Camping in the Uintas

On the weekend following the 4th of July we took a camping trip up to the High Uintas. We couldn't reserve a campground, so we left as early as possible on Friday morning with a couple of campgrounds in mind. The first one we pulled into was full except for a couple of smaller spots that wouldn't have fit our trailer. We had more luck at the second campground, Shady Dell. We found a campsite that had a pull through spot. Not only that, but it had a little stream running along side it that the kids loved. Casey enjoyed it, as well.

 We spent the first hour or so getting camp set up. Then we had lunch. After lunch, we walked over to "Fairy Forest." This was one of the things that we liked about this campground. It had this "Fairy Forest" behind the campground. Basically, it was a big area with a bunch of painted rocks, trees, and branches arranged in fun formations.

While we were there, the kids decided they wanted to make their own little fairy house. This is how it turned out.

They were excited to go back the next day and find that the fairies had painted some of their rocks.

After exploring fairy forest, we drove up to Mirror Lake. There is a trail that goes all the way around the lake that we decided to walk. We stopped to take a few pictures along the way.

After that, we were a little bit worn out, so we headed back down to our campground. We stopped at this lookout point to see the view and take a picture. It sure was pretty up there.

 We also stopped to explore the Provo River Falls.

We called it a day after what happened in this video. I don't know why, but we all thought this was annoying at the time it happened, but so funny when we watched it the next day.

 We had dinner and then did a campfire after we got back. The kids love having a campfire, especially the s'mores and the stories.

The next day, after we were up and had breakfast, we decided to try another hike. In my research before the trip, I had written down about 5 different hikes that seemed to be good for families with small kids. As we were driving the day before, we only spotted one of the five, so that is the one that we headed for. The hike started off great. There was a sign at the trail head that said it was half a mile to Fehr Lake, another half a mile to the next lake, and then another half a mile to the third lake. We made good time to the first lake. The kids were especially excited to play in this snow patch that we passed.

It was really pretty around the lake, but it wasn't the best lake to swim in and Ashley really wanted to swim in a lake. So we decided to go on to the next lake. We weren't too tired and it was only another half mile. We figured it was doable.

It was a BIG mistake. Not only did the trail get muddy, rocky, and steep, but the mosquitoes started attacking. And it seemed that the further we went, the worse it got. We wish that we had had bug spray with us, but we didn't think the bugs would be a problem so early in the day. We continued to push on with the thought that the lake couldn't be much further and the beauty of it would make all of the torture worthwhile. After a while, we came to a small body of water that we will refer to as Mosquito Pond. We call it this, because the water looked nasty and the mosquitoes were are their worst as we walked past it. We didn't even stop long enough to take a picture because of the bugs and because of our disappointment. I wish we had just so I could show how bad it was. We couldn't understand why they would even mention this body of water at the trail head because it was clearly not a worthwhile destination for a hike. We turned around and headed back up the muddy, steep, and rocky trail. Ashley barely made it out and Danny and I each had to carry a boy out.
When we got back to the car, we were all hungry so we decided to go back to our trailer for lunch. We had packed a picnic, but it started to rain and we were done with bugs. After lunch, Danny took the older three kids back to fairy forest and then to a remote location to shoot his .22 handgun.

Camden was supposed to take a nap, but I gave up on him after we laid there for at least an hour and he was still wide awake. I had planned a roast in the crock pot for dinner that night, but overlooked that fact that without hookups, the crock pot would not work. So we cooked it at a low temperature in the oven. As a result, we had to stick around the campground that afternoon so that nothing happened to our trailer while we were gone. I think we did wander back over to fairy forest one more time after dinner so that they could show me their painted fairy house and a cool part of the forest that we didn't see the day before. We ended the day with another campfire. Our s'mores supplies were pretty low, but we did enjoy roasted marshmallows.
We headed back out the next morning to one more lake. Ashley still wanted to swim in a lake. We found a good little swimming spot for the kids.

Casey really loved all of the times he got to jump in water during this trip.
After their swim, we walked a little bit around the lake.

We gave up on our short hike when we saw how many people were fishing in this lake. We felt like we were disturbing them. We headed back to our campsite, ate lunch, packed up and then left. We laughed at all of the text messages and emails that came in all at once when we made it back into cell phone service. It was a fun weekend and we especially loved getting out of the 100 degree temperatures for a few days.

New Kitchen Counters

On July 3, we completed our 2nd item of our kitchen remodel(and probably our last, except to add barstools). We replaced our countertops with some nice quartz ones. The kids don't do well with change, especially Ashely, so they wanted to get a final picture with the old counters before we removed them.

 Alyssa misses stuff, but is always excited for new stuff(as long as the old stuff is recycled).

 Ashley was sad.

Tyler actually laughed while taking this picture. He thought it was funny that Ashley was so sad about it.

 We are so happy with our new counter tops.

(someday I imagine someone will replace our dishwasher with stainless steel. We didn't want to replace it in this remodel because we just bought the white one in the last couple of years)

We especially love our new sink and faucet. The faucet isn't in this picture, but it is a goose neck faucet with a pull down sprayer.

The plumbing was quite an ordeal for Danny to hook back up afterwards. We had a few days without the use of our kitchen but we survived. We were especially glad for the help of a friend who is a plumber that was willing to come over and help us out.

Forth of July

I know this is almost a month late, but we had a nice 4th of July. On the Saturday before the 4th, we went down to the Convention Center to hang out and watch the Stadium of Fire Fireworks show. We invited Gawbie, Grandpa, Shannon, Adam, and their girls to join us. We played games and ate dinner while we waited. The kids had a lot of fun playing together.

On the morning of the 4th, I ran in the Freedom Festival 10K down in Provo. I decided last minute to run this race. All summer I had been working up to running the longer distance(before this summer I had only run the 5K distance). I decided to sign up for a 10K, just to say I had done it. The Freedom Festival ended up being the most convenient(although Danny would say differently). I ran it in just over an hour and was pretty pleased with my 9 minute 48 second average pace. The unfortunate part of it was that Danny got all the kids up early to come down and cheer me on and they never ended up being able to find me. They waited around the halfway point, but decided that I had already passed before they got there. Then they tried to get to the finish line, but all of the roads were closed and there was no way to get there. I called them when I finished and we decided to meet up for breakfast. Here I am with Alyssa as we waited to be seated for breakfast.

 We joined the Wheelers at the park that afternoon for a BBQ and to let the kids play. It was over 100 degrees that afternoon and we could feel the heat even with the shade tents overhead. We called it quits around 4 and went our separate ways. The boys fell asleep on the way home and napped a little on the couch.

At dusk, we headed outside to shoot off our leftover fireworks from last year.

The kids wrapped up in blankets, despite the heat, in order to protect themselves from the mosquitoes (they are brutal in our neighborhood).

It was a nice day and we are so grateful to live in this country and for all of the freedoms we enjoy.

Lagoon Camping

We took our annual trip to Lagoon a few weeks ago. We camped there overnight again so that we could stay later and eat good food. We also spent two days there and were able to ride everything at least once(some things multiple times) We took our GOPRO, so I didn't end up taking a lot of pictures. We did get some fun videos on most of the big coasters. This was the first ride the boys went on. They loved it. Tyler also loved the big Ferris Wheel.

The kids found some pretty big bugs in our campsite. The first was this butterfly/moth.

 The second was this dragonfly. The moth was dead, the dragonfly was barely alive.

We love going to Lagoon and enjoy this time that we spend together having fun each summer.

Baking Kids Camp

Alyssa was wanting to do a baking camp this summer, but I took too long to sign her up and if filled up. To make up for it, I hosted a baking camp for the girls and some of their friends. My plan was to give them the chance to do non electronic things and to spend time with their friends learning new things. We ended up having 9 girls total, including Alyssa and Ashley. We did it all in one week, Monday through Friday, for 3 hours each day. Each day we did a different theme and made about 2 recipes. The first day was cookies(sugar cookies and oreos). The second day was pies (they each got to choose either two small or one big from strawberry, peach, cherry, chocolate, and pumpkin). The third day was bread (we did rolls, cinnamon rolls, and banana bread). The fourth day was cake (chocolate and funfetti). The last day was donuts (chocolate cake, pumpkin cake, and raised glazed). Here are a few of the pictures I managed to grab in between all of the craziness.

They enjoyed the baking, but I think they enjoyed playing outside on our trampoline just as much. Towards the end of the week it was hard to keep more than 3 or 4 of the girls engaged with baking the whole time. It also made a huge mess every day and I felt like I was constantly doing dishes and cleaning that week. I learned that if I were to ever do it again, I would do it once a week over a month-2 month period and I would probably charge them a bit more to do it to make sure that all of the costs are covered. However, Alyssa and Ashley said they were so glad I did it and thanked me over and over for putting so much work into it.

Some Randomness

Tyler and Ashley each did swim lessons during the first two weeks of June. I was hoping to get Ashley good enough to try out for a swim team next summer and to get Tyler swimming on his own. I'm not sure either of them improved as much as I wanted, but they had fun doing it. This is Tyler's class.

 And here is Ashley. She was the only girl in her class except for her teacher(whose name was also Ashley).

 We didn't do a whole lot with Lehi's City Celebration (Round Up Week). Unfortunately the biggest part of Lehi's Celebration is the Rodeo and Danny and I are not fans of the rodeo. However, the kids did talk me into taking them to one of the 3 parades the City puts on during the week. Here we are waiting for the parade to begin(Ashley and I missed the memo about sticking out your tongue during the picture).

 We went to a Children's Farmer's market one Saturday morning. All of the booths were run by children ages 4-16. The most popular item this year was definitely homemade slime, which Ashley bought. There were also a lot of food items, snow cone stations, cotton candy, and homemade crafts. A couple of booths were selling goldfish for a dollar and I let Alyssa get one. She loved that fish and did exactly what the girl told her to do in order to care for it. It still died after one day and we were all so sad. Here it is during it's last hours. We buried it in our yard so that she could always remember it.

The kids sang this to Danny on Father's day. The video didn't turn out great because I dropped my camera trying to coach them and the video went out of focus, but you get the general idea.

We are enjoying summer and doing so many things that it is hard to keep updated on the blog.

Splash Days Carnival

We love the summer in Utah County. Each week, a different city in the county has a week long Celebration with a bunch of fun activities. During the first week of June, Saratoga Springs had their Splash Days Celebration. We decided to take advantage of their Carnival. Danny was out of town on the only day that we could go, so we went without him. The kids had a blast.

Tyler was right at the height limit for this next ride, so we kept him off of it the first couple of times the girls rode it. However, he really wanted to go with them the last time they went on it, so I let him. I was a little nervous for him, but he said he loved it (even if his face told me differently for part of the ride).

This was the one ride Ashley was a little scared of. It has a roller coaster set up, but the track is just this circle where they go upside down. It switches directions halfway through so you end up going forward for half of it and backward for the other half.  She had to work up her courage to go on it, but once she did it, she wanted to ride it over and over and over.

 The boys favorite attraction was this pirate ship themed play area. It was kind of set up like an obstacle course and it had a bunch of things you walk through and climb up.

 It ended with this long tunnel slide. They went through it, at least, 10 times.

The only downside to the afternoon was that Camden had a slight fever and wasn't feeling too well. Oh, and because of the wind, they had to close a few of the rides. Tyler was especially sad that he couldn't ride the Ferris wheel.