from temple square to first pack meeting

Well, I'm officially totally behind, and no, this is not the blog about youth conference. I probably won't get to that one until after Sunday--I have to teach a lesson to all the girls in young women and that takes mucho time, and I'm preparing in between visiting with our friends, Steve and Natalie and their 4 kids, who are staying with us this week, so it's a bit crazy around here. More to come on that later!


Last week for our combined young women's activity, we drove to the Salt Lake Temple and gathered around it to listen to the history of it, and the meaning of all the many carvings and symbols on it.
It is still one of my favorite temples because of the beautiful architecture and the incredible landscape which surrounds it!

We sat close to this statue of Joseph Smith as we learned more about the temple.

I love working with the youth in Young Women's--these girls are so great!!

This past Thursday was Ben's (and Thomas') first pack meeting! These new scouts are so excited to be there--it's so cute!

The bar was set pretty high as far as pack meetings go because it was the annual Blue and Gold dinner--food helps everything go by better!

Our scouts have combined with the other ward we split away from, so it's a big group of boys!

The newer boys (I still don't know what they are called--that's how much I know about scouts!) read a little skit, and in between everything else were these funny little chants with actions.

Ben worked hard so he could get his bobcat patch by his first pack meeting. I had no idea that the mom's get a pin to go along with it! Woo-hoo!

Ben the bobcat! I love that Ben loves scouts already--it will teach him some great things that we too, are trying to teach him here at home.

After all the festivities, and while I was gabbing with some of the other mom's (about cameras, what else?!) the boys found the little cozy coupe to play around in with some of the other kids. It was a good evening.

Friday night we got more rain, surprise-surprise(!), and when we returned home from taking the boys to see the new Transformers movie, there was a full-on double rainbow just outside our front door. (That didn't stop the rodeo from continuing on though--it's just around the corner from us so we could still hear everything!)

start of summer

So today was the first official full day of summer, and since it really was the first time it has felt like summer around here, at a mere 75 degrees, the boys wanted to take advantage of it and get outside. It wasn't long before swimsuits were requested, along with a very long hose and a pool at the bottom of the slide, and voila, an instant party!!
First thing to do is fill a bucket of water, climb up the ladder, pour the water down the slide,

fly like a crazy boy down the slide,

and crash into the pool of water at the bottom!

This is Will's interpretation of said routine as stated above! It cracks me up just looking at the pictures!!

If you look closely at Will's face, you can't even hardly see a scar from his running-after-the-ice-cream truck accident just a few weeks ago. It was almost completely healed within a week--aren't our bodies the most amazing thing!!

Oh yea, Ben was having such a great time!

SILLY BOYS!! (Jake and Adam)

And finally Jaycie was back in town--it was a very long week around here!! What a great way to start off summer!

my boys

To take a quote from a friends blog..."My Boys, My Life!" Happy Father's Day!! xoxo

randomness

K, as hard as I tried, this post is being stubborn and won't let me move this program, so just remember it at a certain point as you are reading through this post. :)

Now I've got some real catching up to do! You would think that having sick kids around here for the past two weeks would give me plenty of time to do this, but in reality it didn't at all!

It all started two weeks ago when Jake got sick. He really did fall asleep just like this on the kitchen stool one day as he was waiting for me to get off the phone. His temperature for 4 days hovered around 103-103.5, poor kid. After Thursday everyone was well until the next Sunday when Ben woke up sick. Then just as soon as Ben was feeling better last Wednesday, Will threw up on his bus and Jake got sick again. I left for youth conference on Thursday, so Daren, who wasn't feeling great himself, was stuck home with a bunch of sickies!! But today, for the first time in 2 weeks, everyone is feeling quite well. We made it through the whole winter without hardly even a sniffle, and then summer hits and we're out for weeks. Hopefully this is it for us for a while! Even a lot of our extended family is sick, and hopefully that is it for them too!!

So anyway, we purchased our first piano a couple weeks ago. The boys were so excited, especially Ben. He kept saying as he was waiting for the guy to deliver it, "Where is MY piano?!" We put it in the Lego room, formerly the twins bedroom upstairs, and hopefully Ben will be taking lessons soon.

On Thursday, June 11, Grandpa Train and (cousin) Aydan came out to our house to go on a bike ride on the Jordan River Trail. How cute is that?! Barry is such a cute grandpa, and the boys had a great time. After that, Grandpa and Aydan took Ben home with them because they had big plans. Grandma was picking up (cousin) Jack at the same time as the bike ride, and then they all got together to play that day.

That evening Gma and Gpa took the three boys to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Capitol Theater and then they had a big sleepover at Gma and Gpa's house. Ben said, "The Chitty Chitty Bang Bang show was really good. Even though I didn't have donuts, I had a great time!"

This is the other thing that has been going on these past two weeks--rain, hail, rain, winds, rain, thunder and lightning, and more rain!! We haven't turned on the sprinklers for a while now it's been so wet. These are a few pictures I took during several downpours!! Oh summer, where are you?! (Actually I've really enjoyed this weather--the storms have been great!)

Then there's my poor garden! As seen in the picture, it got nailed over and over again. It was pretty hard on several of my plants, but they are all still alive, and the strawberries are delicious!!

Ahhh, Donut Friday! It was a beautiful day and Jaycie came along to pick out her own donut. This was a fun day because that evening we went to see Jaycie and her two sisters, Braidie and Ronnie, dance in their year-end recital. I have wanted to see them dance for years and we finally made it, which is something to say for 4 boys (including Daren, what a good sport!).

I got this picture just before the recital started. If I recall correctly, Jaycie's group was one of the first to perform and she had to run up there from sitting in the audience with Jake in his seat. How cute is she in her bumble bee outfit?!

Jaycie in another dance, and this is the only picture I got of Braidie dancing her solo. I don't know too much about it, but she was the 2009 STARS scholarship winner and she went to California to do a 2-day class with celebrity choreographers, and then she went on to nationals in Las Vegas (which I know she has won the past couple years, and probably did again this year, but I haven't heard yet). Braidie has been one of the boys babysitters for the past 3 years since they moved in as our neighbors, and we love these guys!

Not a great picture of Ronnie, but she is such a cute dancer with the best expressions!

And finally, this is what the Legos room has looked like for quite a while now. It's a mess!! At one point I tried to put them all together at the same time to clean things up, but it seriously only lasted less than 5 minutes, and then it went back to as it was before.

Indiana Jones Legos and the pirate Legos.

Will is my biggest Legos junkie--he just loves to play with them, take them apart, and then asks me to put them together again. It's fun, but I can only handle so much you know!!

Well that's it for now. It will probably take a few days for me to get to doing a post about youth conference that I just got back from, but it's coming!

end-of-school year

There were so many things happening at the end of the school year, I decided to lump them all together in one post--lots of pictures (of course!), but I'll try to keep the writing to a minimum. *ya, sure!*

the living planet aquarium

It took me until the end of the school year, but I finally got to go on a school field trip--this time with Jake's class. The aquarium is just in Sandy, so it wasn't far. Jake was willing to wait in a LONG line to take his turn at "driving" the boat in the Great Salt Lake, in search of brine shrimp. We didn't find any...and then it was on to the South American exhibit. There were so many great things to see there, but my personal fave was all the different colored frogs, esp. the electric blue frog! Jake had fun with his friends there, including (friend) Will and Neve.

We did a terrible job of marking off our list of things we saw, probably because we were having too much fun!

spring concert, classes I and II

I love these choral concerts put on by the kids. A few weeks ago I was putting Jake to bed and he wanted me to tickle his back, so I told him I would if he would sing me a song. He asked me to sing first, so I started singing, "You Are My Sunshine." Ben came running in the room, "How do you know that song?!!" Turns out they were singing it for their spring concert...who knew?! The second graders are on the right hand side in photo 1, and Ben is in the middle of the top row in photo 2. His favorite song they sang was, "Button You Must Wander," and he's even learned to play it on the piano.

Not a great photo of Mr. Beck, but he's been Ben's music teacher ever since Nursery 3's, and he is absolutely incredible with the kids!! Now that Ben will be moving on to the third grade, they will get a new music teacher, but I'm glad Jake will still have Mr. Beck.

nursery 4's family math day

For the end of the school year the Nursery 4 class has the parents come and they do lots of fun math activities.

I was one of the parent reps for Jake's class this year, and even though I didn't get to do as many activities as I wanted, I at least accomplished getting to know the kids his age better than I did last year. Jake had two great teachers this year and I wanted to do something special for them. I like to find any excuse to make these flannel blankets, so I put these together for them with the help of the children. We traced their hands onto flannel and they wrote their names by their hands, and then I put the rest of them together. They turned out so cute, if I do say so myself!! Of course, I was up until 3am the night before getting them done, but I did get caught up on the final episodes of "24" so it was all good!!

Miss Ann and Miss Suzanne were great teachers and the kids sure love them!

a double-header

Ben had a double-header the last Saturday before school got out. It was a nice day and they had fun, but it sure wore him out. Ben is #13 in photo 1, and photo 2 is a fun picture of River that I got as he ran by me. Way to hustle boys!!

Diesel couldn't wait until the end of the second game so he could spray off Ben with his little water mister pack. You can see the look of exhaustion on Ben's face at that point, but Diesel was so cute about it!

lacrosse practice/party

Monday's practice was the final practice before school got out and that's when they decided to have their end-of-the-season party. After practicing for a bit they played some games. Ben and Reggie were paired up for the balloon toss.

Tami was a great team coordinator/mom and she put this whole party together.

The awards: everyone pitched in money to get "thank you" gifts for the awesome coaches--Mary, Russ, and Don. Then each of the kids got their trophies while the coaches said positive things about each boy. It was a great season, and thanks to these coaches who put in so much time and effort.

After Ben got his award he ran over to me and asked me to take his picture with his award. After I did he said, "Cool, are you going to put this on the blog?" But of course!!

And what's a team party without pizza?! I picked up the pizzas, 10 of them from Costco, on my way up to practice and you should have seen the looks I got carrying out so many pizzas!! After the kids got their pizza they all huddled around the lacrosse goal posts. Cute!

Have you ever seen the size of the cupcakes from Costco?!?! The are gi-normous!!

One last cheer: RAH--RAH--RAH--RAVENS!!!!!

Towards the end of the party we spotted these f-16's flying in circles around Sandy. One of the dad's at practice works for the military and he told us they were preparing for a fly-over at the Salt Lake Bees game that night (celebrating Air Force Week). They kept flying around and around, getting lower and lower. We were in a perfect place to see them and the "air show" lasted for at least 45 minutes. It was so cool to see!

last day of school

Tuesday, June 2, was Ben's last day of school. In his class the parent reps had the kids write cards to Mrs. Duke and put them all together in this beautiful shaker box, held proudly by Caroline, one of Ben's many friends.

Ben and Mrs. Duke. He really loved her and loved being in her class. Here is the class getting ready for their ice cream sundae treats.

Ben got a hold of my camera and took tons of pictures, including some of his friends in his class: Jack, Sophia, Hughie, and Travis. I'm sparing you all the pictures of the walls, and every single kids cubbie! Bless his heart! I love seeing what kids take pictures of, though, because it's things that are important to them, and he got some pictures of things that I never would have even thought to have taken.

nursery 4's party

One of the girls in Jake's class, Adela, hosted an end-of-year party at her house. Her mom, Rebecca, bought this waterslide from Costco for the party and it was a blast for the kids!!

My contribution to the party was, of course, swedish fish!! I have really turned my boys into junkies for them because that's about all they ate. *sigh* What do you do?! Buy more when the bag is empty!!

Diesel was at the party too, and all the boys really got into these water guns!! Diesel was so cute running around with his water gun (I got some other good pictures that I'll get to you Alisha!). Second photo is Jake and Bridger--you can't even tell how much ketchup Bridger had on his hot dog, but you can see that Jake had loaded up on the swedish fish...again!

class II party

We had to leave the nursery 4's party early to go to Ben's party at Jack's house and pick him up. I got totally lost, yes even with a GPS, but finally found the house. By that time we had missed everyone and the party was over, but I got a picture of the sign and Ben jumping on the trampoline.

We were so close to Daren's fire station that the boys were dying to go see him, so we did for a few minutes. Then we had to go back to Jack's house to get Jake's crocs, and it wasn't until we were on our way home that I realized Ben forgot his towel there too. I felt too stupid calling back a third time to check on his school shirt that he left. What a crazy day!! By the time we got home I was too tired to do anything else, so we went to the golden arches in celebration of the end of school.

Of course that day brought back memories that it was a year ago I started this blog on our first day of our month-long Route 66 trip. We picked up Ben from school and headed straight for California, or Las Vegas as it turned out. Alot has happened in this past year, and I love that I have this blog to look back on. Ben loves it too--in fact, he has figured out how to make comments on this blog, so look out for those!! He asks me all the time if I have a new blog yet! Maybe I'll get him started with his own sometime...

final lacrosse game of spring 2009

The last game of the season was last Saturday. How fitting that it was at 9am...in Park City!! That meant an early morning for us, including my mom and dad who were here for Ben's baptism later that day. It was chilly up there, but not as cold as I thought it would be. It was beautiful up there and the boys had fun. Ben in his final face-off.

Photo 1 is Ben's buddy Quentin. He is an amazing athlete--he won this face off and took it all the way to the goal and scored, all in about 10 or 15 seconds. He's a natural in whatever sport he plays and is just incredible for as young as he is. (He used to race in downhill snow skiing when he was only 4 years old!) He and Ben have been friends ever since nursery 3's.

We led most of the game, but it ended in a tie, 4-4. The boys did great, and now all the second graders move up to the next level in third grade. It's fun to watch these boys grow up and play together.

Quentin and Ben

And so that's a wrap on the end-of-the-year stuff!! Where is Will in all this? With year-round school he's still in school until July 2, but it's all working out well so far. Hello summer!! But that's another post...

p.s. Happy 45th Anniversary to my parents today!!