License to Drive

Look out world, look who got their driver's license on Tuesday....despite my best efforts to keep him my little Will, he went and passed his driver's test.  Then he gave me two coronaries on the drive home, when he ran through two stop signs. Ugh.  This parenting things just gets harder and harder!

On Friday, he will be driving himself to work for the first time as well.  That's right, Mr. Will is gainfully employed these days.  He has joined the ranks of fast food workers of America.  His second day on the job,  he came home and said he had decided he was actually going to study and get good grades this year in school, because working fast food sucks. Can't argue with him there, but hey it pays the bills, right?

Speaking of which, I better go call the insurance company and see what the current rate is for a teenage boy....

Camping Out

Oh August, we barely knew ye.

We had great plans for you, but then it rained nearly all month long.  And we wondered if we had somehow skipped the month of August and gone straight to  September. We did manage to fit in a few good times though....like camping!  Kids have been begging to go camping since 2010.

Ah, the joys of camping, especially for the first time in FIVE years.  It is truly amazing how much less work it is to camp when all your kids are five years older than the last time you went.   Suddenly now, they are old enough, big enough and smart enough to pitch tents, build fires and haul all the heavy stuff.  Leaving me plenty of time to sit by the fire and recover from watching them do all that work.

We spent the weekend at Willard Bay, which was about as far away as we could afford to go.  Still just as much fun though.  Also, only minutes away from gas stations and Walmarts, where we seemed to spend a good amount of time purchasing things like swimming suits, ice and cold drinks.  Not the kind of camping trip we ususally do, but fun just the same. Olivia especially enjoyed herself.  I think she spent seven hours straight in the water on the second day we were there.

This is how we take care of the trees in our yard that die.  They become fire wood.  Best fire we ever had.

We also tried a couple new things this year.  We did tin foil dinners with hamburger, carrots, potatos, mushroom soup, and zucchini.  It came out tasting exactly like pot roast. So yummy.  Next time I need to try stew meat.  Also, we had baked apples foil dinner style, and they were so tasty.  We just sliced up some apples with brown sugar and cinnamon, wrapped them in foil and threw them in the coals.  Just like pie only without the crust.  We even brough whipped cream to go with them, which was a nice little appetizer for our real dessert of smores, of course.

We so lucked out weather wise.  It rained the day before we went, and we almost postponed for a week.  It's good we didn't because it absolutely poured rain the next weekend, while the weekend we went was perfect.  Hot, no wind, no clouds.

Piper is not a water dog.  We discovered that she will swim for cheeze-its however.  That dog will eat anything. Including push pins, Dasani water drops, printer cartridges, swimsuits,  underwear,shoes, broccoli, peppers, watermelon, tomatoes- we have yet to find a food she won't eat.  There are very little non food items she won't eat as well. 

Olivia is most definitely some type of water creature, following in the footsteps of her sister.  Liv was the only one of us that did not get sunburned, because she was submerged in water 9/10ths of the time.

Audrey ended  her camp experience by getting her hair stuck in the tent zipper.  That was kind of funny.  Then when we were taking tents down, one of the spring bars on our big tent broke.  That was kind of not funny, but at least it happened at the end of the trip and not at the beginning.

The last day of the trip, Dan and Duncan had had enough and Will was not feeling good, so the boys left us there and went home while us girls hung out at the beach for one more glorious day.  Me and Livvi could have stayed til sunset, but poor sunburned Audrey was ready to call it a day by late afternoon.

We have been back home to real life for  a couple weeks now, but with a little luck we can pull off one more camp trip before the snow flies.

Weekend Adventures

When you spend two hours on a Saturday convincing your kids to emerge from their weekend electronic stupor long enough to go spend some family time in  the great outdoors,  and then it takes another hour to drag their lazy, complaining selves out to the car equipped with adequate shoes and water bottles,  and then you get half way up the canyon only to have the transmission in your car go out and your engine overheat, the last thing you do is give up and turn around and go home defeated.

At least that is not how we roll.  When Dan noticed the car was acting up, and smelled a putrid burning spell,  he pulled over, opened the hood, checked out a few things, poured some water on the engine to cool it off, and then set out further up the canyon.  When I asked if we shouldn't turn around, he just replied, "Well, we've come this far, might as well keep going", and so we did.   Yes, we had transmission trouble the rest of the way up.  Yes, we were not sure if we were going to make it back down. Yes, I was a little bit freaked out, but hey, it was a beautiful day, and we had worked so hard to get those darn kids outside.

We were not able to take the hike we had planned on, because our dumb dog was not allowed.  So we took some pictures, and hiked into the place we had been sledding last January.  What a difference a few months makes.

 Last January

This July

All too soon, it was time to hit the road.  Miraculously, with a little coaxing and shifting, our poor car made it down the hill and to Grandma's house.  We let it cool off for a good long time while we ate pizza and ice cream, then we started for home.  Once we hit the free way, it started acting up again, so we pulled off on to the highway, which may not have been a great idea, because every time we stopped at a light, the poor car did not want to get revved up and moving again.  Because we have our priorties in order, of course we made sure that the car got us to Swig for our weekend soda run.  Then we babied, nursed and limped it along to the repair shop across the street from Dan's work.  We parked the car, made a mad dash across the street, carrying our drinks, our dog, our backpacks, and our leftover pizza,  and camped out on the grass, waiting to be rescued.  

On the other side of the post from Will's head, parked across the street, is our poor Golden Goose.

We were rescued by our neighbor, who drove all the way in from Syracuse to get us.

And now, we get to wait, and wonder what the fate of our car, and of us, will be.  

I am stranded at home all day tomorrow, and truthfully, I am looking forward to it.  Can't go anywhere, might as well stay home and try to be productive.

July 24th

Our July 24th this year was almost ruined.  We went to the Bountiful parade the night before, and honestly, that was kind of a bust.  We sat amidst this huge family, which would have been fine except for one seriously annoying woman who would not sit still.  She kept jumping up and running around and handing things out to the four hundred children they had with them.  All of that even would have been okay, except that she would not stop yapping.  She mostly complained how she had just run out of time to make it to the parade in time, and that she was the reason they had not been able to get enough space for their family. She was so worried about the fact that her family was all spread out and not able to sit all together, and I felt like she was shooting daggers at me, like she wanted us to get up and move.   I had been there the night before, laying our our blanket, and when I put my blanket down, there was nothing else around me.  So if her huge family had come late, it was their fault for trying to crowd in on us. Not to mention that the spot her zoo was sitting on was IHC property, and was supposed to be reserved for IHC employees.  Of course by the time the parade starts, it's a free for all,and everybody is everywhere, but having her complain all night long was not pleasant.

Any how, by the time we were done, I was kind of paraded out, so the next morning we slept in and were lazy, and we missed the big Salt Lake Parade, which is what we had planned on doing.  Then I felt like a bum for a while, we laid around some more, called out to Cedar Fort, and found out there was not much going on out there. Dan had to work, so it was just me and the kids and finally we headed out to see what kind of adventure we could drum up.

We stopped at the park in Bountiful and watched a wild shootout.  We stood in line for snow cones and cotton candy, and made a pioneer doll named Matilda, after our very own pioneer ancestor.

Then we headed out to Woody's for lunch.  Woody's is around the corner from my mom and dad's house and was the local hangout for me and my friends, back in the day when all our quarters got pumped into the Pacman and Donkey Kong machines. Now they have a jukebox, so we pumped some quarters in there and listened to the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Elton John.

Attempted some selfies...

and finished off the day by going to see Spiderman II at the dollar movies.  Only it was too scary for Olivia, so half way through she and I snuck out of that movie and into the Heaven is for Real movie

Next year, I am vowing that we are going to go downtown and camp out with all the other crazy parade goers.  We are going to get us a spot in the shade, pitch our tent and stay up all night.  Then, after the parade, we will come home, take a long nap and get up just in time for fireworks.