Baby quails and a pokeman party

What a crazy week!

Last Sunday, after I did my blog post, we went over to Nick and Wilda's for dinner. Right after we got there, the girls went outside to play and hurried back in saying, "There's baby birds! There's baby birds!" I went out to find that a mother quail once again had let her babies get stuck in Nick and Wilda's outside stairwell.The babies were TINY. Even smaller than the ones we saved last year. And man those little guys are fast! They kept zooming from one corner of the stairwell to the next, trying to find a way out--and away from me when I went down there. Of course all the girls wanted to be right down on the bottom step, as close to all the action as possible, but I was afraid Cecily would get excited (as she usually does), start hopping up and down (as she usually does), and lose her balance and fall (as she almost always does). I didn't want her falling on one of the babies and squishing them so I had to send the whole crew up the stairs a little ways. Just like last year, I grabbed a pillowcase and put it between the zooming birds and their destination. These ones were wary of the pillowcase, but they seemed to calm down completely once they were inside. I had to make two trips, but I got all the zooming ones up onto the grass so they could zoom back to their momma. It was so so hot that day, like it's been every day for six lo-o-o-ong weeks--almost 100 degrees. I'm not sure how long the babies were trapped before we found them, and they were all alive when I went down there, but there was one that was laying down and only blinking at the time. I think it had gotten overheated and it died before I could do anything about it. Another one tripped and flopped down next to the first as I went to get my second batch of chicks. It had been moving, but after it flopped down, it was limp except for lifting its head slightly when I touched it. After I'd gotten all the zooming ones out, I picked up the still alive one and got some water. putting some of it on its head and back and trying to put some near it's beak to see if it would drink. It was still pretty limp still, but seemed to be breathing. I gave it a little more water and I think that was a bad plan. The beak got covered for a second and the little guy must have breathed it in because it stopped moving completely a minute later. It was unlikely it would have survived anyway, considering it's mother and siblings ran far away as soon as they were all rescued, but it still made me sad. If you want to see a video of it, click on the link: https://www.facebook.com/sabrina.frohlichwatts/videos/1161897133851758/

My sweet girls wanted to have a funeral for the two birds who didn't make it, so we had a shovel hearse bring them to a shallow grave under the lilies and said a prayer over them. So sweet.

Monday we grocery shopped and did laundry, hung out a little bit. I started making the Pokeballs for Emilia's Pokemon birthday party.

Tuesday, we went up to my mom's. Megan and her family are in town from Colorado for a couple weeks and we wanted to see them and spend some time in the pool. We had to make it back home in time to get Emilia to Nick and Wilda's for her birthday shopping trip with them. She came home SO excited for her new Disney Descendants dolls and a new Bad Kitty book. We stopped at DI on the way home to pick up the change clothes we needed to finish the 72 hour kits we'd made for the girls a few weeks ago. Steve was nice enough to make burgers for dinner, so at least I didn't have to worry about that.

Wednesday is our classes day, plus Emilia had a pool party to go to, and some friends in the ward invited us over for dinner. Five different activities in one day. Phew!

Thursday was more getting ready for the party. I went to make cupcakes and realized I didn't have a single chocolate cake mix in my pantry (this is highly unusual for me) and I realized to make a pokeball cupcake cake like Emilia requested, I not only was going to have to make red frosting, but black, too. So after we cleaned up the house, we ran to a few stores. At Joann's, Mira bought this cutie with her chores money. She felt left out of the "new toys" party, so this made her feel much better. After buying red, burgundy, and black food coloring, we headed to some PokeStops at the park, Costco, and a lady's house who had a cheap twin bed frame for sale in the classifieds. Hopefully I'll be able to put the new bed up this week, so one of my kids can stop sleeping on the floor.

When we walk to the park near our house, Mystery always follows us. It's pretty cute.

Friday at 1 was Emilia's party. We got a bit of a late start, but that worked out great, since all of the girls were staying overnight after the festivities. I had everyone meet at Nick and Wilda's house, since everyone lived north of us and we were going to Orem for the activity anyway.

After handing out the pokeballs to the new trainers, I sent them outside to "catch" the wild pokemon (little plastic figures I bought off Amazon for cheap) that I'd hidden out there. There was exchanging done, of course, but then we all headed to Nickle City for games and prizes and cupcakes. When we came back, we opened presents, had dinner, and headed back to our house for a viewing of Zootopia before bed. I worried that it would be hard to handle 7 kids, but the pikachu ears I made for all the girls made them easier to spot at the nicklecade, and they all were good listeners and got along well, so it was a pretty smooth ride. I might even consider doing it again. :)

Emilia is 8! And other things we did this week.

I was supposed to teach an art class at the high school on Monday and Tuesday, but nobody came to the class on Monday, so I didn't go in Tuesday either. The students would have needed two days to do the project.

I brought the girls with me to the school, first of all, because I wasn't sure anybody would show up (and I didn't want to go through the hassle of finding a babysitter and paying them if I wasn't going to get paid anyway). And second of all, the school doesn't mind if they're there, so why not, right?

When we went to leave, Cecily was convinced she could drive us home. If it wasn't so hot in the car, it would have been cute. It still was cute, I guess, but she would have pretended for a lot less time if I had my way. The picture of me and Emilia and Mira is us in the passenger seats.

Since I didn't have to teach, I took the girls to the library. Emilia goes through books like candy in the summer, so we have to replenish her stack regularly. Cecily loves the stairs at the library. I think because she's not supposed to go upstairs (there aren't any books up there).

Steve's grandma on his dad's side lives near us in an assisted living facility. She's getting dementia pretty bad, but Nick is so faithful in attending to her needs and visiting her. He was gone on vacation this week, though, and so when Beverly wouldn't eat on Wednesday, we went to visit her to try to cheer her up. It seemed to work pretty good, since she seemed much better when we visited again Friday night.

Thusrday was a little bit frustrating and a little bit cathartic. It was frustrating because I made plans with a friend on Tuesday to go to a splash pad and then she called Tuesday morning and cancelled. Then Thursday, I made plans to go to Utah Lake with a friend and she called Thursday morning and cancelled. That was on top of being cancelled on by two other families the previous week. So I was feeling unloved and like I had a bunch of unreliable friends. So Thursday afternoon, I took the girls to run errands. It was cathartic because my errands list is about a mile long and I was able to check off more than half of it. We went to Hobby Lobby that day and the girls found lots of interesting things to play with.

The friend who canceled on Thursday rescheduled for Friday, so she got herself back in my good graces. :) It ended up that Utah Lake was "closed" because there is a man-killing algae growing in it right now (Steve found out later that they think its because the government has been forcibly removing the carp from Utah Lake because sport fishers hate them, but they eat the man-killing algae, so I guess they're good for something). Instead, we went to Bartholemew Family Park, which is a reservoir from a dam on Hobble Creek that they dumped a bunch of sand next to. They add fish, too, so people can fish if they want. But mostly, we just played in the sand and splashed in the freezing cold water. It is mountain run-off after all.

After we visited great-grandma on Friday, we went to feed the ducks. It was a super cool outing. We got to feed the ducks, as planned, and all of them were pretty little still, so they were cute cute cute. Then, Steve spotted a beaver munching on something growing in the bottom of the irrigation ditch. We watched it for a good fifteen minutes, bobbing up and down to grab something off the bottom and then munch it above the water.

This picture is of the girls watching the beaver. He was literally fifteen feet from us.

The other cool thing was the sunset as we were leaving. God lit the sky on fire. It was unbelievably gorgeous.

I also found a tree that looked like a skeleton was trapped inside of it. Weird, but cool, right?

Today is Emilia's 8th birthday. I'm good at birthday parties, but I'm kind of terrible at making the actual day of their birthday's special. So Emilia got chocolate chip pancakes from a mix two hours after she woke up this morning. And tonight she's getting the regular ice cream and grandma and grandpa's. That's about all we're doing to celebrate the day.

In my defense, yesterday, we had cookies and ice cream for her neighborhood friends, this coming Friday, we're having a party with some of her cousins, and Saturday we're celebrating with my side of the family. Plus grandma and grandpa Watts will take her birthday shopping some time this week, and on August 6th, she'll be getting baptized and we'll have a party for that, too.

It's kind of cute why we had a neighborhood party and a cousins party. I told the girls last year that I'm not doing a themed big party for all of them every year. So they get one every other year (until Cecily is old enough and then I don't know what we'll do). This was Emilia's year to not have a themed party (because Mira got a Star Wars party for her birthday. Emilia wanted to have a Pokemon party at a pool and invite her friends, but I told her she should invite her cousins, since her cousins like Pokemon and her friends don't even know what they are. Apparently, she'd already told her friends that she was doing a party, so she felt really really bad about going back on her word and disappointing them. So yesterday's party wasn't really a party. I baked cookies and bought a thing of ice cream and we invited her friends to come and partake. Then we walked around the neighborhood for 45 minutes trying to catch Pokemon in the PokemonGo app on my phone. No prep, almost no money, and no presents. But she'll get that on Friday with her cousins.

Stewart Falls hike and 4th of July

I love my kids, but Cecily has been a little punk for weeks now and I'm super glad she is napping right now. This week was a strange week. I have a bunch of little projects left in the bathroom and I can't seem to complete them to save my life.

My writing is coming along pretty well. That always makes me happy. I think I'll be done with this first draft by the end of the month. I'm excited that it's gone that fast.

I took a picture of my new outfit that I bought last weekend. It's not a great picture, but you can see the color and style.

On the way to Nick and Wilda's for the 4th of July celebrations on Monday, Cecily decided to wear multiple sunglasses so she could look like a bug.

Steve's whole family went to the Scera swimming pool Monday afternoon, then we came back to their house and prepared dinner and waited for it to get dark so we could do fireworks. Mira HATES fireworks. She doesn't even like looking at sparklers or hearing the Pop-Its. She runs away screaming. That kinda puts a damper on family fireworks for us. But Wilda says Steve hated fireworks when he was little, too, so I hope she grows out of it soon. I can't remember ever being afraid of fireworks.

Cecily loved the sparklers and Pop-Its, and she wasn't afraid of the big fireworks, but she was done pretty quickly after the big ones started. I think the noise made her uncomfortable (plus it was late).

We had classes on Wednesday and hung around the house Thursday. I made the girls clean with me and let them watch TV. I think it was good for them to settle down a little bit.

Steve was shaking his head back and forth with Cecily on top and she was giggling uncontrollably. She said it tickled.

Saturday, we hiked to Stewart Falls up Provo Canyon (it's by Sundance). It was not a fun hike for me. Especially with Cecily. But we went with my friend, Gina, and she and Emilia got to know each other better, and Steve enjoyed the hike, and the girls all liked the waterfall, so it wasn't a complete disaster.

It was pretty. I'll give it that. :)

If you look close, you can see a rainbow at the bottom of the picture.

Now I think I'll go play games with my kids since we're not doing our usual Sunday dinner at Nick and Wilda's. (They got to go to glacier national park with Steve's sister, Nicole and her family. Lucky them!)

Girls overnight, chlorine sensitivity, and trying new things

Let's see. . . what happened this week?

I had two activities planned on Monday with two different families and they both ended up cancelling. The girls and Steve and I ended up packing our 72-hour kids for FHE, The girls were excited to do it and it went pretty quickly. I still need to go to DI and pick up an extra set of clothing for each of them. We also want to get a water bottle for each of them that will filter water, instead of having them each carry enough water for three days. (That wouldn't happen. Cecily wouldn't even be able to carry three 12 oz. water bottles. It's just way too heavy.)

Steve also stopped by Home Depot on his way home last night to fix the sprinkler head that *someone broke off (*read: my kids or neighbor kids).

The girls also had the neighbor girl, Addison, over that afternoon.

This was the girls' last week of swimming lessons. They were hard on Cecily this week. She still loved being in the water, but she got tired out, I think, and the chlorine levels must have been high because she rubbed her eyes raw every time. Emilia was also super itchy all week.

On Tuesday, Cecily was throwing fits about leaving the pool, and then about taking a bath after, and then about not having her clothes off. So I just let her run around naked for a while. She felt better afterward. :)

Some pictures of my garden:

Cecily with her sore eyes.

I started coming down with a cold on Tuesday. I tried to take it easy when I had down time, but I didn't have much of it. I had to take the kids to swimming, do laundry, feed everybody lunch and dinner, do visits for my church calling, and we got free tickets to the new Independence Day movie that night and we already had a babysitter lined up, so I went to that too.

Wednesday, I made Steve take a sick day.

I was so out of it, and Wednesday is the day ALL the girls have classes. I slept for like six extra hours and generally tried to be still. I did dishes and changed out two loads of laundry, but mostly, I just sat around all day. It was just what I needed to feel better.

Thursday, we went up to my mom's house. One of the missionaries that baptized my parents came to visit and I was the only kid that could come see her. I was glad I did. And then the girls got to swim for a couple hours in my parent's (above ground) pool. They loved that, too. Emilia was SO proud of herself. At the beginning of swimming lessons this time, I challenged her and Mira to be able to pick something up off the bottom of the pool. Mira had done it by the third day. But Emilia didn't accomplish it by the last class and she was distraught. At Nana's, she did it and she was beaming.

Thursday night, Steve had game night, and Friday, I went on an overnight retreat up in the mountains with my mother- and sisters-in-law. We went shopping at the outlets at Park City first, then slept at a hotel in Midway and did a soak in the natural hot springs crater there. I tried a few new things. I got an outfit that was something different than I've worn before. I have to be confident in myself to wear it. I also got sushi and tried eel in it. And I'd never done a hot-springs soak before, let alone in a crater. I'm trying to live more fearlessly, so these were little steps in that direction.

Nicole, me, Heather, Cindy, and Wilda

This is Nicole.

The views as we were driving home were gorgeous. I wouldn't mind living up there. It reminds me of North Dakota (but with mountains).

Saturday, we went up Provo canyon with Steve's family and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, threw footballs and softballs, kicked a soccer ball around, played games, and all the little girls found a small stream and made a special area for people to visit. Then they all got wet in the cold mountain water. A fun day with family. I'm so glad I love my in-laws as much as I do. It's such a blessing!