Labor Day Weekend

For most people, Labor Day weekend signals the official end of summer.  For us, it literally meant that school started the next day.  We wanted to do something fun and memorable, but opted for lazy and boring instead. :-)

We started with our only camp out of the year, which was going to take place in the deep woods of our back yard.  However, as evening approached, so did an impending storm, so David set up the tent in our basement.  (There was a HUGE thunder storm that rocked our house around 3:00 in the morning, so I was glad they were inside).  We cooked S'mores in the microwave instead of a campfire, but they turned out to be just as sticky and messy as always.  At least there wasn't any dirt and ash to stick to the goo all over their faces.  Dave and I tucked them in their sleeping bags, then went to bed in our comfy king-sized bed.  No floor sleeping for us if we didn't have to!  The kids took turns telling stories to each other by flashlight.  They came upstairs a few times to complain about Josh (he was pretty over-the-top thrilled and had a hard time containing himself!) or to request a drink, etc.  They finally settled down and slept for a while.  They wanted to camp all weekend and we planned on letting them, but about an hour into the second night, they all decided that their beds sounded better than basement camping.

The happy campers

S'mores!!  Josh's first one ever!
 

On Saturday, we just did normal Saturday things: chores, grocery shopping, baths, etc.  We lucked out though, because we nearly missed a family birthday.  Alison is the one that remembered Cookie!  Poor girl almost turned six without a proper cat party!  We sprang into action and celebrated  with creamed tuna for dinner, a small birthday cake, and presents.  Whew!

The birthday girl.

Thank you, Winco for having a little cake with a cat decoration!

Presents for the little diva (Cookie).
 

On Sunday evening, we had a family get together at my parents house.   Grandma and Grandpa Church were there, along with both my sisters' families.  We ate WAY more than anyone should (as usual) and had a great time visiting with the adults while the kids played together. 

Gotta love this picture of Katie:  "Put that camera down!"

A fun crew.

Bronson and Adam playing with Uncle Brian.
 

Monday was the actual Labor Day holiday.  We celebrated by putting in hours and hours of hard labor.  Kristin and her family arrived around 9:30 in the morning and all four parents worked together canning 6 baskets of peaches while the kids played together.  It took more than 6 hours, but the kids had a fun time playing with each other and many of their neighborhood friends. They were pretty much on their own for most of the day and they loved it.  They did lots of things we may have frowned upon if we weren't too busy canning (like smashing rocks in the driveway with a hammer, climbing down our window wells, feeding the entire neighborhood the pizza we bought for lunch, etc.)  Meanwhile, we bottled a lot of peaches, several batches of jam, and even froze a few bags of peaches in orange juice.  It was fun - in a hard, messy, hot work kind of a way.

They looked so pretty, but they weren't good!!!  Lots of bruises!

Love this - Dave's handing me the phone while I take his picture.  I think it was my mom checking up on us.

That's a lot of labor for one day!!!

Brigham City Temple

On Thursday, August 30th, our family went to the Brigham City Temple open house.  We were part of the first group to go through in the morning.  My parents came with us.  It was VERY early - I think we had to be there before 7:00 am, but it was so beautiful with the sunrise and the cool air.  I loved it!

Driving up to the temple.

Bronson loved the bus ride!

We parked several blocks (or even miles) away from the temple and rode a shuttle bus, which may have been the highlight for Bronson.  The inside of the temple is really quite lovely.  There is a peach blossom theme running throughout the rooms and the colors/decor/light fixtures, etc. are all breathtaking.  But it was a silent tour and it moved VERY quickly.  I felt like we weren't able to really get a good look or sit and feel the spirit of the building.  Luckily, Nicole had presented a Family Home Evening lesson about temples a few days before we went and told us about each room we'd be seeing because I wouldn't have been able to explain it to them as we went.  She was pretty bugged by the whole thing.  As we were going home, she was like, "Mom - I didn't feel ANYTHING!  We were going too fast!  And I didn't even get to read the white scriptures in the celestial room!"  Poor girl - she really had been looking forward to going to the temple for weeks and I think she felt too rushed.  Oh well.  She still got to see how beautiful and special it is - and she ate a couple of cookies after the tour so it wasn't a complete loss!

The whole crew.

Little Women

On August 27th, my mom called and asked if I'd like her tickets to go see a play.  My parents have season tickets to the Centerpoint Legacy Theater in Centerville, but they had dinner plans that night and weren't sure they'd be able to make it to the play in time.  Of course, I jumped on the opportunity! 

I took Nicole on a date because she needed some one-on-one time with me.  The play was the musical Little Women.  I didn't even know that it WAS a musical, but it was super good!  What a great time we had!  My parents' seats are awesome - right in the middle, about 6 rows from the front.  The cast was great, especially Jo, and the music was wonderful.  I bawled like a baby when Beth died.  Seriously!!!  Bawled!!!  Nicole had seen the movie before, so she knew the storyline very well and enjoyed every minute of it.  She was grinning and giggling the whole time.  Once, she even laughed and spoke out loud during a quiet part of the play, (She said, "Ha, he was like...") then she ducked in embarrassment.  It was darling.  Seeing the play reminded me how much I love that book.  I'm going to have to read it again soon.  Thanks, Mom and Dad for giving us those tickets!!!

After the play, Nicki drove to the airport with me where we picked up Aunt Suzette.  She'd been in China for almost 2 weeks.  It worked out perfectly because her flight came in around 10:30 at night, so we went straight from the play to the airport and met her on the curb.  We stopped at Wendy's and got a frosty while we listened to a few of Sue's adventures, then went home and went straight to bed. 

Our First Visit Back to Idaho

We went back to Idaho on August 10th for the first time since our move.  We came at the same time that Nathan's family was visiting, so we had a Gee Family Reunion! We hadn't seen Dawn and the kids since Dave's parents came home from their mission (Nathan came for Grandma's funeral, but the rest of the family couldn't come).  I'd never even met their youngest son!  It was fun to see how they've all changed over the past couple of years. 

Since there was a lot of family around, we stayed at Suzette's house.  Jodi stayed with Kristi and Nathan stayed at the folks' place.  It sure was nice to have so many places to stay!  We drove up to Idaho after work on Friday evening so we got there very late.  On Saturday morning, we went over to Dave's parents house for a yummy pancake breakfast.  His parents weren't there, though.  One of Dave's cousins was being sealed to her husband that morning so they went to the temple.  We still ate their food and then spent the morning letting the kids play while the adults visited with each other.  By lunch time, nearly all the family had gathered (Shawn's family was just getting back from a ward camp out, so they weren't there).  What a fun, loud, happy house it was!

That afternoon, we went to Porter Park.  The kids all rode the carousel and frolicked in the splash park.  Fun Aunt Jodi set up a tension line between a couple of trees, so we all (yes, even the adults!) tried tight rope walking.  Yikes!  Its HARD!!!  Jodi also brought her recently purchased long board so I had a fun time giving it a go!  I'm pretty sure that I looked way cooler in my imagination than I did in real life, but it was really fun. I kind of want to get one of my own and get good at it now.

We love our cousins!!!  Waiting for our turn on the carousel.

Yee-haw!

The carousel was practically full of Gees!

Ali, Bronny and some kid I don't know at the splash park.

Nicki getting soaked when the bucket full of water tipped over.

Grandpa, Grandma, Bronson, and Dave looking on.

Nicki tight rope walking.

It's impressive that he's not holding on to anyone for a minute - I needed someone on each side the whole time!
 

After the park, I asked David to take us to our favorite snow cone shack for old times sake.  They really are my favorite!  Then, we headed back to Grandma and Grandpa's house for a barbecue.  The whole family was there, so we took a few group photos (after a day in the splash park, we were a little less than stunning, but you take what you can get).  It was a really great day for all of us.  Oh how we miss being close to our family!  The cousins all play so well together and Kami and Caden have a special kind of magic about them - they are like pied pipers to the other children!

On Sunday, we decided to go to church at our old ward.  We figured that we'd rather be there than visiting someone else's ward.  It was a little sad driving by the old house on the way to church, but it didn't feel like our home any more, so that was good.  As we pulled into the parking lot at church, Dave and I were like, "Is this weird?  Maybe this was a bad idea..."  But before we even walked in the building, we heard a loud, "Nicki!!!!'' and we saw one of Nicki's friends running toward her from across the parking lot.  They gave each other a big hug and her friend said, "I'm so glad to see you!I've really missed you!"  Right then, I decided that it was a good idea to come back.  We saw so many of our old friends and had such a great time visiting with many of them.  Alison's old primary teacher had been released to have a baby and her new teacher was the woman who bought our house, so she told Ali all about the happenings:  Which kid sleeps in which room, that Dusty had one kitten and they named it Snickers, they're planning on getting cows out in the pasture, etc. 

Just a little taste of the joyful chaos!
 

After church, we intended to go home, but we wanted to stay a little bit longer.  So, we had a hard time figuring out exactly what to do for lunch, but we ended up just running to the store and buying a couple of boxes of Mac N' Cheese and making lunch at Suzette's house.  Then, the boys took naps while the girls stayed up and read a book together.  In the evening, after everyone was home from church, we went back to David's parents house.  We ate dinner and played and visited one last time.  Then, David's parents had a little show for us.  As they'd been going through the Shirley's things, they came across a bunch of old slides.  They also got a bunch from Jim's brother and had them transferred to DVDs.  So we spent the evening looking at pictures of Jim and Marilyn as babies and children.  It was so great!  I'd never noticed before how much Marilyn looks like some of her granddaughters.  And I loved seeing both parent's happy family's photos.  I loved it!  The younger kids didn't last through as much of the presentation as I'd hoped (to them, they're just old pictures of people they don't know) but the older kids had fun.  By the time we were finished, it was late.  We got home close to midnight, but I wouldn't have changed that for the world!  I loved every minute of our first visit to Idaho.

Canning

I love all things that are associated with food (except dishes).  I love cooking, gardening, grocery shopping, menu planning, collecting beautiful dishes, baking, eating at restaurants, watching food TV, buying kitchen gadgets and pans, and plain old dreaming about food!  When I used to go to Weight Watchers meetings, people kept talking about all the reasons we overeat.  I used to get bugged because they never addressed the fact that some people eat not because they are making up for some horrible event in their past, or they are trying to compensate for something else that's missing in their lives, or they're too bored or sad to make good decisions - some people eat for the sheer joy of food!  Hence the forty pounds I need to lose. 

But I digress...one of the aspects of food that makes me overwhelmingly happy is canning.  I love home-bottled fruit and vegetables.  Always have, ever since I used to eat bottled cherries in my friend Heidi's basement when I was six.  My mom canned tomatoes, peaches, pears, plum jam, and applesauce when I was growing up and I always wanted to be in the kitchen with her.  When I was around 19 or 20 years old, I got a hankerin' for Heidi's mom's cherries so I went to the store and bought a bag of cherries and a pitter, went home and bottled a few pints.  My mom probably thought I was nuts.  When Dave and I moved to our home in Idaho, I really learned how to can food!  With our huge garden, I canned nearly a hundred bottles of green beans each year.  I also canned beets, stew mix, salsa, and chicken - along with the peaches and pears that I'd grown up with.

Alas, I am the only Smith child to inherit the canning gene.  Neither of my sisters would EVER consider bottling fruit when perfectly good stuff is usually cheaper at the grocery store.  But somehow, this year a miracle occurred.  My older sister Kristin, who swore "Scarlet O'Hara-style" that she'd never can a thing, said she had an overabundance of tomatoes and wanted to make salsa with me.  Hallelujah!  So one day in July, Kristin came over to my house with her two kids and a huge bowl of tomatoes.  The kids had a wonderful, long play date with their cousins while Kristin and I worked as a team to whip up and process a batch of salsa.  Of course, while the bottles are processing, there's not much to do, so we watched a movie together.  It was so fun!  We had a great day visiting and as an added bonus, we each went home with 7 pints of delicious salsa!  Plus, it's nice to feel productive, but not in the usual laundry-and-dishes kind of a way.  It was a pretty good set up!  So good, in fact, that we decided to do it again.

So all summer long, Kristin and I would get together once or twice per week to bottle stuff.  We started out with the salsa, then we tried a fantastic relish recipe that's made with zucchini - in fact, it calls for giant ones, which everyone has and no one wants!  It's awesome!!!  We also made plum jam.  It was great!  And our husbands helped us bottle A LOT of peaches on Labor Day - I'm sure I'll write more about that event later.  Now that school's in, we've moved to bottling tomatoes.  We've found a U-Pick farm a couple miles from my house with the world's greatest and cheapest tomatoes, so we're going to town!  Mom's joined in on the tomatoes - she loves them - and we all work together. I have an abundance of jalapeno peppers in my little mini garden so I've pickled a few pints of them for nachos (I packed some pints of pickled peppers, hee hee).  They're spicy and I love them!!! 

It's been so fun to share this hobby with Kristin!  We're already talking about what we want to grow in our gardens next year for canning season.   Now if we can just work on Katie....

Night Games

The first month or two after we moved to Utah were a little hard on the girls.  I tried to help them adjust, but the girls missed their friends.  They both had amazing friends in Idaho.  It was a really big deal to have to leave them behind and try to make new ones.  The girls wrote a few letters to their old friends and talked to them on the phone once or twice, but that's just not the same as playing together.

Our new home is in a neighborhood filled with children, but it can be hard to break the ice.  Every day, Nicki (and sometimes Alison) would walk around the cul de sac a few times, hoping that someone would play with her.  Sometimes someone would play for a little while, but no lasting friendships were formed.  Each Sunday, the kids would BEG me to let them stay home from church.  They simply hated being the new kids - it was awkward.  We decided to wait out the summer and hope that they'd meet great friends when school started.

Then on the last evening in July, just when we were about to give up on a super-fun summer, the doorbell rang.  It was a group of kids from the neighborhood (probably prompted by their mothers who took pity on us) inviting my girls to come play "night games" with them.  Historically, our kids have always gone to bed very early, but we decided to change our schedule a bit so that they could make new friends in the neighborhood.  We sent them off to play, hoping it would go well. 

I forgot to take a picture all summer, and by the time I thought of it, nights were getting dark. 

Did it go well?  I'll say!  That night, they played Gray Wolf (or was it Silver Fox?) They spent nearly every single night from that point on running around the cul de sac with a band of about four to nine kids.  They played games, rode scooters, told stories, taught my daughters how to ride two-wheeler bikes, played with one boy's toy poodle Pepper, and sometimes just talked and laughed for hours.  We called the girls in around 9:30 each night (they were still usually the first ones to have to go in, but what can you do??? - We go to bed at about that time ourselves...)  It has made ALL the difference in our girls lives!  They are so HAPPY in this neighborhood.  They have tons of friends and spend hours and hours playing.  They all walk to school together in a huge group ranging from 1st graders to 6th graders.  The girls keep telling me how excited they are about all the neighborhood traditions during the holidays, etc.  They're thrilled.  And I'm happy for them.  They actually love living in Utah now - not that they've forgotten Idaho, but they can see that there is life AFTER Idaho now! 

So the kids love it, and so far it hasn't been too much for me either - I was afraid when we first moved here that I was going to go crazy with all these people hovering around me and in my life.  I know how it  COULD get, but it hasn't.  No one is pushy or anything - it's just right.  Sometimes I go out in the evening and sit and chat with some of the other parents in the circle while our kids run around.  It's really nice.  No doubt about it - we bought ourselves a great neighborhood to raise our family in. 

Anniversary Weekend

On July 27th, David and I celebrated 10 years of wedded bliss. To celebrate, we went to Salt Lake City for a couple of days.  We stayed in a hotel right next to the City Creek shopping center, a block or two from Temple Square.  It was so wonderful!  I felt like I was in a fairy tale - or some sort of time warp taking me back a decade or two.  We ate at fancy restaurants, shopped in stores we wouldn't dare enter with the kids, exercised together each morning, went to the new Draper Temple, drove around town for fun, watched a movie (non-Disney!), ate a ton of Del Taco food in the middle of the night, and woke up in the morning when our bodies wanted to - not when some kid started shaking the crib!  It was totally amazing!  We really needed that little break.  It was fun to look forward to it for a month before hand, end even more fun to actually experience.  I have to admit - I love my children with an intensity I can't explain, but I got a little bit weepy on Saturday morning when we checked out of the hotel and I had to go back to real life.

Meanwhile, the kids were having the time of their lives with Grandma and Grandpa Gee!  Dave's parents sacrificed a whole weekend (and perhaps several years off their lives) to drive down to our house and stay with the kids while we were gone.  It sounds like they had a blast.  The real highlight was when they all went to Antelope Island and waded in the Great Salt Lake.  The water was pretty low, so they had to walk through a lot of very hot, heavy sand to get to the beach.  They waded in the water for a while. Josh kept trying to keep his pant legs dry, but he'd squat down and stick his whole bum in the water!  Funny boy!  I get the impression from the grandparents that it was smelly, hot, and gross - the kids were all cranky and tired and filthy by the end (Josh collapsed face-first in the sand halfway back to the car and waited for Grandpa to carry Bronson to the van, then come back and rescue him), but the kids thought it was the coolest thing ever!  They loved it and want to go back!  For the rest of the time, Grandpa and Grandma also took them to a park, fed them pizza, watched movies with them, and just had plain old fun with them.  We love and miss them so much!  We were glad they offered to watch our kids so that they could be together again.  Maybe we'll do it again in another decade or so...