A Good Man

Recently I've been thinking about what a good father my husband is. There are so many positive things he brings to our family. I did not grow up with a close relationship with either my father or stepfather. Now that I have my own family I realize what it really means to have a father in a childs life. These are some of the things my husband does as a father that touch me and our children.

~He diligently takes the children to the library every week. They are learning to love to read and have that special outing with their dad.
~He gives them lots of hugs and kisses.
~On the weekends he fixes the big, special breakfasts that I never fix.
~He plays dominos with the girls. They love that.
~Mike and Zach share with one another the strange, interesting and unique subjects that they love to learn about.
~He teaches our family about the gospel.
~He takes the kids on visits to the D.I. and often gives in and buys them something special.
~He teaches them by example how to serve others.
~He attends their special activities and events.
~When Mike has the younger girls for the day he always does the fun stuff with them- trips to the park, special meals, and playing with them.
~He goes with Zach to priesthood meetings and they come home excited to discuss what they have learned.
~He supports us in our various activities, but especially with our busy dance schedule.
~He shares his favorite books, music, shows and other interests with the kids. And it has obviously rubbed off on them. :) Zach has developed a love for many of Mike's favorite '80s musicians and they all love to watch the old, classic TV shows.
~He prays for his children.

Obviously I have married a good man! I am so thankful to have him in my life and that our children have the blessing of a wonderful father.

Time to Purge

Lately I've been feeling like my house is being taken over by junk. It seems like over the summer everything we own multiplied. There are piles of stuff in most rooms, some much worse than others. Between homeschooling, dance and trying to motivate/nag Zach to stay caught up with his school work, house work is falling through the cracks. Our kids have also been playing musical bedrooms recently and have their stuff scattered through various rooms. I've never had a perfect house, but it usually has been presentable enough that I wasn't too embarrassed about the occasional drop in guest. Not so right now!

I am posting a picture of our awful hall closet as a motivator to do something about it again. (After taking this picture I nearly couldn’t post it, because it is so embarrassing). I truly do clean this closet out every couple of months, but the kids get in there to search for stuff, hide, or play and within days it is a scary place to be. When I open the closet door and the stuff in the closet starts falling out on top of me, I decide it's time to tackle it again. It's no fun having a vacuum or broom knock you in the head! The other worst room in the house is the food storage room. I want to store food in there. What a novel idea! Everyone else thinks it’s the catchall junk room. So it also becomes a difficult room to enter and is a constant source of frustration. It is time to purge our house again!

It's a good thing we have guests coming in a couple of weeks! Having guests is a great motivator to do tasks that tend to be ignored. So over the next two weeks our family is going to tackle our junk, room by room, closet by closet.

Birthdays & Peach Days

We just had a few busy, but fun days here. This past weekend was Peach Days, which is the local harvest festival that was first held in 1904. Isabelle and I kicked it off by going to watch the Peach Queen pageant. This was the first time we have attended the pageant and it was quite fun. I told Isabelle she should start preparing now to enter it, because it would be fun to have a more unique, upbeat talent like clogging in the talent competition. She just gave me one of her, "yeah right" expressions, but who knows what the future will bring.

Saturday featured visiting the booths with my sister, Toni, and taking the girls on the rides. We also ate yummy dutch oven dinners and peach cobbler. Mike had to work part of the day, but managed to squeeze in time to visit the car show, which is his favorite event. Zach spent time with his friends and Nathan and managed to show off his parkour talents for various gawking girls. I'm sure he loved every minute of it. Saturday evening Isabelle and I took in the hypnotist show. Overall a fun filled couple of days.

Mike's birthday is the 13th and Zoe's is the 14th. Because of our busy lives we decided to hold their birthday celebration on Sunday the 12th. It was a simple family affair with a yummy lemon cake that Zachary made from scratch (both cake & frosting).

Both Mike & Zoe received a few gifts, but the ones they were most excited about, they didn't receive on Sunday. Mike will be receiving a 3rd generation Kindle, which should be arriving any day now. He is anxiously awaiting its arrival. He's wanted one since they first came out a couple of years ago. Zoe wanted a new bike and today (her actual birthday) we went and picked one out. She knew right away which one she wanted and we were in and out of the store in a matter of minutes. The bike is a little tall for her so it took her a few times of starting on it to keep her balance well, but she had it figured out pretty quickly.

Zoe turned 8 this year. Being 8 is a big deal around here and Zoe keeps remembering cool things that happen when you are 8. She gets her own library card (going to get that this week). She can have her ears pierced (also trying to do that this week). She is no longer required (by law) to sit in a booster seat. She happily reminded me of that when we hopped in the van to go pick out her bike today. And most importantly, she will be baptized next month. Updates about these exciting events will be forthcoming.

Summer 2010

I always have grand ideas about the fun stuff I am going to do with my kids during the summer, and then life just keeps going forward and it is easy to put stuff on the back burner. This summer we managed to get in a few fun activities, thanks in large part to my friend Karie, who motivated me to get out and go. 

Among other things we went to Twin Falls, ID, Willow park zoo, Bear Lake, Minnetonka Cave, the Discovery Gateway children's museum, bird refuge and swimming. And then Karie braved taking her girls and mine to go fishing and to Antelope Island.

We also attended dance camp, clog camp, my niece's wedding, the Mormon Miracle pagent in Manti, went camping at Heber Valley girls camp, and had a family Independence Day party. Isabelle attended girls camp and Zach worked all summer at Camp Hunt boy scout camp. We also celebrated Isabelle and Justine's birthdays.

I attended a Carole King & James Taylor concert with my sisters and my sisters and I also had a few fun evenings together learning a dance for our family talent show at camp. I also managed to read a few books this summer. Woohoo!

Whew! We did more than I realized this summer. You don't realize all you've done until you start to list it out. Here's a slideshow of some of our summer adventures.