First Day of School!

Where we spent our summer

On the picnic blanket under the trees!

We had so much fun this summer at the Picnic in the Park program. Every weekday the kids had a sack lunch and Kelsie an Amanda had an activity for them, it was a great way to get us out of the house, outside, the kids played with their friends, I could chat with mine and a free lunch to boot. It was even better than the pb&j's I would have been fixing. Mandie has some pictures of the actual lunches here.

For the end of the summer party they had face painting and a pinata.

Mallory's new hair cut

Before After

Courtney's new do

Before

She wanted bangs, but then was unsure for a moment

Holding still is hard

After

Twin Falls

Last weekend we headed down to Twin to see some friends. While the we made another trip through the temple (Kevin hadn't been yet). It was great to get to take the kids through again. I hope they will be able to remember more. Mallory liked the Celestial room most. George liked the big falls mural in the endowment room. Courtney thought the "Wedding" room was best.

After the temple we headed over to Shoshone falls to take in the view. It was fun to show the kids the falls that was in the mural.

I was sad I had left the wide angle lens in the car, but not sad enough to walk back to the car.

Kelly&Saddie, Me and Lily

My Models

Big Man is 4!

After returning from camping we had a party for George's Birthday.

Phrase of the day was "that's awesome!"

Playing with his parachute launcher

Super George/Spiderman cake

I know, it is kinda lame, but give me a break, I took him camping the night before and spent the day on the sand dunes, I was spent.

Camping

We headed out a couple of weekends ago for a quick camping trip. We went with Hannah and Buzz out to Bruneau Dunes State Park.

Courtney helped us to pack. I had been stacking everything next to the door of the garage for easy packing once it was gathered. Courtney decided to help out. A few things made it to the car that had to be taken back out. The canning pot and toy weed whacker included. Oh and we went through this process twice. Fun times.

Lily thinks soccer is really funny

Playing in camp, dunes in the back

Looking back at our campsite

Playing on the Dunes

Buzz and Hannah were fabulous camping companions. Hannah even had us all saying "torch" for flashlight by the end of the night.

The Last Week

This week has been an absolute flurry of activity! School starts on Monday and we had to fit in as many activities as possible. We have been to the park and the pool a couple of times. Open house at the school and I worked (w00t for 2 week notice!), tomorrow is haircuts, and we'll most likely hit the fair. Hmm that doesn't sound like much, maybe it just feels so busy because I know this is the last week. So many things to cram in. Ohh and the laundry, do I really have to catch up on the laundry before school starts? Crap.

What Courtney and Mallory know

I've been tagged: What Courtney and Mallory know about Mommy

1. What is something mom always says to you?
Don't whine
Clean up

2. What makes mom happy?
when you do something without having to be asked
Feeding Lily

3. What makes mom sad?
when we don't do what you ask
sing songs that make you cry

4. How does your mom make you laugh?
When you sing silly songs
When you tell a joke

5. What was your mom like as a child?
you were little
Brown hair

6. How old is your mom?
28
29

7. How tall is your mom?
28
14 remote controls (she measured)
Courtney got in on the act, and I am 12 pens

8. What is her favorite thing to do?
Work on the computer
Scrapbook

9. What does your mom do when you're not around?
Feed Lily
Be lazy

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?
Chef
Singing

11. What is your mom really good at?
Cooking
Photography

12. What is your mom not very good at?
Cooking on the Grill
Cooking bacon

13. What does your mom do for her job?
work on the computer
sell body works

14. What is your mom's favorite food?
cocoa wheats, Mallory corrected her, cream of wheat, I am NOT a fan of cocoa wheats
Special chocolate syrup, and crabcakes

15. What makes you proud of your Mom?
When you are nice
she works with one hand holding Lily

16. If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be?
Wheezy on Dragon Tales
Wonder Red's mom

17. What do you and your mom do together?
you go down the slide with me at the pool
Do math

18. How are you and your mom the same?
We've both got church shirts
We have red hair

19. How are you and your mom different?
We don't have brown shirts
We don't have the same eyes

20. How do you know your mom loves you?
Because I'm your child
By taking us to the park at lunch

21. What does your mom like most about your dad?
because you got married to him
because you guys had a crush on each other

22. Where is your mom's favorite place to go?
The Library
Docter's

They want to tag Clyde, Ali and Pamela

All about me

Image credits
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Want to make your own?
In case you want to take a shot at it, heres how it works:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using ONLY the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker. Choose 3 columns with 4 rows.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name. (kid version: favorite animal?)

Summer Reading

I thought I would get a ton of reading done this summer and I have done almost none. :(

I found this list on a blog I stumbled on. I thought it would be fun, especially considering the number of book lovers in the family. The is a list of books put out by the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), who say that supposedly most adults have only read 6 out of 100 of these books. Let's see how I do.

1. Bold all the books you've read.


1. Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen (I've seen the Wishbone version on PBS countless times, does that count for anything?)
2 The Lord of the Rings-JRR Toilken
3. Jane Eyre-Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I admit to skipping over a lot of so and so beget so and so, but other than that I have read most of it and actually studied parts)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations- Charles Dickens
11 Little Women- Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22- Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye- JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (This book stuck with me for a long time, I would love to read it again)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy- Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia- CS Lewis
34 Jane Austen
35 Emma-Persuasion- Jane Austen
36 The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe- CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm-George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43>One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I read the alternative in high school Siddartha. I LOVED it. Now I should go back and read this one. I'm not even sure why I picked the alternative, other than it was offered.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune- Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Love the movie!)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime- Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick- Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula- Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses- James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad (I read this in high school and really liked it, I'm not sure why, it probably deserves a reread)
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet- William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

19, more than triple the "average" Not bad, but I want to add so many of these books to my library que.

Grandma, how did you do? I bet you beat us all.

George Was Tagged

I've been tagged: What George knows about Mommy

1. What is something mom always says to you? not kick or punch



2. What makes mom happy? bring breakfast



3. What makes mom sad? if there was a fire and somebody died you will be sad



4. How does your mom make you laugh? if we made a silly face



5. What was your mom like as a child?



6. How old is your mom? don't know



7. How tall is your mom? that tall (with his hand just above his head)



8. What is her favorite thing to do? play with your kids



9. What does your mom do when you're not around? She feeds Lily



10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for? I don't know this question



11. What is your mom really good at? She is good at checkers, beating Mallory



12. What is your mom not very good at? I know this, when daddy's playing checkers and mommy loses



13. What does your mom do for her job? telling us to do chores



14. What is your mom's favorite food? I don't know that one, what is your favorite food? Chocolate. Oh!



15. What makes you proud of your Mom? when we go bowling



16. If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be? On Curious George, Curious George's mom



17. What do you and your mom do together? We go to stores together



18. How are you and your mom the same? they have the same hair



19. How are you and your mom different? Because mom is a girl and your son is a boy



20. How do you know your mom loves you? because she is really nice



21. What does your mom like most about your dad? because he is very nice



22. Where is your mom's favorite place to go? Fred Meyers

George wants to tag Mallory, Clyde and Courtney

Jam

So every year I am getting more and more domestic. This year I have tackled growing a garden (with LOTS of help) and another new project, jam making. Actually jam making and canning. I was going to start with just freezer jam but I tend to lose things in the freezer. No, I did not grow these berries, but I did make the jam and successfully can 18 1/2 pint jars of it. One batch of Red Rasberry and 1 batch of Blackberry/Raspberry. Not only is it edible, it is yummy. Success!