Photo of the Week!

For his before the football game snack:
A bowl of matey-less Marshmallow Mateys.
He said he'd always wanted to do that!

Photo of the Week!

Photo by Auriana

Photo of the Week!

Photo of the week!

August 2013:by Becky

We have spent the summer trying to keep up with the kids, but we have tried to have some time to relax and enjoy our time too.   All summer long, Isaac and Auriana have had to be out the door before 7am and I have been very impressed at how well they have done that on their own.   Auriana works everyday cleaning the elementary school, and Isaac goes to football or basketball or both and then comes home and almost immediately goes out to mow several lawns in the neighborhood.   We don’t see either one of them much until noon. 

We have followed Enoch and Natalie around to several soccer tournaments and have enjoyed turning those into family time.  We spent a weekend in Park City and stayed at Bjorn’s family’s cabin for a night.  It was fun to build forts together, play some games, and enjoy the quiet of the mountains.  Natalie has had a badly bruised knee for the past few weeks, but has been a trooper and has played anyway.  She plays last defender and it was so exciting to watch her dribble all the way down the field and score.  She has done it before, but not when I was watching. 

Most of the free time in our house is spent reading.  I think we have made more trips to the library this summer than the grocery store.   We are trying to enjoy the slower, longer days before school starts in 11 days.  School, soccer games, and football games all start at the same time and will hit us pretty hard.  I figured we could have as many as 10 games per week to try to attend, which makes it pretty hard to have dinner together.  I told Bjorn I wanted to have a big breakfast every morning and spend more time together then, so that we could have cold cereal or something easy for dinners when it’s hard to get together as a family.  At least Monday nights are usually very unscheduled around this area.

Bjorn and I will celebrate 18 years of marriage on August 16. It’s hard to believe Auriana will turn 17 in just over a month. She is excited for her senior year of high school and for her choir retreat this week. She’s also excited to have Isaac in the same school as her. It’s nice that they can drive to school together now. Isaac has been invited to play on the varsity football team, which is cool for a sophomore, but he says he would rather have one more year of being able to be in the stands with his friends while watching the games on Friday nights.  So we are all quite content if he plays on the sophomore and JV teams only.  (Actually I’m content if he doesn’t play at all.)  We’ll see how things turn out. 

We had a wonderful visit last week from Adam and Rachel. They joined us for our family home evening where each person asked Rachel one question about her mission. The experiences and feelings she shared were wonderful. She has such a wonderful spirit about her, and the storytelling ability and sense of humor have only improved over the last 18 months. Later that evening Bjorn told me that FHE was definitely in the Top 10 of family home evenings we’ve ever had. We’re excited to once again have her close by. We love having Teresa visit our home often, and now feel doubly blessed to have another amazing returned missionary cousin interacting with our children and bringing their wonderful spirit into our home.

Photos of the week!

Photo of the week!

Ellie & Bjorn

Photo of the week!

Auriana & Natalie

June 2013

This is a letter we received from Isaac, while he was gone to the boys ranch in Victor, ID for two weeks. 

Dear Family,

I am having an absolute blast here!  Everybody is super cool and I’m friends with everyone!  That’s so cool that Matt and Brenda are engaged, they’ve been dating for like twenty years and then they pick right now, when I’m gone, so I don’t get any glow sticks!   And to answer Dad’s question, yes, I’m surviving, and they know I’m allergic to peanuts so I don’t really have to worry. 

It’s super fun here!  Something I’ve really gotten into here is blacksmithing. I made something for all the kids in the family!   I made Enoch something out of wood, but I made all of the girl’s cool pendants out of metal. 

Ok, so funny thing, there is six groups right?  And I know five people who came here, and there’s three cabins, right?  And so two groups share a cabin.  I didn’t get Jacob or Daniel (cousins) in my group or in my cabin!  All three of us are in different cabins.  What are the chances!?  Luckly Brandon (2^nd cousin) is in my cabin so that’s cool, but I guess I don’t really mind, because this way I get to meet new people and stuff.  All the people in my group are way cool!  Brandon is in my activity group and when we went kayaking we went around flipping over everybody else!  No one could catch us because we were so fast. 

And yeah, we have to do chores and stuff, but I don’t really care because it’s mostly way fun.  Even when we move pipe we race so it takes the grumpiness out of it.  We have a ton of free time, so me and my friends do some really fun stuff.  We set traps for rabbits and skunks (good thing we didn’t catch a skunk), but we didn’t catch a rabbit either, we caught this kid named Glen instead.  It was pretty funny! 

We’re leaving on the backpacking trip tomorrow, and table rock isn’t one of the options, because it’s too easy.  We do three-day backpacking trips. I’m doing the hike called Green Lakes, it’s not the hardest, but it’s one of the funnest ones.   Remember how I read the book “Holes” right before I came here?  Well that’s the book that Dick (Bjorn’s uncle who owns the ranch) is reading aloud to us this year.  Weird coincidence, huh?  And it’s so funny that I’m going on the hike called “Green Lakes.” 

We’ve done some pretty cool stuff this year!  Like the counselors build a little waterwheel on the little stream in front of the main house, then someone had the idea to build a clock that ran off the power of the water wheel.  And believe it or not, it actually worked!  We’re building an ampitheater, it’s pretty cool!

I’ve only had bad allergies one time and that was because I was army crawling through waist high grass when we were playing capture the flag, but it only lasted till I went to bed and I was fine the next day.   We went to a bike track in Victor yesterday with six other people and it was super fun, the best part was going to the Emporium for shakes.  I’ll tell you all the other stuff when I get back. 

Love,  Isaac

Photo of the Week

Nicole & Berry in chalk: by Miriam

Happy 4th of July!