Swimming Lessons

Enoch and Kate have been asking about swimming lessons since last September.  They love swimming and swimming lessons with Bailey are 'SO MUCH FUN, I CAN'T STAND IT!'.
I have been pestering Bailey, our cute next door neighbor, if she was going to do swimming lessons again this year.  When she brought over the flyers, I immediately signed my kids up for the entire month of July.  First, for the fun factor.  Second, for the convenience of just having to send them next door.  And lastly, for safety - with a trip to Lake Powell coming up, the kids needed to be comfortable in the water.

 

 The first session was great.  Enoch went at 8:30am and Kate at 9am.  They had a great time and knew a few kids in their classes.  The second session was perfect.  Because some kids needed to change times and a few got moved to other classes based on ability, Kate was the only one left in her class.  Enoch's class was big, so we moved Enoch and Kate to the same time and they basically had private lessons.  It was fabulous.

 

 

Enoch improved so much.  He can now do his freestyle stroke and can float on his back.  You wouldn't think that floating would be so difficult, but Enoch is a Fowler.  Fowlers sink.  His favorite part was diving for the rockets at the end of each lesson.

 

Kate is an expert back-floater.  Bailey said that she didn't have a student that could float as well as Kate.  Her strokes also improved and she got over her fear of getting her ears wet - not her eyes or face, but her ears.  Kate's favorite part of lessons was doing cannonballs.

 

 It is amazing as a mom to see your kids improve at things - especially at things that are difficult.  Maybe it's so amazing to be because swimming doesn't come naturally to me.  Enoch and Kate love the water.  They did so well in their lessons.  It was fun to watch and brought my heart joy to see them having fun, learning and working hard to improve.

Cub Scouts at the Water Slides

The Best Pack Meeting Ever!  That is how I feel every year when we go to Classic Water Slides for our July Pack Meeting.  We have a hot dog dinner, an extra short Pack Meeting (prayer and pledge) and then more water sliding.

 

 

Enoch and Kate stuck mostly to the little pool, except when they would go down the big slides with Dad.  Gavin had a great time with his friends.  Guard snoozed in his stroller by the side of the pool with Mom. 

 

 

The highlight of the night was the bubble bouncy house.  Yes, a giant bubble bouncy house.  My kids LOVED it!  They pumped bubbles into the bouncy house and let the kids in a few at a time.  So much fun!

 

 

 

Can't wait until next year (Enoch will be a Cub Scout then! Yikes!).

Gone Into Reading

As Grandma Randall would say, Gavin has gone into reading this summer.  If he has free time, his nose is in a book (or his Nook).  He has read new books, he has read old books.  He read all seven Harry Potter books in four days (he's a fast reader!). 
His favorite was Micheal Vey 2.  When I brought it home from Costco, he grabbed it and was done with it in about 90 minutes.  I only wish new books would last a bit longer.
I am thankful for his good example for Enoch and Kate.  Enoch is currently reading Dragon Slayer's Academy (recommended by Gavin) and Kate still loves her Dr. Seuss books.
I love how Gavin involves the whole family!

 

Bath Time

When Guard was a newborn, he hated his bath.  Now, he loves it.  Lots of splashing, kicking, smiling (and occasionally peeing) going on in the tub.

 

He loves to have his hair washed.  Just like his mom, he really enjoys a good head massage.  And he has such a smile of contentment when I rinse his hair with warm water.

 His feet are ticklish and getting him to unclamp his toes is work.

He likes his water quite warm and squishes up his face if the water is cool.

It's the highlight of our day!

Yellowstone Day 2

After a quick breakfast of cereal, yogurt and donuts we packed up the van and drove back to Yellowstone.  We didn't have any specific thing on the agenda, but did want to see Yellowstone Falls and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. 
Once we got to the Park, our first item of business was to feed Guard.  This was consistently the hardest part of our trip.  We could not find warm water anywhere for Guard's bottles.  The water in the bathrooms was lukewarm and we discovered that water in this area has nitrates in it that is not good for babies.  We purchases some bottled water, but had no way to warm it.  Guard is very picky about the temperature of his bottles and would refuse to eat if it wasn't warm enough.  Greg finally came up with the idea of warming the bottles on the hot car engine.  We would stop to look at something and we would stick Guard's glass bottle in by the engine and then when we got back to the car, it was warm.  What a brilliant idea!
We spent some time hiking today.  We went on some small hikes to see the canyon and falls.  It was beautiful and the kids loved it.  Enoch said, "So now I know why it is called Yellowstone!  Now it makes sense!"

 

 

 

 

 

Enoch spotted this snow across the canyon and asked, "Why did someone put a giant piece of Styrofoam over there?"  It does look like Styrofoam, doesn't it?

The kids are such good hikers and they did great.  Gavin was a great help with the small kids and Enoch kept us all going (because we had to catch up to him and not lose him again).  Kate did well as long as she could hold Dad's hand.  Guard did great and fell asleep during the bumpy stroller ride. 

 

We went on a few shorter hikes to see more geysers.  Enoch and Kate would point out all the geysers and say, "That's a Guard geyser (very small)," or, "That's a Gavin geyser (bigger)."  It was a fun game they played.

 

The favorite spot of the trip was the Dragon's Lair (do you see the dragon's breath coming out?).  The kids all thought it was very fun.

 After seeing so many geyser and 'stink pots' the kids did get a bit bored. Their favorite game to play was 'gate'.  You had to guess the password to get through.  It was all fun and even some indulgent strangers played along.

 

We had a wonderfully fun time, but when the kids were done, they were done.  We couldn't stretch out the fun anymore.

 

We got a later start home than we wanted.  We left Yellowstone around 4pm, stopped in Ashton for dinner and finally got on the road.  We drove for a few hours before Guard couldn't take anymore (or we couldn't take anymore of his screaming).  We pulled over in Farm Country, ID, and on the exit ramp walked and walked with Guard, while the other kids ate snacks and watched TV in the car.  After Guard finally asleep and we got back on the road, I thought we were good to go, but we ran into road construction in Ogden.  Seriously.  It felt like it took us forever to get home.  We finally pulled into our driveway after midnight.  Of course, the kids were awake because they had slept the last few hours.  It took us a while to get everyone in bed and calmed down.

It was a great time.  I now wonder if that is why Gavin wasn't suppose to be on the bus.  Maybe our family needed this trip and the great memories.

Yellowstone Day 1

When we signed up Gavin for OYA at BYU-Idaho we were excited to discover a shuttle service from the Conference Center in Salt Lake to Rexburg.  I tried to sign him up a few times and found myself getting distracted or just plain not wanting to do it.  I finally put Greg in charge of it.  That night when I asked him if he got around to it, he said, "I entered in all his information, put in our credit card number and went to hit submit.  I couldn't to it.  I know that Gavin is not supposed to be on that bus."  Okay.  While I didn't like hearing that we would be driving to Idaho twice in one week, I trust Greg completely - especially when it comes to matters of the Spirit.  We don't know why Gavin was not suppose to ride the shuttle, but, in faith, we listened to the Spirit.
Greg took Monday off work to drive Gavin to BYU-Idaho.  On Friday, Greg took work off again to drive to Idaho.  This time the whole family went with him.  Since Rexburg isn't far from Yellowstone, we made a family trip out of the weekend.
We picked Gavin up (I tried not to let him see how teary I was because I didn't want to embarrass him) in Rexburg and headed north to Ashton, Idaho.  We had a very difficult time finding a hotel with short notice.  The closest we could find (that wasn't $250 a night) was in Ashton, which is about one hour south of West Yellowstone.  Greg found a great, little place called Rankin Motor Inn.  It is a cluster of white cabins, that I'm sure, was built in the 1930's (and remodeled in the 1970's).  They were roomy and clean and our family fit well in our two bedroom cabin with a kitchenette.

Our cabin was close to a supermarket and we ran over Friday night and did some grocery shopping to last us the weekend.  We also found some fun places to eat in town - a pizzeria with an old-fashioned soda fountain (where Greg tried a huckleberry soda with phosphate) and a burger joint with great root beer floats.
When we checked in to our hotel, the owner, Mr. Rankin, advised us to take the longer, scenic route into Yellowstone because of road construction on the main highway.  I am so happy we did.  We drove through quaint towns, military rows of flowering potato fields, a herd of cows and a few fluffy sheep.  We also stopped to see Mesa Falls.   It was a short walk to the Falls and the kids were happy for the break from driving (at least some of them!).

It was stunningly breathtaking with the early-morning mist.  It looked like something you would see in a movie.

 

 

 

 

Aren't my boys handsome!?  It always surprises me to see Gavin next to Greg - not too much longer and Gavin will pass him up.  Greg was so happy to spend so much time with Guard on this trip and took over the feeding and diaper duties - I love the bottle sticking out of his pocket.  And, I think it is impossible for Enoch to look at the camera - I don't know how many pictures of I have of him on this trip and he is looking everywhere but the camera!

When we first entered Yellowstone, we got stuck behind a giant motor home going so slow and stopping to snap pictures of every animal they saw.  It was quite frustrating.  No kidding, later that day around 4pm, we got stuck behind the same motor home!  Ugh!  We did see many animals, but we didn't stop to talk picture of all of them.  We saw elk, squirrels, bison, an eagle and a few ravens.

 

 

 

 

 

We saw one bear, and thankfully he was quite tame!

 We crammed a lot into our Saturday in Yellowstone; we knew it would be our only full day in the park.  We visited a lot of geysers, big and small.  The kids had a lot of fun (and nobody complained that they were too stinky).  It was a bit cool, overcast and rainy, so when the geysers sent out a lot of warm air and steam it was quite dramatic.

 

 

 

 

 

It was probably against the rules to leave the boardwalk, but the kids found this great tree root that was the perfect picture taking spot.

 

 We took a break from sight seeing to have lunch - peanut butter and jelly from the car.

 

Mid-afternoon, we drove to the Yellowstone highlight, Old Faithful.  It wasn't as crowded as it could have been, but it was still quite busy.  Enoch had been asking about Old Faithful for months after seeing it on a commercial.  He was pretty excited to see it.  And it did live up to it's hype.

 

After viewing Old Faithful from the Lodge, we hiked up to the Observation Point.  We thought it would be a short, easy hike, but it was more than we were ready for.  It wasn't too steep, but longer than we thought. 

Greg carried Guard the whole way up.  Enoch and Kate ran most of the way.  The view from the top was great and it was fun to see Old Faithful from a different angle.  It doesn't look so big from way up there.

Enoch had ran ahead of us.  When the rest of the family got to the look out spot, we couldn't find him.  We looked everywhere and was calling out his name.  We finally found him.  He had ducked under the rail fence and climbed down onto a rock hanging over the cliff.  A man was sitting there and Enoch climbed out to talk to him.  Unfortunately for Enoch, this man wasn't very chatty, so it was really a one-sided conversation.  It scared the begeebees out of me!  We dragged him back and he was furious (and tired and hungry and sick of being bossed around).  He started screaming and Greg took him back down the path.  Everyone up there could hear him screaming for the next 20 minutes.  It was great.

After Enoch calmed down, we had a nice hike down. 

 

 

 

 

After we reached the Old Faithful Visitor Center, we went to turn in the kids Junior Ranger workbooks and discovered they had been lost.  It was quite disappointing for Enoch and Kate (and for Mom who had spent so much time encouraging Enoch and Kate to finish them), but they were gone and we didn't have time to do it again.

By then we were done.  We headed back down the path and drove back to the hotel.  The kids slept well that night and we were ready to go again the next morning.