You May Officially Disregard the Last Post

We have less than 3 weeks of summer break left to go and I don't know if I've accomplished ANYTHING on my list from the last post.  But who cares... it's summer vacation right?  Here's a recap so far:
Week 1:  Girls Camp

It was amazing and exhausting, all at the same time.  I LOVE Girls Camp.  I LOVE doing the 4th year hike... I LOVE doing it with my partner, Danielle.  I LOVED having Megan on the hike this year.  I LOVED my YCL's.  I LOVED how Eric puts up with me all for this amazing 3 days with a bunch of teenage girls.  (He LOVES it too... and I think he loves that going to Girls Camp gets him out of Scout Camp now!)

Week 2:  Recover from Girls Camp (Daily Routine:  Sleep in, decide it's too hot to exercise, sit in chair in my PJ's until close to dinner time, shower, get dressed and make dinner, pretend like I've done something other than watching Robin Hood episodes with the kids all day, hang out with Eric, watch some more TV, wish I was back at Camp, and go to bed.... repeated 5 times!)

Week 3:  Road trip with my besties...
These girls are seriously awesome.  We got invited to go hang out at Karen's house (aka Lambson Lodge) for a couple days without kids or hubbies.  It was sooo much fun... we were the biggest kids up there.  We sat around Karen's house talking, eating caramel corn and chocolate chip cookie dough, while watching Season 2 of Downton Abbey.  We did get out of the house to eat some mediocre mexican food (and I was mad because I forgot my milk pills!), shop for soda and junk food at the local Safeway,  and get ice cream in Greer.  (Again... still no milk pills....)  Most of these photos were taken when we parked to walk along the creek in Greer.  This little tourist trap town has got to be the prettiest mountain town in Arizona I have EVER seen.  Next time I get a Groupon offer for a cabin in Greer, I might just buy it.    Many thanks to Karen and Sheri for making this visit happen.  It was WONDERFUL!

Two days after coming home from the White Mountains, we took Sheri's family out on the boat with us. It was super fun.  All the kids had a great time, including Megan, even though their family has all boys.  Megan is such a good sport.  She puts up with a lot of boys in her life.

Week 4:  Recover from road trip with my besties and an exhausting boat day... I'm not 13 anymore... it was almost like Ragnar all over again... except that Adrienne and I got to share a double bed instead of cramming into a van for middle of the night naps!   Also this week, appointments galore.... Visiting Teaching, Chiro, Ortho, Dermatology and 2 of the kids got physicals.  Whew... I felt like I was LIVING in my car!

Week 5:  Which brings us to today.  The only thing I've accomplished today so far is about 6 loads of laundry... whether or not said laundry will get folded and put away is anyone's guess.  I've also cleaned out my 2 email inboxes and read blogs that I've ignored for the last six weeks.  Luckily, I'm not the only lazy blogger out there... so there weren't too many to sift through.  I do have a "to do" list of things I want to accomplish before wednesday afternoon.  It includes cleaning the fridge, sweeping and vacuuming the house, pulling the weeds in the backyard, and the usual stuff that has to be done all the time.  Wednesday evening we are having friends over for a BBQ/swim party, and Thursday, Eric and I head to Portland for a short but sweet getaway.

Week 6 will involve lots of cleaning and back to school shopping.

Week 7 we will have family come!  Yay!  I always feel bad when the grandparents come in the hottest summer months, but Ian will be turning 12 and getting the priesthood, so it's a big occasion that warrants the presence of both sets of grandparents.

Week 8 will be the first day of school... and summer vacation will officially be over.  Booo.... Hisss.... sad face!  Summer itself will last for 2 more months after school starts, so at least the school routine will help distract us from the heat.  Maybe...

Cousin Reunion, Part One: The Lake

Thus begins the long awaited cousin reunion... 3 out of 4 of my kids were born within 3 weeks of 3 out of four of their kids.  Those are some pretty scary stats considering we never consulted each other in advance or hinted to each other a pregnancy was coming.   I now present:  (left to right, top to bottom):  Dallyn, Ashlyn, Taylor, Ian, Ethan, Brayden, Megan and Lyndi. 

The very first item on the agenda was a couple days at the lake.  The first day we went to Bartlett Lake.  Not our favorite, but parking isn't an issue if you get a late start on a Saturday, which we did.  The second day we went to Saguaro Lake... our favorite lake to visit.  We went on Monday and had the whole lake to ourselves... it was awesome!

Megan and Lyndi... sometimes I think they wish they had been born twins. 

This picture cracks me up every time I look at it.  Poor Ashlyn was the brunt of A LOT of teasing that day, which doesn't happen often, so we were milking it for all it was worth.  To her credit, she was a really good sport about it, and I won't even disclose what she did that brought the teasing on in the first place, but it would be a really fun story to tell!

This shot took about 15 "takes" to get... but they were having such a good time doing it.   We call these four the "little boys"... although poor Ian... he's anything but little right now.  But he is a good sport about it all, even when he has 3 obsessed younger boys following him around all day long!

Everyone knows that Jeff and Eric are brothers.... you can't help but tell when they walk into a room together.  I think they look very different, but out of the corner of my eye, I have gotten them mixed up... and when I was looking at a picture from the lake trip, I thought it was Jeff, but when I zoomed in, it really was Eric!

We call these four "the teenagers"... they were hardly ever apart from each other the entire visit.  I am so glad they have stayed close, especially in the years since we've moved away.  I seriously think I can thank Facebook and Cell Phones for that.  They do have their purposes!

Stay Tuned for more cousin adventures...

Saguaro Lake

Here's some fun photos from our trip to the lake yesterday. All in all, we had a great time. Taylor got out first so he could work on his WaterSports Merit Badge. (One of the products of being the son of a Scoutmaster.) After a few attempts, he did the hardest thing on the list - cross each wake back and forth 4 times... so he had to cross over from side to side 8 times. It's harder than it looks, but he finally did it! I'm not sure I've been able to do that yet, so we are darn proud of him!

One of our favorite things to do is to anchor the boat in a cove and swim... well it often turns into a canonball contest... something we can't do in our pool at home because we don't have a deep end. Yesterday they discovered that belly flops don't hurt when you have a lifejacket on, so we got some great shots of belly floppin' supreme!

We tried a new type of tube yesterday and everyone loved it. We even got Brayden out there with Eric for a short run.... I was only going 4 mph, so it was a super safe adventure for him!

I'm so glad Ian is smiling in this photo. It seems we always have a "glitch" of some kind at the lake. Maybe this is normal, but we've never owned a boat before last year. We've had everything from flat tires on the boat trailer (with no spare and no store for 30 miles) to snapping the tube rope because we weren't using the right type of rope. Yesterday, Ian was in the water waiting for me to circle around and pick him up after kneeboarding and he almost got run over by another boat. It was a close call. Way toooo close. He was fine... but Eric and I were pretty shaken up about it. We still are today. We don't know if the other guy driving just didn't see him at all or if he was just a jerk who didn't care if he whizzed right past a little kid with less than a few feet to spare. We don't know because he never came back to see if we were okay or to apologize... and there's no way he didn't know what he'd done by the time he passed our boat. Eric was screaming at him like I've never heard him yell before. No profanities, though... I was grateful for that. :) I was very proud of Ian, too. After we swam for a bit (in a safer area, no wake zone), he got back on the horse and rode the tube around with Megan and Taylor. We also had a "safety lesson" on what to do if you are in the water and you see a boat coming. Everytime we go out, we have a new "learning experience" it seems. I guess that's life. I'm just so grateful that my baby is okay.

p.s. Mom, the boat photo at the top is for you! Sorry about the water spots on the lense... I took it from the water!

Adventures in Boating

Saturday was a crazy busy day. We got the "boat family" together to give the boat a good spring cleaning. What I thought would take an hour, took almost two hours, but the boat was dirtier than anyone realized! Then we got our sitters and headed for the lake. The bummer thing about our favorite lake is that it is the "favorite lake" of everyone else too... the parking lot for boat trailers filled up at 9:30 a.m. (we didn't get there until just after noon), so we had to wait in a "staging lot" where they line boats up to come in as other boats leave for the day. We waited 1 hour and 20 minutes, which really wasn't bad, because it would have taken us almost that long to drive to a different lake. We ended up sitting in the boat and having a "tailgate" party ... we ate our lunch and hung out while we waited for our turn. The funniest thing of the day was when this guy came by (he had the look of a homeless, stuck in the 70's, spaced out on crack, bum) asking us if they could borrow a deck of cards or some dice. They didn't come prepared to wait for entrance to the lake... (I'm so wishing I had taken a picture of the waiting area with all the boats....) Unfortunately, we didn't come prepared to wait either, so we had nothing to give him. Then 5 minutes later, he's back again asking the same question... before he could finish his request, Spencer says, "we still don't have any dice or cards..." Embarrassed, he explains that he couldn't remember which boats he had been to already and which ones he hadn't. He walked away and we noticed he hopped into a boat with some pretty cute girls in it. Then Tammy said, "that just proves that having a boat does help get the girls flocking to you!" It was so funny.... we were all busting up! Our time on the water ended up being pretty limited, but 4 of us got in and tried it out. If we hadn't brought wetsuits, I don't think any of us would have gotten in the water... it was really cold! We were joking that Peter Parker doesn't struggle this much to get into his "spidey" suit.... it must take lots of practice! All in all, it was a good day... until we drove the boat down a road that we thought had a parking lot in it to clean it up for going home and the gate was locked... we ended up having to do some crazy 3 point turn with a trailer to get back out again.... we never have a boat day without at least one glitch in it!!!

A Change of Plans

This weekend was supposed to be the launch of our summer "boating" season.

One year ago, we bought a boat with two other families... kind of a co-op thing. It's been great because boats are really expensive and no one in our group has enough free time to use it enough to get the full value of the investment out of it. We really had a great time learning all about being boat "owners" last year and discovering the world of wakeboarding. It is sooo fun! This year, we got a new stereo and speakers to put in the boat because the old speakers were literally falling out at the end of last summer. So, two weeks ago, the men got together and replaced the stereo system. One family was going to take it out Friday and we were planning to take it out Saturday. We'd just had major repair and maintence work done on it, but there was still the potential for a leak that we wouldn't be able to assess until it was in the lake. Cory and Lynette took the boat out on Friday with their kids (day off from school for no apparent reason!) and didn't even get past the dock. The engine was leaking way more than it should be. Darn! So, Eric ran to the boat dealer Friday after work and brought home the part to fix it. He looked up the procdure online and got to work on it. Just before this, I got the reminder call that it was our turn to clean the church on Saturday morning. Ugh! But, naively, we thought we could still fix the boat, get the church cleaned and hit the lake on Saturday by lunch. Yes, we were very naive. We had to make 2 more trips to the boat dealer to get more parts and Eric spent most of the day like this:

The boat wasn't fixed until dinner time. It was discouraging, but it saved us another $300 in repair bills. We took it back to our storage place last night and for the first time, I drove the car towing the boat behind. I've towed stuff before, but for some reason the boat intimidated me. Maybe by the end of this summer I'll get brave enough to try backing the boat trailer down the ramp into the water... I think I can do it, but not on the first try. It's harder to back than you think... and there's always a line up of people waiting for you, so that adds tons of pressure!

So the maiden voyage will now be this Saturday - all six adults are going out together without the kids! This is by far the most fun Saturday we'll have the on the boat all summer... at least from the adults perspective... I know the kids won't agree! But, I for one, can't wait!!! Here's our destination of choice:

Insomnia

What do you do when it's 12:30 and you've been in bed for over an hour trying to get to sleep? You get up and read blogs! :) I'm having that funky twitch thing going on in my legs which keeps me from relaxing enough to sleep... I know what the remedy is... bananas... and I don't have any! If anyone near by is up, reading blogs, can you bring a banana over so I can sleep? Just kidding... well sort of.....


Yesterday we got the boat out and got together the co-op for a "work party"... the plan was to replace the stereo and speakers with a new set (the old ones were falling out) and clean the boat up for the summer. The three guys spent something like 8 hours changing out the stereo system... the last two hours were spent trying to troubleshoot a problem that really didn't exist. I won't go into details to avoid embarrasment, but let's just say they were dead tired by the end of the night. And the boat never got cleaned up at all. Still not sure when that's going to get done, but after this weekend's heat... we're all antsy to get out on the water! I finally had to break down and turn on the a/c downstairs today. The upstairs has been on since we got back from our spring break vacation, but the downstairs has stayed cool enough to leave it off. I guess 90 degrees will heat up any house... summer is just around the corner for us!
Ian and Brayden thought that the boat was their personal playground... they are excited for summer and time on the lake!

This morning, all was going well getting ready for church until we tried to get Brayden dressed. He went to bed last night in a green and grey t-shirt and some of Ian's "ninja turtle" undies... worn OVER his diaper of course. Potty training is on the to do list, but not until the second bathroom remodel is done.... I fought with him for 15 minutes and still didn't have him dressed. I went in to tell Eric that I might not ever make it to church at this rate.... which made me sad since I haven't been able to take the sacrament in 3 weeks due to illness and conference. So Eric told me he'd take over dressing B if I took the other kids to church and got T there in time to pass the sacrament. Deal... I grabbed my purse and ran out the door before he could change his mind! Eric was 15 minutes late to church, but made it to the foyer for the sacrament... he got lucky because we had a baby blessing today. Now I think he understands what my life is like trying to get this kid dressed when he doesn't want to... it happens more than I like to admit! The "ninja turtle" garb went right back on his body as soon as he woke up from his nap and he was more than willing to show it off for the camera.... I've already told him that tomorrow those clothes will have to be washed and he'll have to wear something else. He said ok, but I don't believe it's really going to be okay....
As long as I can salvage some decent sleep tonight, I'm going to start bathroom remodel number 2 tomorrow... joy! I'm so excited, I can hardly stand it! Not.....