Park Fun

We have had fun at some of the parks near us this summer. One morning, I took the boys out for a bike ride and we stopped at the little park a few blocks away from our house afterwards. The boys especially had fun in the sprinkler that was running. They kept running over to it, getting wet, and then running back to show me.

When Camden saw me taking pictures, he wanted to see what they looked like. He takes the best pictures in selfie mode, so I took a few of us.

I don't know why, but I have this amazing ability to copy the facial expressions of my kids almost exactly. There is a picture of myself and Alyssa as a baby and we have almost the exact same expression. Well here is my picture with Camden. It made me laugh when I first saw it.

Tyler jumped in on the fun as well. They forgot to tell me that I needed to stick my tongue out for the picture.

We had some friends invite us to join them at this new splash pad in Bluffdale. I had no idea when people talked about this splash pad that it would be so nice and so gigantic. We played hard for at least two hours. The kids were not ready to leave at that point, but our friends left along with their shade tents, so we left too.

There is this park that I've been wanting to take the kids to all summer. Well, it isn't really a park, actually, but a small lake. We headed up to the splash pad nearby and when it was closed for the next hour, we decided to check out the lake. The kids loved it, despite the fact that we didn't have kayaks(or even life jackets) and that it was filled with ducks and fish.

 The girls were excited to show me that they could swim all the way out to the dividing ropes.

We only spent about 30-40 minutes there, but the girls have been begging us to take them back(and to bring rafts or boats or kayaks of something because that is what most of the people at the lake were doing and they thought it looked fun.
This has nothing to do with parks, but Alyssa had fun with the boys and my phone while they were waiting in the car one day. I thought this one was cute. I especially like her Indian headband😉.

We have been having a fun and busy summer. I am almost all the way caught up for now. The girls are finishing up tennis lessons this week and Tyler is in the middle of a 3-4 year old soccer camp(pictures to come later). And then we(me and the kids) leave for California and Danny leaves for Nashville on Saturday. We are looking forward to spending some time with Grandma and Grandpa and with cousins. I'm not sure if Danny is excited for his conference, but I am grateful that he thought of the idea to send us to California while he is gone.

Foam Day

Every year on July 24th, the Lehi Fire Department hosts Foam Day at a park close to our house. This is probably our 4th time going since we have lived here. I don't know why, but the kids love it. Walking through the foam kind of grosses me out a little bit but they play in it like it is water, especially Ashley.

Camden was a little freaked out by the foam and wouldn't even step into it. I had to carry him around as I followed the kids to get pictures and videos. After we were done with the foam, we walked through the different sponsor booths and collected balloon animals, candy, prizes, and business cards. The kids also played games and built a throne with these huge lego blocks. 

After the booths, we waited in the too-long lines for water covered inflatables. There were maybe 6 bouncy houses set up, but I only let them do 4 before we called it quits. Danny was already home from work by that point and we were heading over to spend the afternoon and evening with family. We had a lot of fun. The only down side was when Alyssa started to really be bothered by her allergies a few hours later. We decided it was probably from crawling through the grass infested foam. 

Bowling

While Danny was at High Adventure with the young men, I took the kids bowling. It has been a long time since I have tried bowling with them and I wasn't sure how well Tyler and Camden would do with it. They actually did pretty well with the lightest ball possible and the metal ramp.

They were pretty insistent about carrying their balls to the ramp themselves even though they dropped them a couple of times.

Ashley and Alyssa did well too, with the bumpers in(Alyssa tried without bumpers for a few frames, but gave up on that when she threw a few gutter balls in a row). Ashley is wearing headphones because she was going through a phase of her ears not popping like they should. The headphones seemed to make it not be annoying so she wore them for like 3 days straight.

We had a "buy one game get one free" coupon so we stuck it out for the 2 full games. I think Alyssa and I were the only ones that actually enjoyed the whole second games. The others were pretty much done after the first.

After bowling, we played a few arcade games, picked some prizes, and then headed home.

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.