Squid People

We took Anna and Evie to the Swiss Days festival in Midway for the first time this past summer. We were looking for something fun to do as a family, and since we'd never been before, we thought we'd go check it out. I admit that it wasn't what I expected. I was hoping for a lot more Swiss and fewer vendors of non-Swiss items. But we managed to find a spot for the parade and collected lots of candy. We've never really taken the girls to a parade before, much less one that involves so much candy being tossed out. I didn't come very well prepared. At first, we tried to keep the candy in our pockets, but then we had to start dumping it all in the diaper bag, which was fine except that it was hard to keep their candy separate. At any rate, the kids loved it and for months afterwards Anna has asked if we can go see the squid people again.

waiting for the shuttle to go back home

Christa's Graduation

Yay! My sister Christa graduated in August from college, earning a BA in English. She immediately began the masters program at BYU the very next month and I've been doing my best to relive my own graduate school experience through her. She's been a good sport about it, although I can't convince her that it really would be worth it to go around dropping my name to her professors. She says she tried it once and the professor obviously only pretended to remember me.

My plan was to show up for the last half of graduation so that I wouldn't spend quite so much time trying to keep my kids quiet but we could still be there to take photos with Christa. The ceremony ended up being much shorter than we expected and then I got stuck in traffic, so we were too late to see any of it and my family had to wait for me to catch up to them. It seemed like such a good idea. Oh well.

Christa decided to ring the Victory Bell at the Marriott Center. Anna who has always been sensitive to noise wasn't a fan.

Two hot, tired kids!

Celebrating with waffles south of campus.

Nutella and strawberries = yum!

Motion Exhibit

In August, Bill and Sandy came to look at houses in Utah, with the thought of possibly moving here. While they were in town, we took Sandy over to the Notion of Motion exhibit at the Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur Museum.

The exhibit had a spinning table with lots of different objects for kids to place on the table and then observe what happened. Most objects quickly moved to the outside and flew off the spinning table. It's amazing how long kids (and adults) can be fascinated by objects flying off a spinning table.

The above exhibit released smoke out of this hole. By pushing down on the top, you could create smoke rings. Most kids pushed with their hands, but Evie preferred jumping on it (with adult supervision of course).

More smoke rings

August Snapshots

We spent our summer doing as much swimming as possible. A friend of ours introduced us to the reservoir in a nearby neighborhood. I think it is stocked with fish, but my kids just liked playing in the sandy mud and splashing in the water. I liked the zero-depth entry. We always left super dirty, but I started using the sprayers at the fish cleaning station to hose my kids off--a little gross, but better than mud and sand in my car.

One afternoon during Evie's nap, Anna found my stash of maxi pads and wrapped several around her arms. She was very proud of herself and I thought it was funny.

Anna had lots of nightmares this summer and so, ended up sleeping on the floor by our bed often. One morning, when we got up, I noticed that Anna burrowed under our bed, leaving only the bottom half visible.

Anna's friend Avery has an inflatable pool in her backyard, so we spent lots of time swimming over there too. Evie wanted so wanted to be with the big kids, but the water was almost as deep as she is tall. The first time, she fell several times and couldn't pull herself up out of the water without some help. I spent a lot of time running over and pulling her out. Eventually she figured out how to keep her head above water.

Climbing on Grandma

We made several trips to farmers' markets in our area, but only managed to make it to the downtown market once this year. It was a little early for apples, but we found some golden delicious and bought some lunch.

Yummy ice cream cake!

In July, my sister Jamie and her husband, Chris, adopted their first baby boy, who is also Anna and Evie's first cousin. They love their cousin and at first Anna called him her brother.

Tyler looks a little worried about having Anna hold him.

Upside down or right side up, we love sunglasses at our house.

July Snapshots

 July 23, 2011

These kids figured out pretty quickly that Grandma keeps Fat Boys in her freezer. Every time we went to Grandma's house, they asked for ice cream--but not just any ice cream--the ice cream in the freezer in the garage.

Anna with her watermelon "bowl."

Payson Lakes

July 22, 2011

With the help of my parents, I took my kids for one night of camping. Dan elected to stay home, so we drove up to the campground midl-morning on Friday. It was our first time sleeping outdoors. We had lots of fun exploring the lake up at Payson Lakes and hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa and my sisters, but not so much fun sleeping.

The kids loved being outside, but Evie had a hard time settling down to take her afternoon nap. I wasn't too worried about Evie getting her nap--I figured she'd fall asleep if she felt tired enough--but then Evie started to have an emotional meltdown.

Christa brought some giant marshmallows and at some point it seemed like a good idea to calm Evie down by giving her a marshmallow to eat. Instead of eating it though, she decided to pull it apart and spread it all over her legs. I was totally paranoid about bears, so I wasn't so happy about Evie spreading marshmallow all over her legs. We got it washed off and Grandpa put Evie in his hiking backpack and took Evie for a walk. That finally put Evie to sleep. She got in a good nap and I got her settled for bed at what seemed like a good hour. For some reason, Evie didn't like sleeping outside and kept waking up screaming. I would get her settled and put her in her pack and play and then minutes later she'd be screaming again. She only stayed asleep when I sat up with her, so around one or two in the morning, I went and sat with her in my car. Grandma was nice enough to take a turn too, so I did get to do some sleeping lying down.

The next morning, we had some pancakes for breakfast and then headed home to try and recover from our long night.

Maybe next summer we'll try camping again and I'm hoping it will go better.