

And some more elk at Mammoth hot springs. Although, let's face it, the obligatory ice cream was way more fun than those elk! The best part for me was being able to spend so much time with my whole family together.