Capital Reef

Before we left Abbie and Spencer went with me to get a tripod for the camera so we could take a few pictures with all of us while we were hiking. Abbie and I tired it out in the backyard.This last week was crazy! Soccer every night; Spelling in the afternoon with Great-Grandma; Ken taught his classes at UVSC and also subbed for the other teacher and so taught every day, Monday to Thursday. By Friday we all needed a break. So since the kids had a day off school Ken took a day off work and we headed out.

It actually took us an embarrassingly long time to get on the road. I mean how much stuff do you really have to do for a two day vacation?

We only had one small detour on the way and got stopped to get frosty's and figure out where we were.
When we got to the right turn off we were met with these beautiful striped mountains.

This is the view from the visitor's center at Capital Reef.

And I just couldn't resist taking a picture of the flag. I felt so grateful to be able to live in a country where I could come and go and do as I pleased.
Our first hike was the Grand Wash Trail. It is basically hiking up a dry river bed so it was pretty easy going. The dry mud was so cool. Not only was it an intense red, but it was so smooth on top. The kids really wanted to bring some home but when they realized what a big mess it made they didn't even argue when I said we'd leave it behind. (More on the mud later....)

Jessie found this cool shell-like imprint in the rock.

There were a ton of little caves and crevices to crawl into and explore. I included the next two pictures simply for crazy picture people like me. This first one is with the tripod and no flash in one of the caves. (Mark tried to hold very still.)
And this one is without the tripod with the flash. I just couldn't believe how the flash took away all the color.
We saw this cool rock when we decided we could no longer stand Spencer's whining and turned around to go back. Coming the other way it's just a pile of rocks, but going back it was a cool face.
More on the mud.... Jessie found a rather good size piece of mud and used a rock to make a hole in it. One hole lead to another and soon she had a great mask.

Getting ready to head back into town for dinner we stopped at to see the Petroglyphs. Ken and I couldn't help but wonder if they were really pictures intended to call upon the Gods of the Indians or just teenage Indian's have fun.

There is a short board walk by the petroglyphs and Mark and Jessie had a rest waiting for Abbie and me to reach the end (Abbie really wanted to go get dinner.) When we got back to the car Mark showed Ken the petroglyphs in the binocular thing while Spencer pushed the stroller running up and down the trail.

Abbie just sat by the car and waited....she still wanted to go for dinner.
We stopped at one more place called "Gooseneck" before dinner and took a look around. It was an 800 foot drop down to the river that winds through part of the canyon. Then we took Abbie and got her some dinner. After dinner we went swimming in the pool.

Actually we mostly we sat in the hot tub, because the pool was a little chilly. Then we took the kids and put them in bed.

Ken went out with the tripod to try and catch a few pictures of the stars since we were in the middle of nowhere. This picture is so small now you can't see it, but he was able to get a few pictures where you could see the different star colors. Some red, some blue, some white. He held the shutter on the camera open for about a minute and just started to get some of the Milky Way to show up. Something we'll try to get on film again.

Saturday morning after breakfast we went "swimming" again, then packed up the stuff from the hotel and loaded the car. Again by the time we got that done we got Subway for lunch and had a picnic in the park.

Our first hike was Cohab Canyon. Here is the view part way up the switch backs.

After the switch backs it is fairly level so we took a family picture.
You keep climbing around some stinking huge boulders and come to a spectacular....hidden canyon to hike down into.

Ken and Spencer found this crack in the rocks and hid from the rest of us. The other kids were sliding down some smooth rocks.

Abbie found a cool feather while we walked. It was black with a bright red quill. She was determined to keep it for herself, but ended up trading it to Jessie for some other treasure.

Pretty flowers.
There was a lot of sand and we emptied the kids shoes a couple of times. Are only big mishap was Abbie touching a cactus and getting a few needles in her hand, but I'm surprised you all didn't hear her screaming, because the way she screamed we thought she cracked her head open and was dying.
This ended up being about a three mile hike and afterwards we were all happy to sit in the car for the scenic drive. Isn't this a cool rainbow rock.
We saw quite a few lizards although they were all way to fast for us, but this one finally hung around long enough for us to get a picture.
Now, I hope you are impressed, I was able to condense a 258 picture trip into just 26 photos. Thanks for reading along and enjoying the trip with us.

Happy Birthday MOM!

We hope you are having a super birthday. It was great to chat this morning. Eat some cake for us!

Remembering Brian

Every year as close to the 22nd of September as we can Ken's family has a BBQ at Whiting Campground up the canyon in memory of his little brother who passed away right before Abbie was born. It is always a peaceful and enjoyable evening together. I'm so thankful for the knowledge that this life is not all there is. And it feels good to remember the whispering of the Spirit that I had during that difficult time especially when I am able to share those experiences with my children.
Abbie is my first kid to like olives. She gets it from her dad. Here she's showing me that she's still 4, but in two weeks she'll be 5 (and she added the last olive onto her thumb).
In honor of my little brother David, we brought up some Starburst to roast. They were actually quite tasty and the kids had a blast with them.

We went for a walk through the woods...well, most of us walked.
The kids climbed down to the river to explore.
Isn't this beautiful!

Do you see those yellow leaves!!! I can't believe it's fall already.

Jessie found a walking stick and started the others on a search for more. Then they made a train on the way back to the camp site.
We celebrated Spencer's birthday today. Abbie kept reminding us that it wasn't actually his birthday; I'm still not sure why that was so important to her, oh well.

All the kids, expect Spencer, ended up in my bed this morning and we were trying to figure out what to do for Spencer's cake. Mark thought a Captain Moroni cake would be good because Spencer likes to play with David's wooden swords, but that sounded a little intense for me. Then Jessie suggested a Sesame Street cake since Spencer loves to play Sesame Street on the computer. I personally like cookie monster the best and so that's what we did. It was so fun and he was SO excited about it.

After dinner with Steph and McKay we cleaned up and readied the cake while the rest of Ken's family joined us. Spencer was dancing around the room he was so excited. He was cheesing through the whole song part and when the first blow didn't take care of the candles he jumped up and stuck his face really close and got them all in one more blow.
Watching him open presents was really fun. The excitement, the drama. Jessie, Mark and Abbie were all right there ready to offer assistance and suggestions for quick opening. He didn't have much trouble and threw wrapping paper all over in his excitement. After he was done he took all of the gifts to the couch and made them into one big pile then started looking through them. It was a good evening.
One side note. Today the primary had their sacrament program and after yesterday's practice I was a little nervous. But today was wonderful. The kids did a super job! They were reverent on the stand; they sang all the songs; said their parts. WOW. I didn't quite make it through all the songs though. I had to stop a few times to hold back the tears. When it was all done "I felt as light as a feather and before you knew it I was walking on air." (Because jumping up and down and cheering in church aren't usually appropriate.)

Another Week

Mark had to do a poster about himself for school. He helped me come up with a bunch of words that describe him. Since he loves games we tried making a game board... but no. Then we decided to use his name. He liked that idea and helped me cut out all the words and color the pictures of him since we just have a black and white printer. It was fun to do together. One thing about Mark is that each year we've done these he has a new favorite color. I remember last year's color, silver, the year before, red; this year's color was orange. If you could pick one position to find Jessie in it would be with her nose in a book. For school every 30 minutes the kids read they get a ticket for a drawing for a bike at the end of the year. My kids are really going to it. Which is great, but as a parent it is hard for me to tell them to stop reading, but I still need their help. Jessie cruised through this book in two days.
Today while Spencer was napping, Abbie made up a new game for us to play. It's kind of like a color mixing game on a Blue's Clue's computer game we have.

First she tried drawing a game on a piece of scratch paper, but then we came up with the perfect thing. We cut out little 2 inch squares of paper in orange, green and purple and then randomly laid them out in a line that curved around for our board. Then we typed up the colors red, yellow and blue on little pieces of paper and cut them out. Abbie got to pick out different fonts for all the primary color words because her mom loves fonts! (Speaking of which I haven't checked out the new fonts on scrapvillage.com yet. They upload a few new ones on the 15th of every month. Back to the story...)

So to play the game you picked a primary color card and then choose another primary color to mix with the assigned one and moved your piece to the color it made. So if you drew a RED card you choose to mix it with blue and get purple or yellow to get orange. Abbie was so good at always picking which combination would get her the farthest.

Of course you have to have prizes for the winner and so Abbie picked out some of her favorite rocks, two paper puppets, a bracelet she made at a birthday party along with a few other things for our prizes. She won the first two rocks and let me win the third one because she felt bad for her mom. I won the last rock and we moved on to the puppets. Spencer woke up around then and the game was postponed until tomorrow.

After that we sat on the front steps eating ice cream cones and waiting for the kids to walk home from school. Later we had Mark's soccer game and Grandma and Kyle and Jennie came. Mark was SO happy to have such a crowd there to watch. He did a super job and after the game we handed out rice crispy treats he helped make. What a good kid.

Everyone is finally in bed and Ken just finished reading two chapters of Holes to them. It's nice to have quite at the end of the day. One sad thing...Poor Jessie got her head squished in the van door when we got home from the soccer game and it sleeping with a bag of ice on each side of her head behind her ears.

Hip Hip Horray

I'm so excited. This weekend Ken helped me get the placemats printed and laminated. YEAH! When he brought them home I was so excited. I felt like a little kid at Christmas. Getting them cut out was a little tricky, but once I got it figured out it wasn't too bad. I still just want to jump and shout every time I look at them.

A Little Rain and some Birthday Pictures

So nearly everyone around my house, including me, picked up a cold last Sunday afternoon. YUCK. I can only think of two things to be happy about a cold: one, you get to lay around and have an excuse to read a good book and two, you remember how thankful you are that your usually healthy.

On to the rain. (This probably wasn't good for the cold factor, but it sure was fun.) Mark had to stay home from school yesterday and today so he wouldn't infect anyone there. Home he decided, is really boring (and it was since I wasn't really feeling up to doing anything) so when it started raining yesterday he was all ready for fun. He and Abbie and Spencer had a lovely time soaking themselves in the water pouring off the edges of the carport.

Today we were all feeling much better, but Mark's cough was really something so he stayed home with us again. Since it was nice day and cloudy, so the kids wouldn't squint in the sun, I decided we'd go take Abbie and Spencer's birthday pictures.

I found my new favorite picture place -- up at BYU at the waterfall by the bell tower. It was simply beautiful there! And while I was taking pictures the other kids played with the ducks there.

Here are my favorites from today. The funny part was that we stopped at Flow Serve in Springville first and then headed up to BYU. After parking and getting all the way over to the waterfall my camera battery died after 2 pictures. I knew it was close, but didn't realize it was that close. So we packed everything back up and headed over to the CougarEat for lunch and to plug in the battery recharger. It took us almost an hour to find a place to eat, order food and eat and clean the kids back up, so the battery had plenty of time to charge back up.

Then off we headed again. It was fun. The kids were so surprised when I let them take off their sandals and put their feet in the water. Abbie didn't know it was going to be so cold. Mark collected 6 duck feathers, one for each of us, but his favorite blew away on the way back to the car.



Spencer loves pictures, but he won't look at the camera for anything. I was so worried I didn't get a single good one of him, but when I got home and downloaded them to the computer I was pleasantly surprised with the following and they are so Spencer. I had to focus the camera on him and then try and hold it still while I peeked around the side and made funny faces at him. There were a couple of other great shots, but I moved the camera and cut half his face off. Silly guy.