Last day of Freedom

School started on a Tuesday, so we spent Monday making some last minute preparations.  Sam was able to take some time off, and we took the kids bowling in the morning.

None of them are able to truly bowl, but they each developed their own strategy of getting the ball down the lane, and they all had a great time.

 The local bowling alley has a "Kids bowl free" program every summer, so maybe this will become a new family tradition.

Monday night, at Family Home Evening, Sam gave each of the children a Father's blessing for the coming school year.  I loved how excited they each were for their turn, and I'm confident they will each have a great year!  I am looking forward to the new schedules, some time at home with just Levi, new projects, cooler weather, and crunching leaves.  I love the fall.  The kids are excited and nervous at the same time, and it's so fun to watch them grow through these experiences.

Summer's End

Tomorrow is the first day of school.  I really can't believe how fast this summer has flown!  I think we've had a pretty great summer.  I could hardly remember what we spent our time doing last summer (besides the 2 weddings, trip to Bear Lake, and Lagoon), and wanted to make sure we had some "lazy summer day" memories this year.  I found some great ideas on Pinterest, and stocked up with a bunch of supplies at the beginning of summer, which allowed for a lot of spontaneous fun. The end of summer finale was tie-dying. We made a family bucket list at the beginning of the summer, and doing tie-dye was on it.  I thought it would be more fun to do with some friends, so we invited a few other families over and made it into a party.

I may have gotten a little carried away with the whole tie-dye theme.  The kids and I spent our days the week before the party making tie-dye cupcakes:

tie-dye ice-cream:

colored ice, for tie-dye drinks:

I was really pleased with the shirts the kids made too.

We had a bunch of left over dye, so Saturday the fun continued with a family tie-dye party.  Sam was able to get some photos of the dying process, which didn't happen during the party.  Helping 20 kids dye shirts keeps you pretty busy for quite a while, and photos were pretty much impossible.

Noah was so excited to tie-dye some underwear.  He wore the proudly yesterday.

I dyed Olivia's shirt at the party, but on Saturday, she wanted to do it all herself.

I looked through the list we made a the beginning of the summer, and was happy with how many things we did.  I wasn't good about getting photos of much, but I think that's because I was too busy being involved.  Sometimes I get so caught up documenting what's going on, I don't actually live in the moment. This summer I lived in the moment a lot more, but have hardly any photos from the fun. But here's a list of a few of the things we did:

had a water balloon fight
mixed up homemade (lavender scented!) playdough, and did lots of sculpting
ran through the sprinklers
finger painted
read (Harrison's got a huge list of AR tests to take when he gets back to school.)
went to several splash pads/playgrounds and had picnic lunches
had several backyard bbq's with strawberry and Brazilian lemonade
made muddy buddies
went to "Chimpanzee" and "How to Train Your Dragon" at the free summer movies
did the diet coke and mentos explosion
checked out books & movies, did crafts, and watched a movie at the library
ate at the farmer's market
made sculptures with toothpicks and marshmallows
played in the sandbox
squished home-made flubber
painted the sidewalk with water
made taffy
dressed-up
collected and painted pet rocks
drank smoothies (every morning!)
strung fruity cherrio necklaces
picked fresh cherries, peaches and nectarines
turned shoe boxes into dioramas
catapulted marshmallows
created mini bows and arrows with q-tips and popsicle sticks
caught bugs
cooked up colored/flavored rock candy
played with tin-can telephones
TIE-DYED!  (We've decided that the last Friday every summer is going to be a tie-dye party!)

Now that school is starting, I have mixed feelings.  I'm ready to have some more time to myself (to do things like update this blog!), and I do love having a schedule to rely on, but I will miss these kids.  Noah will start 1st grade, which means most of his waking hours will be spent at school.  Noah and Olivia have been playing house together for hours each day, which often means messes created all over, but I'm going to be missing those messes in a couple weeks.

camping in the backyard

We looked at our summer bucket list and saw that we had not yet camped and watched a movie in the backyard.  We (the kids) cleaned up the great room, and then I read while dad set up the tent. Noah and Liv played together. After a while I got up from my book and went outside and got in the tent. Dad, Liv, and Noah came out. We all got into our sleeping bags, or in Liv's case, a "comf" pile of blankets and dolls. We then watched one hour of Mary Poppins.  Afterwards we all wanted to look at the  stars, so Dad got out his green laser pointer and showed us a few constellations.  I was surprised that the green laster could be a straight beam right up to the top of the atmosphere and point to a single star.  It was a neat way to trace out the Big Dipper or Draco.  There were enough clouds that I could not see everything that I wanted.  Only the Dippers, Draco and a few other stars were visible.

Then we all got back into the tent and went to sleep. Noah woke up at about 5:50 and Dad said to just go lie in his bed.  Then Olivia wanted to go also, and dad went with her.  So that left me alone in the tent.  I slept the last hour peacefully, and woke up just before dad came to get me around 7:30.

-Harrison

hometown parade

On Saturday we went to a parade in downtown Kennewick. It was cool. I was surprised how long the parade lasted.  It was almost two hours, which is longer than the July 4th parade at Grandma Margie's house. At the beginning of the parade, there were tons of horses.  There was the Sheriff's search and rescue band, many different local rodeo princesses from the surrounding counties, some from the local Native American tribes.  But by far the most interesting group of horses was a musical band.  In the picture below I got the big drum player.  I was most impressed with the horn section, several trumpets riding on horses.  They had their music clipped to the end of their trumpets.

In addition to the horses, there were lot of cars.  There were classic cars, like the group of Ford Mustangs, or the Cougar and Thunderbird cliques. There were some old Model A cars and Dick Tracy style pre-War beauties. My favorite car was a baby blue slug-bug convertible. I had never seen a baby blue car before, and I had always been on the lookout for a rare color slug bug convertible. We also saw the most rare license plate ever.  It was from Aruba.
As with all parades, the floats and walkers threw a whole lot of candy. We only heard about the parade about an hour before it started, so we were not really prepared with candy bags, but we were able to store the candy in our pockets and in the bottom of the stroller. It was mostly tootsie rolls and jolly ranchers. Other types of candy they threw included now and laters, hard candy, fruties, lemon heads, sweedish fish and other stuff. As you can see from this picture, the bottom of the stroller was pretty full of candy.

Some people did not give out candy.  The Little Caesar's van handed out coupons.  A local kids dentist handed out tooth brushes and plastic leis.

We were really fortunate that Levi was a super baby the whole time.  He was happy in his stroller and very quiet.

[Post co-written by Sam & Harrison]

Lego Revamp

One Saturday morning in late July, I went to the "Lego room" and decided we needed a change.  We had built a Lego table a year and a half ago, but it wasn't working.  And our huge desk was up in that room, and was not being used, now that I had a computer set up in the kitchen.

As Sam and I started to talk about what we might to do fix the problem, I had a brilliant idea - take the huge desk apart, and use it's parts to build a new Lego table.  And that's just what we did.  It took the whole of our Saturday (and a few evenings to finish up some parts) but now the big desk is gone, and the boys have a new place to build.

Taking the desk apart.

Harrison helped haul off the pieces.

Olivia helped fill the old Lego table with little people sets.

Everyone helped sort through the Legos.

 It's not perfect - legos still end up all over the floor (but I really don't think there's any avoiding that...) but it seems that it's more manageable now, and it's definitely easier to clean up, which is a big help.  We also took the time to sort through a lot of the legos, and organize them and rebuild several sets, so that we don't have so many legos in buckets.  It was a bit shocking to see just how many sets we own, but I suppose that's what happens when you have 2 boys who only ever want legos for birthdays and Christmas for the past 4 or so years!

The old Lego table is now the "little people" table and Olivia's doll house now has a place in the toy room, which helped to make her room feel a bit bigger.

Before:

After:

Olivia turns 4

Our sweet little Olivia turned 4 on August 4th - her golden birthday!  In the morning she had pink pancakes in flower shapes, and strawberry lemonade.  As is tradition in our family, she opened presents right after breakfast.  She had gifts from mom and dad, her brothers and grandparents.  She's at such a fun age, so excited about each item she received.  Her eyes really lit up when she opened the princess dolls she had seen at the Disney Store in Salt Lake.

She is really into princesses, and she got some great dress ups for her birthday as well:  

Since she had a big friend party last year, we decided to just do a family party.  But since her birthday landed on Saturday, we wanted to have some of our local "family" come help us celebrate, so we had a BBQ in the evening with 5 other families. It was tons of fun, but I have no photos of the occasion.  Between taking care of Levi, making sure everyone had what they needed for dinner, and that all the kids were getting along, we forgot to sing happy birthday to Olivia.  She still had a grand time playing with several of her good friends, and enjoying cake, but no one can have a birthday without getting happy birthday sung to them.  So, right before bed, we stuck some candles in a cupcake and did the honors:

Olivia is a spunky, fun, creative and loving little girl.  She loves to give her little brother Levi several hugs a day, and "moos" him with kisses.  She loves to dance around, and whenever there is music playing, she will start spinning around to the music.  She doesn't just talk through the day (although the talking is usually non-stop), she also sings her requests and conversations.  I think I finally figured out why she cried so much as a baby - she just had a lot to say, and she still does!  She's very particular about how her hair is done each day, and when I ask her how we should do it on a given day, the request is always very specific.  "One side pony with a braid only in the front," was the request I received yesterday.  She's starting preschool this year, and will be a big kindergartner next year.  We love having this fun-loving little girl in our family.