Back To School

I apologize in advance for the quality of these pictures. On a teeny Blackberry screen they looked OK, but now I see they're a little fuzzy.

Anyhoo... It was pointed out to me today that I haven't been keeping up with my blog very well. I confess my blog creativity (the small shred I had) has taken a summer vacation. Maybe it will come back soon. I admit I like my blog better than I like Facebook. (I could do a whole post on the "joys" of FB. Maybe later.)

So today Mary and Alex finally started school. I think we're in the only school in the country that hadn't started yet. I had good intentions of waking the kids up early all last week to get them back in the habit of 6:30 awakenings, although who am I kidding. It's not that much earlier than they had been getting up anyway. And I was lazy. It's not that I got to stay in bed any longer. I was getting up to work out anyway and to Adam 6:00 is sleeping in... I've got to get that boy trained better.

Alex was particularly excited about school. He barely ate half a poptart before he ran to get dressed. As you can see, he could hardly wait to get out the door. He only has half day kindergarten, which is fine with me. I think he'd struggle going the whole day since he's got so much energy. He was just a teensy bit hesitant when finding a chair, but he wasn't worried at all when I left the classroom. He had a blast. He talked my ear off the whole way home, which is a nice 20-25 minute drive.

And I'll have to take a picture of Mary again later. The one I just tried to put up was so fuzzy you wouldn't necessarily know it was her unless I told you. She's in 3rd grade this year. She's excited, although she was bitterly disappointed when she found out that her best friend was in the other class this year. They've been together since kindergarten.

Adam wanted to stay at school too. We were gone all morning until we picked Alex up so he didn't have a chance to realize that he'll be home alone. Hopefully he'll adjust just fine once he realizes Alex won't be taking away every toy he tries to play with.

I'm excited for school to start too. I love hearing them talk about fun things they're learning. It almost (but not really quite) makes me miss my own school years.

Mary's Birthday

I can't believe it, but my girl turned 8 on Friday! She's still a tad on the young side I suppose. Most of the kids that will be in her 3rd grade class turned 8 last year during 2nd grade.

We didn't have a huge party. We just let her invite her best friend from school, Katelyn, over to spend the night. Doug's mom came into town for her birthday as well. We went and grabbed some pizza from Cici's (3 mediums for $9.99) and took them to one of the city swimming pools. The pool is a pretty good pool. They have a regular swimming pool with lanes to swim laps and a couple diving boards. Then they have more of a kid pool that's only about 3 feet deep. It even has a huge water slide that goes into it. Mary and Katelyn had a blast doing that. Alex didn't want any part of the slide. He's never been quite as comfortable in the water as Mary has been. They also have a little playground kind of area with water spraying out everywhere. There was a little slide there too so Adam spent most of his time there. The lifeguards kept yelling at the boys to stop running. Adam of course didn't listen. He'd just get so excited to go down the slide again that he'd take off running. (Kids only go slow when their parents are in a hurry anyway.)

After we swam for a while we came home and had cupcakes. Mary and I found an easy recipe on Kraft's website for these flowery cupcakes.

Basically you just take a large marshmallow and cut it horizontally into 5 slices (or 4 if you're lazy) and them arrange them in a flower shape with a mini marshmallow in the middle. Then you sprinkle them with colored sugar sprinkles. They were so easy. We used the new pink strawberry marshmallows because they're a teeny bit prettier, but I think white ones would look nice too especially with the sugar sprinkles to give them some color. My kitchen shears did get rather sticky, but they wash off so it's no big deal. Katelyn came over right as I was getting ready to frost and decorate and the girls were excited to play with Mary's new present so I ended up doing them all myself, but they're totally easy enough for kids to do.

Anyway, we had a great time and Mary didn't even get totally exhausted and grouchy like she did at the previous sleepover.

Catchup

So today I'm catching up a bit on my blog. I've been busy the past few weeks with school shopping and work and planning Super Saturday. We've also had some stomach flu somewhere in there too. I believe that's gone through all of us so hopefully it's moving on. I expect things will get crazier in about a week. Mary and Alex start school on the 30th.

A couple weeks ago Doug decided we should make homemade soft pretzels for his home evening activity on Monday night. (We have a more spiritual/religious lesson on Sunday and then play a game or do some sort of activity on Monday night.) It turned into more work than I realized because I hadn't fully read the recipe until that afternoon when I got the dough started. You have to shape them, bake them a few minutes, boil them in salted water, put melted butter or eggwash on them and season them, and then bake them again. We had fun and they tasted pretty good, but it's certainly not worth the effort on a regular basis. We did some salty ones and some cinnamon/sugar ones. Here are a few pictures of it.

(This is right before they were baked the 2nd time. Ours did stay kind of pale. I think it's because we used melted butter instead of egg wash. All that really means is we might not be able to sell them, which is totally fine with me.)

The boys got haircuts a few weeks ago. Alex usually likes Kathy, our stylist, to spike his hair. Adam decided he wanted his hair spiked this time too. He kept rubbing his hand on the top of his spikes. (No, I don't have a picture of Alex with spikes. Maybe next time.)

To end... Alex managed to get a hold of the Blackberry and took a lovely picture of his eye. Enjoy!

Our Vacation

This picture really isn't from our vacation. It's just Adam looking cute carrying Tiger around in his backpack.

Our vacation this year unfortunately only lasted about 4 days. We went back to my parents' house. My older sister was there with her kids and my youngest sister was there for a few days. My younger brother was there too since he lives in the same town.

For those of you who don't know... I'm from a teeny town in Southern Colorado called Manassa (about 1000 people and 1 mile square). Since Manassa was settled by Mormons in the 1880s it's a little bit like towns in Utah sometimes. We celebrate the 24th of July there too because that's when Brigham Young and other pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley.

So we celebrate with parades, rodeos, lots of food, a carnival, fireworks, etc.

Some people (like Doug) make fun of the parade because we watch it go through town and then back again on Friday morning. And then we watch it do the same thing on Saturday morning. However, I do point out to him that at least the parade has nice floats and stuff unlike the parade where he's from in Craig, CO, that has a bunch of guys driving their off-roading vehicles and a bunch of old guys driving their ancient tractors through town.

Here's a few pictures of the parade.

This is the Miss Pioneer court float. I admit I was once part of such a float. I feel like that Hope Floats movie where Sandra Bullock takes her daughter back to the little town she grew up in and her daughter asks her if this is where she was the "cream of corn."

1950s soda shop stuff seemed to be a bit of a theme this year. There were about 3 like that. This one was probably the best.

The alien one was a big hit with my kids also.

My kids also enjoyed the snowman.

The Little Mermaid one was our favorite. I didn't get a great picture of it, but the boat moved up and down, the dolphins were squirting water, bubbles were blowing out the back, etc. It was pretty impressive.

This is Alex enjoying an Otter Pop. We love it when local businesses or politicians throw candy, but the popsicles are especially nice on a warm day. (My grandpa, age 91, is sitting in the background.)

The carnival isn't exactly worth spending money on, but my dad always spoils the kids and gives them a few bucks to spend there. Mary was too busy playing with her cousins to ever go on any rides so she added her money to her stash. Doug took Alex to ride a few, but I had the Blackberry so we only got pictures of Adam riding. He had a great time at first. There was a train ride on a little track that he wanted at first, but then he saw the alligator train and wanted to ride that. It was really more of a little roller coaster so after a while he got tired of that and wanted off. We did do the carousel later, but it was too hard to try to take a picture while I was riding with him.

We did have a good time. Adam was sick a lot of the time and Alex got sick the last day with strep throat, but thanks to amoxicillin he's doing much better.