Sabbatical Camping Trip

The last time I went camping was seven years ago.  Jerel and I weren't married yet and his family invited me to join them on a Memorial Day camping trip (or was it Labor Day?)  Anyway, since we were still dating I had to pretend to like camping so I went along.  Oh the pre-marriage days--pretending to like camping one time was okay, but I pretended to enjoy so many board games back in those days!  Now I just sit with the other wives and watch the kids while the Atkinson boys play their too-much-thinking-required board games.

Isaiah and the other kids had a great time throwing rocks into the "river."  The little kids threw them for hours, and sometimes the big kids or a cool uncle would come throw in a huge one, which caused all sorts of delight!  

Here we have Eliza relaxing in the camp chair.

Next we have one of my all-time favorite pictures of her.  I love how she makes her face all scrunchy when she smiles!  This picture made sleeping in a tent worth it!

 At one point while the kids were throwing rocks in the river, Isaiah was right behind Eliza and ready to toss his rock right at her head.  I stopped him and explained you can't throw one when someone's in front of you.  (Repeat this exchange numerous times.)  Then later, no sooner had I said, broken-record style, "don't throw that rock when she's in front of you" he threw the orange-sized rock, which hit her in the head, which knocked her into the freezing cold water....It wasn't on purpose (his aim isn't good enough for that yet) but she was sure an unhappy girl--cold and wet and probably with a big headache!

 Did I mention the kids spent a lot of time throwing rocks in the river?  Ryan & Amy were our camping companions (and the ones who did all the work.  ALL the work).  Jerel's mom came too, and then Jake, Mandy, & Co. came up for S'mores in the evening.

 Don't Eliza and Emmaree look so happy here?  I propped Eliza up on the rock next to Emmy, which prompted Jerel to freak out thinking she was sure to plunge to her death from the 2-foot precipice.  While I was mocking him for being paranoid, she fell.  Luckily I caught her and catastrophe was avoided.  We have this ongoing battle where I think Jerel's too paranoid about the kids getting hurt, and he thinks I'm not careful enough with them.  They're both alive and relatively unharmed, so I think I'm winning.

The horse was another main attraction at the campground.  Horse?  Oh wait, what I meant to say was the LOG that Isaiah pretended was a horse was a big attraction.  Everybody wanted their turn at the end of the horse, and of course little Liza didn't get a turn until almost everyone had gone on to another activity.

 Here's Jerel playing with Eliza on the horse.  He's a good dad and always (well, most of the time) willing to go play with them when I'm too lazy (and by lazy I actually mean exhausted from countless hours of mothering while Jerel relaxes at work).

 Zay's first bite of S'more!  He wasn't sure about the whole thing, and I was happily surprised when he agreed to try it (he's not a fan of new foods, even if they are full of sugar).  He ended up not liking it and just wanting to eat the graham cracker and chocolate.  If Isaiah took the marshmallow test he'd pass with flying colors!  (The marshmallow test is summarized here  if you're interested.  Basically kids were offered one marshmallow right now, or they could have two if they waited a few minutes.  The ones who waited were more successful later in life.  It was also referenced in our church's general conference recently, which you can read here. (oh, and Zay wouldn't pass because he's so patient; he'd pass because he wouldn't eat the first marshmallow if you left him alone with it for years)

 I don't think little Liza even really took a bite.  She touched it, then tried to wipe the sticky off, and then just sort of gave up.  See, sticky.

This, my friends, is what we call The Scowl.  This is actually a pretty mild version of it.  Usually the eyebrows go down so far you can just see the shadows where her eyes are.  It started a couple of months ago and I find it pretty entertaining.  We'll be at the grocery store and she'll be in the cart smiling away.  A cute little old lady will come say hello to her and the face immediately turns to this.  It's like she has a switch or something. And most of the time it's left in the "on" position.  I'm not making this up.  In fact, today at library story time (we go almost every week) afterwards the librarian was so excited because, she said, Eliza hadn't scowled at her for the full 20 minute session.  I can understand why she felt so proud--not many people make it through an encounter with our sweetie without facing The Scowl!  (The picture at the right here is just to prove that she is actually capable of smiling)

 Brigham caught a fish in the creek.  He made the pole himself; he and Sadie both tried catching fish for a while and Brigham was the lucky winner this time.

Week 8.5

We were out of town for week 9, so we took a picture before we left.  Hooray for windows!

Independence Day

 I'm on a personal quest to restore the term "Independence Day" to its rightful place.  No one would call Christmas "The 25th of December" so I don't get why we've renamed Independence Day as "The 4th of July."  Please spread the word.

The last couple of years we've been in Utah for Independence Day, but this year we were still in Oregon.  Our town has a charming little parade each year and I was excited to attend it for the first time.  Luckily for me, someone else invited Jerel to attend (because if I was the one inviting him we probably would've stayed home--he's not a parade fan.  And trying to persuade him with the joys of bad marching bands doesn't help; I've tried.)

Anyway, we went with Elizabeth.  She's a co-worker of Jerel's, LDS, and although single she adopted a little girl umm, I'm not sure, 5 years ago?  Anyway, they used to be in our stake, but moved out to the neighborhood we're building in a couple years ago.  So Elizabeth's been our go-to gal for for all things Springville.

Also there was a family Elizabeth has known for quite a while.  They just sold their home, which coincidentally was just a couple of blocks from our old home, and are also moving to the same neighborhood we're moving to.  They have a 4-year-old little boy.  So that was our group, watching the parade.  It was fun to see.  One particularly awesome feature is this old people band we have.  If marching bands are nerdy, and old people are nerdy, then imagine the awesomeness of this marching band of old people.....there's also an old people flag team and a couple cheerleaders.  The best part is how embarrassed Jerel will be someday when I join up.  I'm a good marcher, what can I say?  

Week 8

They've added the beginnings of the front porch (one of my favorite features) and the whole house is all wrapped up.

Getting ready for Dave

 Jerel's sister Karee & her family are coming up to visit us next month.  It's always fun to see them, and I especially enjoy when we are able to visit with just one other family--I feel like I'm able to get to know people better in smaller groups.  So while it's fun to have the whole bunch together (Jerel's side is close to 30 people now) I also enjoy seeing them separately.

Lucky for us, we live where there are delicious blackberries, and Karee's husband Dave loves them, therefore they come to visit us!  We all politely pretend they've come because they miss us, but we secretly know it's just the food they've come for.  Which I am actually fine with because then we get to join them on their eating adventures.

In preparation for Dave's arrival we've been testing out some local pizza restaurants.  This may seem fun, but if you have any familiarity with Jerel's dislike of driving downtown you'll have a different view.....Luckily, despite his predictions, we have actually made it to each desired location, and we have in fact found parking, and none of the trips have ended up turning out to be a disaster.  (Okay, so once we didn't get home until close to 9, which is almost a disaster with kids as young as ours.)

Anyway, we've selected our favorite (Apizza Scholls, which is not the one in these pictures) and hope we can go there with the Brightons when they visit.  Then come home and have some blackberry cobbler a la mode......

Week 7 (I think)

I've sort of lost track of how many weeks it's been, but the last picture said week 6 so we must be somewhere around week 7 now.  Main difference is there's a roof now; still no windows.  (I'm dying for windows so my kids won't fall out when they're running around in the house.)

Here's the upstairs bonus room or bonus floor or play room or whatever you want to call it.  It's 800 square feet, which we chose not to divide into rooms.  We plan to use it (at this point) as a play room for the kids.  I originally planned to use an extra bedroom as my sewing room, but the reality is that the kids go wherever I go.  If I do it that way, I'll have them dragging toys into my small sewing room.  So instead I'm going to use a corner of the playroom (with 800 square feet, they should be able to sacrifice a bit of it for their mom) for my sewing area.  I want to get shelves with doors, or cabinets or something, because a lot of my stuff still needs to be locked up with them as small as they are.

The kids' favorite part is that there are puddles in the house.  

Here's Zay in his new room.  Jerel's still a little disgruntled that Isaiah's room is slightly smaller than the one I chose for Eliza, but I really had no choice; the one I chose for Eliza has a larger window and if she's going to be doing her makeup in there she'll need as much natural lighting as possible.  See, my hands were tied...

And here's the back view (ours is on the left).  We sit slightly higher than the house next to us, and theirs doesn't have the bonus floor, so we're definitely the tallest one around.

Milk Math

 I'm such a nerd, and my kids are following in my footsteps.  Isaiah loves to play Milk Math.  I started saving our milk jug lids a while back for a game idea I had.  Once I had enough for the game I realized it would be too hard for the kids to play so I came up with this instead.

Isaiah's still working on recognizing his numbers 0-20 (he knows some but not others) and we've been trying to introduce the concept of adding.  This lets us work on both.  All the red lids have the numbers 0-10, two sets.  All the blue lids have the numbers 0-20, one set.  Then the purple ones have the addition sign and the equals sign.  (Someday when we get nerdier we'll add subtraction, division, etc.)  We start with all the red lids upside down and Isaiah picks two of them and tells me what the numbers say.  Then we set it up with the purple ones and practice reading the number sentence.  Next we add beans because that seems to help Zay count.  (I've since replaced the black beans with some large lima beans that I dyed rainbow colors).  Anyway, then we practice adding up all the beans and then Zay looks for the blue lid with the corresponding number.  Of course he needs help throughout.  Anyway, once we find the right blue one we finish the sentence and read it again.

Next comes the fun part--when he's finished with those two red numbers he puts them in a line.  After each round he adds two more to the line, which he calls his train, and he gets really excited to see how big his train is.  (Yes, my children are doomed to geekiness and instead of trying to help them overcome it I tend to encourage it.)  Anyway, we keep playing either until we've used all the red lids or until he gets bored, whichever comes first.  Because I may be nerdy enough to get my kids to play Milk Math, but I'm not horrible enough to force them into it.

By the way, when I showed Jerel Milk Math and bragged about how I'd made it for free he said something about how since each gallon of milk cost like $2.75 and we had about 50 lids in the game, this (at about $140) was actually the most expensive game we own.  That's Jerel's version of milk math...

Fire Station

 The fire station had an open house recently and Jerel suggested we take the kids to check it out.  They had fun checking out the big fire trucks.

There was a miniature fire truck for the kids to drive.  Apparently it's actual capable of driving around, but they had it stationary for the open house (smart thinking with the number of kiddos running around!)  Eliza wasn't much into driving and just kept trying to climb out.












Then they had a game where you try to toss a tennis ball into a fire boot.  Isaiah smartly took the tennis ball, walked right up to the boot and dropped it in.  Luckily these weren't rule-oriented firemen so they let him win a hat despite crossing the toss-from line.  Eliza won one too and they had fun wearing them for a few days and then destroying them.