Tabernacle Choir/Utah Symphony Concert

Alyssa had to attend an orchestra concert for her orchestra class. I had picked out a concert at Thanksgiving Point that the American Heritage Orchestra was putting on during the Tulip Festival. And then Danny informed me that he and I were going to a Real Salt Lake Soccer Game that night. So I had to scramble to find another concert to take Alyssa to. I found a Tabernacle Choir/Utah Symphony Concert on a night that we, amazingly, had open. And the tickets were FREE. I also must have gotten the first time reservation special because we were in the very front section on the left side. We were like 9 rows back and 2 sections over from the entire first presidency. Amazing.

The concert was really good. I have never seen the Tabernacle Choir in concert, just during Conference the couple of times that I have been. And I certainly wasn't on the 9th row for that. It was a fun outing and we even made it in and out of SLC without any trouble.

Oh yeah, Lula is Part Poodle

We took Lula into a professional groomer in April and they poodled her. We understand that she is part poodle, but we try to ignore that part of her as much as possible. Hard to do with that poodle poof on top of her head and her poofy tail. Funny thing is that we talked to a couple of other families with doodles who had the same problem. Now we know that telling the groomer "short" isn't enough. You have to specifically say "no poodle poof, please." Danny especially loved her bows (any time he saw her with them on, all he would say was "ridiculous").

We shaved her at home on Saturday and she now looks much more like an Irish Setter and we can all call her cute again.

Camden's 4th Birthday

Camden had a fun birthday. Unfortunately, his birthday fell on a Wednesday this year which is already a Young Women's/ Bishopric night. However, Alyssa also had a soccer game that night. So Alyssa skipped Young Women's that night(it was a personal progress night and she had already finished personal progress, so we didn't feel that bad about making her skip it) and we celebrated Camden's birthday with dinner at Denny's, then presents and cake/ice cream at our house after. It was already a late dinner(7pm) and then the service was slower than I have ever seen it anywhere. The waitress told us 30 minutes from when we ordered and it ended up being an hour. Kind of ridiculous. But they gave us a $50 gift card to make up for it. It made for a late bedtime for all of the kids, though. Here we are waiting for our food. I'm guessing that is Alyssa's fingers that slipped into the shot.

Camden opening his first present.

 He was excited about all of the green things he got, especially these green crocs.

His request for his cake was green. So Alyssa made him this very green cake(which she did almost completely on her own). And then after it was all finished and we had shown it to him he said "I want a PJ Masks - Gekko cake." What?!? So we found a couple of PJ Masks figures to put on top and he was happy with it.

Camden is a fun little caboose to our family. He finished his first year of preschool this year(a joint effort with some of the other moms in my neighborhood). He can recognize, name, and tell the sound of almost every letter of the alphabet. He can do the same with the first 10 numbers and even some higher. I even caught him counting to 100, using a homework sheet that Tyler brought home from Kindergarten. His favorite color switched from pink to green sometime around March. His favorite shows are Paw Patrol, PJ Masks, and Puppy Dog Pals. He also loves music. His favorite radio songs are "Party in the USA," "The Middle," and anything with "baby" in the lyrics. He often tells me in the car "turn up the radio. I can't hear it." And on Father's Day he sang right along with all of the bigger kids. I've never seen my other kids actually sing the words to songs as sunbeams. It was so cute. This summer we are working on learning to swing himself, not be afraid of putting his head underwater, balance on a bike, and pick up his toys when he is done playing with them. He is a couple pounds heavier than Tyler and a couple of inches shorter than Tyler. I think his feet about a half size bigger than Tyler, as well. We love our Cam-Cam.

Itty Bitty Baseball

While Camden was playing in the backyard one day, I noticed that he hit a plastic softball almost all the way across our yard. So I signed him up for the 3 and 4 year old version of baseball with the city. He had so much fun. In fact, he loved Itty Bitty Baseball so much that we signed him up for t-ball, as well.

This next picture was during their warm up and stretching. I think they were being alligators or sharks or something else like that.

Alyssa Was Very Busy

Alyssa decided to run track and field at school in the spring. She really enjoyed it, but it took a lot of time. She had practice until 4:15 Tuesday-Friday, plus 6 different track meets from the end of March through the beginning of May. Her best event was probably the 800M, but her favorite event was the 4X400M

Then, on top of track, she also wanted to play spring soccer with the city. I think she liked her team and she had 1 friend on the team that she has played with the past 3 or 4 years. Her coach held 2 hour weekly practices on top of the 2 games a week(almost every week). She ended her season with a tournament, in which they ended up loosing to the undefeated #1 team in the semi-final. It was a team that beat most of the other teams in the league by 10+ goals. I think her team held them to 5 or 6. She had a good season. She played goalie for half of each game and did very well considering her size. She got a lot of comments from both teams in that final game about how well she played.

Tyler also played spring soccer with Danny as his coach. He was able to play on the same team as a couple of his friends from the neighborhood. He seemed to enjoy it, but didn't love how much he had to run. He also had 2 fairly dominant players on his team that scored the majority of their teams goals. They probably won most of their games by a 10-15 point spread because of the 2 boys, one of them pictured below(on the right).

Unfortunately a lot of Tyler and Alyssa's games overlapped, so I was only able to go to about 3 of Tyler's 8 games, and Danny only made it to about half of Alyssa's. Thank goodness we didn't have a 3rd child signed up for soccer!

Catching Up

 I realized as I was unloading pictures from my new phone, that I haven't updated our blog in, at least, 2 months. I guess that is the problem with having more storage space on my phone- It eliminates the need to get the pictures off. I am going to try post daily for the rest of this week and see if I can get it all up do date.
We got to enjoy the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point again this year. Somehow we managed to get there in between all of the rainstorms of April and May. As you can see from our clothing, it wasn't exactly a warm night, but it was warm enough and the tulips were AMAZING!

We had a fun family night there, took advantage of the lawn games and bounce houses, and went out for dinner afterwards. We feel so blessed to have Thanksgiving Point so close to home. They really have some amazing venues and fun events.

California for Spring Break

For Spring Break this year, we took a trip to California, mostly to see family, but we did some other fun things along the way. We broke the drive down there up between 2 days and stayed with my sister's family in Henderson. Christy had a meeting from about 7-8, so we decided to kill some time in Henderson getting dinner and dessert. We ended up at a BBQ restaurant and ordered way too much food, especially Alyssa. We didn't want to carry the leftovers along with us, so we stuffed ourselves so full. Alyssa was the only one that ended up taking food home. Even though we were pretty full, the kids still had room for ice cream, so we stopped at Ben and Jerry's(we missed free cone day by exactly one week, by the way).

 Tyler had the best chocolatey mustache and beard, so I had to take a picture. I think we embarrassed him a little when we all laughed at it and he asked me to wipe it off as soon as I was done taking the picture. He kind of reminded me of Joker from Batman.

We got to Christy's house at the exact same time as her and had fun catching up with her and Dan and the kids before going to bed. They were up early for school, tennis, and work the next morning. We had planned to sleep in a little, but the sun comes up at like 5:30am in Vegas, so we were all up by 6:30. We took the time to shower and let the kids play a little in their backyard, including picking some lemons off of their tree, and then headed over to Green Valley Casino for a breakfast buffet. The best part about it was how the boys eyes widened at the sight of all of those "arcade games." We had to explain to them that it was an arcade for only adults. The girls didn't like having to walk through the casino, but we all really enjoyed the breakfast. We aren't quite sure why their breakfast spread included bread sticks, pizza, and tacos, but we enjoyed the other stuff.
After breakfast, we were off for Grandma and Grandpa Miner's house. We made it there around 2pm and the kids enjoyed an afternoon and evening of exploring Grandma's toys. We even got a nice musical serenade from the kids using Grandma's musical instruments.

I went up to the park with Alyssa before dinner so that she could do her track workout. She was supposed to do a workout every day of spring break so that she could stay in shape. I got to do them with her. I may have been more of a hindrance than a help since she is a much faster runner than I am. At least it helped me get my exercise in most of the days.
On Thursday, we were up at the crack of dawn to open up Disneyland Park. We made the mistake of offering the kids breakfast. This delayed our departure about 30 minutes which caused us to hit more traffic and get to Disneyland about an hour later than we wanted to. Lines were already pretty long, but we started the fast pass line up and line waiting and had a really fun, but tiring day. We got in the park around 8:45am and our kids actually lasted until 11pm. The girls would have made it to midnight, but we struggled to keep Camden awake for the final 45 minutes. We managed to ride everything that day that we wanted and some of the favorites twice. I think the kids favorite was Space Mountain and they probably would have loved to ride it a second time, but it was the longest line in the park and the fast passes ran out around 3pm. I didn't get very good pictures, but this is what I got.

It must have been bright that day because someone has their eyes closed in almost every picture. The kids were asleep within minutes of getting in the car and we rolled into Grandma and Grandpa's house around midnight. They had waited up for us which reminded me of my teenage days. :)
Friday was our rest day. We slept in, enjoyed more of Grandma's toys and games, and just enjoyed spending time with them. The girls got up on the roof in the evening to clean out their gutters and thought it was a lot of fun. They also picked a lot of lemons while we were there and made lemonade. We were glad for the down day. Alyssa and I even skipped the track workout. We needed it after such a long day at Disneyland.

Conference and Wheeler Cousins

On Saturday, we headed to Brian and Maryn's house to enjoy some cousin time and watch General Conference. They invited us to join them for breakfast and I'm sure our kids were so excited when they realized that they got donuts for breakfast(one of their family traditions for Conference). They also got to play Conference Bingo for prizes. I think the adults all got to listen to Conference better than usual since most of the kids disappeared upstairs to watch and we didn't have all the extra noise around us since they entertained each other so well. The weather was perfect, so the kids enjoyed playing outside in between the first 2 sessions.

These 3 boys claimed the trampoline for "the boys" and did not like when Alyssa invaded their territory.

In between the afternoon session and the priesthood session, we went to dinner at Fuddruckers(our request since there is no longer Fuddruckers in Utah and we miss it).

During priesthood session, Alyssa, Catherine, and Maryn made snickerdoodles while I took the rest of the kids over to the park. I also ran a little with Alyssa for her daily track workout.

We stayed until about 7:30 and then headed back to Grandma and Grandpa's to get a good nights rest for our drive home the next day.
On Sunday we were up and on the road shortly after 6. We didn't even bother getting the kids dressed, just loaded them and all of our stuff in the car and left. We stopped in Barstow for breakfast and got everyone(except Alyssa) dressed there. We listened to the first session of Conference by streaming through our phone. Our lunch stop didn't work out as well and we ended up having to stop as the second session was starting. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. We probably should have skipped the stop and listened to Conference. We ate as quickly as possible. Danny and the girls finished first, so they got in the car as the first speaker was starting. The boys took a little longer, but finally finished and we were on our way. The traffic was heavy on the freeway and Danny was commenting about how the next few hours were not going to be fun if it was going to be like that all the way home. The car in front of us stopped quickly and we barely were able to stop in time, but fortunately we did. Unfortunately, the car behind us did not. We heard squealing tires and then we were forced forward. Danny swerved to avoid hitting the car in front of us and somehow managed to maneuver our car in between the car in front of us and the truck hauling a trailer to our right. I still don't know how we fit in that space without hitting any of them. We pulled off to the side with a car full of crying kids. Danny dealt with the people who hit us(their car hardly had a scratch on it), the police officer who finally responded to the accident(like 30 minutes later), and our insurance company. I calmed the kids down. We were all wearing seat belts and no one was injured, except Ashley having a little pain in her neck(mostly from the seat belt rubbing on it). There was a bigger accident not too far behind us(probably a chain reaction from our accident) that the officers responded to first, so we had to wait for them for awhile. After filling out a report with the officer, we were on our way. We tried to listen to Conference through it all, but it was quite difficult. I guess we will need to re listen to those talks. Our car is now in the shop being repaired. Not sure how long it will take, but we are grateful for insurance and that no one was hurt. We still made it home around 6:30, even with the delay.