Santaquin Carnival

Last week our family went to the first ever Santaquin City Carnival. The children had so much fun on all the rides I think it might have made up for the stream of "disappointed hopes" this summer, (long story).
We got in just after 5pm and were about the first people there. It was just the sort of crowd I like. I like that there were so many rides that the girls could ride and yet the boys had their fill of excitement. Dennis ended up getting sick, but by that time the boys were fear free and able to go on the rides by themselves. The carnival is scheduled to come every year from now on. Mark your calendars!

Week #1

Wow! I mean it wow!! What a week it has been. We started school head on Monday morning. I'm so tired and it went by so fast. We've been so busy and the children were pretty good considering they had to do school work two days before most of their friends. I love the school time routine though. I feel more put together during this time and oddly enough my house has actually been cleaner this week than most of the summer.
My brain has been going full board too. It felt so good today to go out in the yard and pull weeds and water my garden. I love having a yard. It has become one of my greatest release times. I also enjoy it because it is one of the things that my husband and I like to do together. My husband is a fabulous landscape designer considering he has to incorporate all of my "wants" into the picture. The weeds are never ending but so is my stress so it's probably a good thing . . . in the greater scheme of things.
My other great stress re leaver is scrap booking. Crystal was so nice to come over until 1:30am last night to "play", and my ever amazing husband was good to take care of the kiddos while we worked. (Kids night out and City Hall was a great idea!)
Well, one week down and 35 to go! It's going to be fabulous!!

Year #4, Here We Go!

Today was the first day of our 4th year homeschooling and I must say that I'm so excited! I love the routine and the time with my children. Of course the only glitch today was that I ran out of ink in my printer! (yea, disaster!) It turned out great judging by how quickly the day flew by!

Afton's Kindergarten Books

These are books that I made for Afton that we'll be working on this year. Glad I finally put that binding machine to use that I bought last year. It's been a lot of fun and I'm really getting excited for the school year to start again. I just have a few more books to buy, but then there are always more books that I could buy.

Summiteer

As part of the Santaquin Days activities, Dennis put together the first ever Santaquin City Summiteer Mountain Bike Race. Dennis put a lot of time and effort into getting this thing going. He designed the T-shirts, found sponsors and donations, mapped out the race, and got every thing going, even rode the course 2 or 3 times over the past weeks. There were 20 participants this year from ages 5 to 51. Both Jacob and Isaac participated in the beginners course. It was very hot but they did a great job!!
We had a little drama just 1.5 hours before we had to be there when Jacob's bike got another flat. The night before Dennis fixed Jacob's tire(for the 3rd time this year, darn sticker weeds). Well I ran up to Stringhams and bought a tubeless tire and our neighbor put it on for him. We made it in plenty of time and everything went well.

These are just a few pictures from our trip to the Moyle Park in Alta Utah. Every Tuesday during the summer, a local family has been putting together tours and activities at the park for free. A few of us from Dennis' family, met at the historical Moyle Park in Alta, UT for lunch, since it is part of our family history it made the visit extra special. We were able to tour the old family house. They shared with us a short history of the Moyle family and had the new DVD "The Stonecutter" playing as well. They had a list of items for the children to try to find while looking around inside the old homestead which kept them looking instead of touching! It was also fun looking for great-granddad Cluff's baby picture along with his baby shoes.

Some of the other activities they had going on around the park were, churning butter to eat with homemade bread, jump rope, checkers, a ring game, doing the laundry by hand, stilts and candle making. The old lookout tower was also open so we could look inside. Kind of a fun day enjoying a little family history together.

S'mores

This happened a couple weeks ago but I'm still posting it. We were going to go up the canyon and have dinner with some friends of ours but the trip got rained out, so we made due with our grill on the deck and still had plenty of fun and didn't even miss out on the s'mores. We didn't have enough roasting sticks to go around so instead of taking turns, the kids simply took a couple sticks from the neighbors willow tree and used them instead. I wasn't quick enough to man the marshmallow bag and I think a couple of the kids came out of the house with 8 or 9 on their stick. Classic!! It was a lot of fun. We don't make our S'mores with the traditional grams, marshmallows, and chocolate, we skip a step and just use striped cookies with marshmallows. I personally just like one cookie with one mellow, but that's just my preferred cookie mellow ratio.