Back to School!

 Back to school happened! I was so ready to send the kids back to school this year, but it was still a little bittersweet for me once they actually left! Hudson and Davis were pure excitement, Chase was a little sad summer was over! The Sunday before school started we did our traditional back to school feast and fathers blessings. As always, it was a sweet day. 

Hudson started 4th grade. He has Mrs. Schoneman. She seems really nice and I think she’ll be a great teacher. He was a little taken off guard to not have his best buddies Hyrum or Richie in his class this year. He came home in tears the first day, but he quickly bounced back and made some new friends. By the end of the first week he was really happy at school and has stayed that way! 

Chase is in his last year of elementary school! He’s a big 6th grader and has Mrs. Bywater. He was excited to have his friend Coen in his class this year, plus a few other kids he’s known in the past and has been able to become better friends with. School lunch is no longer free for everyone, so he’s happy that we are back to him taking a home lunch every day again like he did pre-Covid.

Davis was so dang excited to start kindergarten! He has Megan Joseph, our good friend and neighbor. Half the kids in his class are in our neighborhood too and it’s a darling group of little kids! His favorite part of school is recess and iPads. Writing was really hard for him at the start, but after just a few weeks he’s really gotten the hang of it! Kindergarten just does testing the first week, but he had this on the boys first day of school so he got to “go” to kindergarten that day. He started for real the next Monday. 

Miss Lila is so happy to be home with mommy in the mornings all by herself! We bake together, paint nails, color, run errands, clean together. She’s basically my little shadow and seems to really soak up our time together- just like I am! 

On the first day Hudson came home really upset and stressed and sad and Chase was okay, but a little stressed as well. Within an hour Heidi sent them crumbl cookies which made everything at least 50% better. Every day that first week got a little better and by the end of the week Chase had gone from “okay” to “awesome” and Hudson had gone from “awful” to “fine” so we called it a big win!

Ben was in Detroit on the first day of school, so we took this picture after school so he could see that we all survived! 

We got to end that first long week with a fun party with Bennetts and Virgins. The kids swam and played all night long and had a blast. It was good timing for a party!

Davis got to start for real the next Monday. He was so excited to ride scooters to school with his boys! I pick him up at 11:30 and just throw his scooter in the trunk. He feels so big and seeing him scoot away between Chase and Hudson is the absolute cutest thing.

Yay for a fun new school year! 

The End of our Summer Break

 Our summer was rapidly coming to a close as August began and we crammed in the last few fun activities we’d still had on our wish list for summer! One was a day at Pineview with the Josephs. This is the third summer in a row we’ve done a lake day with them and it’s always so much fun- and as the kids are getting bigger it’s also getting much easier! We had so much fun on the paddle boards, playing in the sand, and enjoying each other’s company that I only got a few pictures!

I did get them all to line up in age order for one picture right before heading home. These kids all get along so well! I love that we have six boys with one tiny girl at the end. 

And testament to a really fun day- four kids asleep in the car on the way home. Also, I’m pretty sure this has never, ever happened before! 

We spent a lot of time enjoying our backyard once the deck was complete!

And a lot of afternoon popsicles on the front porch. We’ve been doing this for years during the summer and I just love it. The simple things!

We hosted a whole bunch of fun swim nights with different families. This particular night we had the DeForests there who have a bunch of little boys that Davis loves to play with. Davis and Dean ran around like crazy all night. And after every time they got out of the pool, Davis would inexplicably “fix” Dean’s hair and then they’d run off the board again. It was darling!

Our usual summer camping trip didn’t happen this year, and not wanting to disappoint Davis who prays frequently to go camping, we pulled together a little backyard camp out. Will’s girls want to go camping too. So we had a Friday night that we set up tents in Nana’s backyard, swam, cooked hotdogs and s’mores on the fire, swam some more, and then sent the babies home to sleep in their cribs. Will and I stayed with the big kids for the night. 

Will’s tent is a little four man. Ours is an 8 man. Davis talked all evening about how our tent was SO MUCH BIGGER than Will’s. He was so proud of it. When given the option to sleep in Will’s tent, he quickly responded that he wanted to sleep in the BIG tent. The kids shuffled around and Huds and Nora slept in Will’s tent, and I had Chase, Davis and Anna in mine. I told them a story about Elsa and Spider-Man meeting and bonding over their shared experience of being teenagers with weird powers. I’m pretty proud of it as it kept them very entertained.

Davis was so excited he couldn’t go to sleep. He kept standing up and walking to a new part of the tent. Lying down right on the floor and deeming that to be the right spot, only to move a minute later. He was clearly so tired and just couldn’t calm down. Finally I laid right between him and Anna and within two minutes they were both out! (Chase had been asleep for a good 20 minutes at this point). Will and I both slept horribly, but had to admit it was worth it for the amount of excitement it brought to these cute little kids! (And Lila had no idea what she missed out on!)

One of the sweetest memories of this summer will be our cousin swim mornings! We went every Wednesday morning and these kids had so much fun together. Hudson and Nora are always off in their own world and Lila and Rosie truly became best friends! We all gushed over how cute they were together all summer! And I usually let Chase bring a friend along since there isn’t anyone his age. 

The boys did our traditional system of 100 points again this summer! They get points for doing jobs, yard work, babysitting, reading, piano songs passed off, etc. The big kids finished at the first of August, and it took Davis a few weeks longer to finish. I took this picture on the last day when he finally got his 100th point! He was so excited! For their reward, they got to pick a date to go on with their dad. So far, only Hudson’s date has been cashed in (more on those later). 

For Hudson’s date he wanted to go test drive cars. This kid loves cars so much. So they went and test drove a really fancy Mercedes EQS. It’s over $100,000 and obviously we have no intention of buying it, but Hudson loved the experience. He chose dinner at Blue Lemon and then they went to another car dealership and checked out other cool cars. He’s been talking about this date ever since!

Our neighborhood hosted a Makers Market for kids to come sell stuff they’d made. My boys baked like crazy and sold so much stuff! Hudson made no bake cookies and coconut lime cookies. Chase made scotcheroos and mint brownies. It was a darling little fair and the kids all had lots of fun! 

On the last day of summer Chase came running errands with me and we got his haircut! It’s been so long all summer and he looks so handsome!

I’m going to miss these sweet moments of all my kids home together! There have been so many sweet memories like this (and a fair amount of fighting too) all summer long! 

July

July was full- mostly of swimming! Also, a few of my kids discovered that if they put goggles on before I spray them in sunscreen then none gets in their eyes and everyone is happier. 

We had our 14th wedding anniversary and this was the only picture I got of the day! This little daddy-daughter nap was darling though!

Hudson had a really great day with his BFF Richie. They had an old TV waiting to go to the dump and asked his mom if they could take it apart. If you know Hudson, you can imagine this was heaven to him! We still have part of the circuit board down in his room. This kid loves technology and most of the conversations this summer have been his *long* opinions and thoughts about all kinds of technology and things he’d like to invent. 

My girly-girl likes to always have a purse with her when she leaves the house. Even if it’s just to the back yard.

The FDA officially approved the Covid vaccine for kids older than 6 months, which means they unblinded the study Lila and Davis are in. Davis was already unblinded when he turned 5, so we knew he’d gotten the real shot. Lila was then unblinded and we found out she got placebo. I wasn’t too surprised, since she had zero reaction to the shot whatsoever, I had been suspecting this news. That meant that we could either pull her from the study, or keep her in and get her the real Moderna shot. I opted to keep her in, so we were back at the doctors office this particular day for her real shot. She knows the drill now, poor thing has had so many shots this past year! She was nervous, but she kept talking about how it all works and how she’d get a sucker after. She was a champ and only cried for a minute and held so still for the shot. Also, she had no reaction at all to the real shot either!

The deck- oh the deck. This thing has taken over so much of our summer! When we moved in we knew we needed to do major work to the existing deck which was so old and rickety. After living her for a bit we quickly decided it wasn’t worth repairing and would need a full reconstruction. And then life got in the way and the expense and effort put this on the back burner year after year until this year we finally committed! 

My parents generously gifted us some money to help with the cost and we saved up a bunch and finally we were ready to pull the trigger. Ben hired someone he knew from growing up in Virginia. His name is Nick and he’d done some work for Ben’s parents and had done a good job. Nick was starting a business and Ben wanted to help him out. So we did. Ben demoed our old deck mid-April with Nick supposedly starting our building late April/early May. That ended up getting pushed to mid-May before Nick actually started and immediately it became clear that things were going SLOW. His initial time table of “2 weeks” came and went with almost nothing done. Then his helper quit on him, so Ben volunteered to help out to discount the price a little.

It’s been the slowest process, especially since our builder would frequently go a whole week or more between actually coming to work, working for a few hours and then not showing up at all for another week. I was super frustrated. Ben stayed really calm and continued to work on it whenever he could. Almost every free moment was spent out there working. To be fair, Nick did a lot of the initial framing that Ben was very nervous to do on his own, so we were thankful for that. But it turned into “Nick helping Ben build the deck sometimes” instead of “Nick building the deck because we hired him”. You can tell, I’m still pretty frustrated about this.

We got the project about 80% done when Nick pretty much quit. He said he was too overwhelmed to finish the project. So then it was mostly up to me and Ben to finish it up. Between a lot of YouTube tutorials, a lot of thinking and trying to figure stuff out, a few phone calls to others who might be able to lend some expertise, by the end of July we finally have a totally finished deck! And it turned out beautiful. And now we can kind of laugh at the hilarious (read frustrating) moments we had, like when Ben and I were trying to cut railings at 10 pm in the dark and totally ruined the railing and had to buy more. Or how I helped Ben build the stairs for hours in the hot sun in a dress (because I just came out to help for a minute and ended up staying for hours). Ben learned a lot about construction through the process and kind of enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed mostly none of it, but we did save thousands of dollars compared to what the more experienced deck companies quoted. 

 

Evenings while working on the deck- Lila usually wanted to be out there with us. She’d clap her little hands and cheer for us when we finally got something put in correctly which was adorable. I went to check on Hudson and Davis one night because we hadn’t heard them for awhile and I found them in the driveway, spinning their bike wheels like crazy, running a bike shop apparently!

We rarely visit splash pads, but we did this one time and for about forty minutes it was a blast!

On the last day of July, we celebrated Harry’s birthday. Chase went through our entire Harry Potter cookbook and marked a bunch of recipes and we made them all together. We had my mom and dad and Nate and Halie down for dinner and watched the 5th movie together. It was a fun day! 

Fourth of July and Bear Lake

 

My favorite holiday! I love the Fourth of July! We had a very calm day- mostly working in the yard and on our deck (more on that later). We did our little “red, white and blue breakfast” which was minus the blue this year since I couldn’t find any blueberries! We did crepes with strawberries and whipped cream and it was so delicious! We just hung out together as a family that day. Later we joined the rest of the family up at my parents house for my favorite night of the year- swimming, BBQ and fireworks from the deck!

This little group of cousins is so cute together and this year their relationship has just grown! We’ve had many dinners where the adults get to just sit and relax and talk because the kids are all just playing so well! Chase bemoans the fact that there isn’t a boy cousin or anyone his age- but he’s finding his spot in the cool older cousin that Anna loves to play with. The little girls have been so cute and just totally bonded this summer. And Huds and Nora are always off in their own little world together!

This year fireworks from the deck were my favorite. Everyone could stay up this year and Lila was SO HAPPY we let her stay! She exclaimed “FIREWORKS!” the whole time and just loved every second of it. I played some patriotic music from my phone and all the kids had ideas of songs to add. Davis wanted “Kristoff’s song” and although I knew which song he was talking about, I couldn’t quite place the name to type in. Of course, Will knew exactly what it’s called “Lost in the woods”.

As we were chatting in the pool, Dad mentioned we could use the old family cabin at Bear Lake a few days later if we wanted (my dad’s aunt and uncle own it and let my grandma and her family use it a few days each summer). We jumped at the chance and a few days later we were all at the lake together!

We didn’t spend the night- just drove up early in the morning and came home that night and it was such a wonderful day- including the beautiful drive! We went up through Monte Cristo and home through Logan canyon and both drives were just gorgeous!

We set up shade on the beach and dad brought four wheelers, so we could easily run back up to the cabin to use the bathroom. Other than that, we were on the beach all day! The kids could not have been happier playing in the sand and water. The water is so shallow for quite a while. We let the kids go out to the second buoy- which was quite far out that- and they were still only waist deep on Chase.

Lila and Rose mostly played in the sand, although Lila did brave the water a few times. Davis ran and ran and ran into the water over and over again. In fact, I don’t think he stopped moving the whole time we were there. Including while eating his lunch, he just kept walking around with his sandwich in one hand. He’s been praying to go to the beach for a whole year, so happy we could make this happen for him.

Hudson dug this humongous hole and thought it was hilarious. He enjoyed the water too. Ben grabbed a boogie board from his parents house and we loved having it even though there aren’t waves big enough to really use it on. Hudson and Chase would put the smaller kids on it and pull them around in the water, delighting everyone.

The water was so beautiful and blue, so was the sky. It was a really delightful day. Also, this picture below made me laugh because Kate had been photographing the baby girls and went to take a picture of Hudson and Nora together, and the baby girls ran and hopped right into it. We take so many pictures of them and they know how cute they are. I think they assume we want them in all photos. 

We stopped for burgers and raspberry shakes on the way home in Garden City, then drove home through Logan Canyon for another beautiful drive. We were all sandy and exhausted and so happy. This may have been my favorite day of the whole summer!