Independence Day!

The 4th of July! What a holiday. So much stuff going on.

The Coombs came to stay with us while they were in town for the celebrations. So we got to hang out with them for five sleeps! The first day, me and the girls met them at Hertiage Park in Salt Lake. None of us had ever been there before. We enjoyed making crafts, riding ponies, and seeing what life would have been like when the pioneers first came to Utah.

My favorite part was panning for gold. It was fools gold, but it was still treasure. I could have done that for hours. This was Mira's pan. She was more excited about that agate than about the gold.

Saturday we went to the splash pad and had a yummy lasagna dinner. Then Sunday, the Coombs hung out with the rest of the Watts' and we went to spend the evening with my family. We barbecued and shot some fireworks in the comfort of the backyard. Neither Mira nor Cecily like the loud noise of the fireworks, so my dad let them borrow his noise-cancelling headphones. Mira still didn't want to stay and watch more than five minutes, but that was WAY longer than last year, so we're making progress. She would at least admit that they were pretty.

Monday was a day with the Watts'. Steve played foot golf with the other Watts men on Monday morning, while I took the girls up to play with their cousins at the Watts house. When they got back, the moms all went for pedicures and some shopping. We celebrated Davis's birthday with pizza and brownie sundays that night. There was lots of playing both for the adults and kids.

Tuesday was the 4th. It was a busy day. We met up at Great Grandma Watts' retirement home and talked to her and took pictures. She's got dementia pretty bad, so we were mostly introducing ourselves and letting her know she is loved.

From there, we divided up into teams and did a photo scavenger hunt of places that the Watts ancestors lived around Provo and Orem. It was fun to see where Great-great grandma and great grandma and regular grandma and even Daddy lived. I hadn't seen most of those places and we got to hang out together, so I enjoyed it until the heat made us all want to sit in front of a fan and sip iced lemonade for the rest of the day. :) After some lunch, we looked at our collection of pictures, played some games and then headed outside for water fights and slip 'n slides. I was sort of a party pooper for this part. I was not up for getting wet. But I participated in the frozen t-shirt contest! That should count for something right? :) I should mention that one of the games we played was "After the Manner of the Adverb," which I'd never played before. The first two rounds were played by adults, so we picked harder adverbs: flexibly and gracefully. It was all pretty funny--watching the women cook dinner "flexibly" or having the men play football "gracefully," but by far the funniest was when the men sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" "flexibly." I wasn't able to get to my phone fast enough or that would have been a video to go down in the history books. :)

Dinner was hamburgers and hotdogs and chips and watermelon. And of course we ended the evening with a bang. Thousands and thousands of dollars of fireworks were visible from our vantage-point and our display was amazing, too.

The rest of the week, I had to play catch-up on housework and then yesterday we went up to my parents' house to help them with some projects they want to complete before putting their house on the market in August.

Some other random pictures--

When we left one morning, there was a big beetle in our garage near a tub I set out there a few days before. I think it was a water beetle. And as I used a box lid to shoo it out of the garage, it stuck its butt up in the air to scare me away. (It didn't work.) He eventually climbed into the lid and I deposited him safely in our lilac bush. When we got home that night, this big guy was in the exact same place as the water beetle, but twice the size! If we hadn't taken the other beetle out before leaving, I might have believed he molted into this thing while we were gone. 😂 When Steve tried shooing this one with the same box lid, he got hissed at. Bugs are crazy.

These next ones are another collection of pictures that Mira took. Still impressed with her.

I love Cec-bug's thumbs up when she's approving of her own stuff. She was proud of this house that she built and she did the thumbs up when I asked if I could take a picture of it. :) She's so great.

Unplanned week

This week was wonderfully unplanned.

There is a lady in my ward that I've been helping on Mondays. She is a funny eccentric lady that I do very random things for. One week, I covered her counters in plastic. Another week, I sewed minky cloth into a fitted sheet. This week, I helped her find a library book that she'd misplaced. I've done a few other things, too, but that gives you a pretty good picture. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to serve. It's helped me to get to know her better and it's helped me to see what it looks like to be content with what you're given in life. I'm so glad she asked me to help. That idea has also helped me to think that I need to be more willing to ask for help. It really can bless the lives of others to give them opportunities to serve. And they rarely will feel put out or upset that you asked.

Tuesday and Wednesday, both Mira and Cecily had gymnastics/tumbling. They had two days this week because they missed two weeks worth because of swimming lessons. So we'll have to do another two times week to make up for the second missed week. They really enjoy going and I really enjoy the hour to write. I realized this week that Cecily has noticeably improved her coordination since starting. I forgot how much she tripped over her own feet before starting tumbling until I was talking to someone who said their child was super uncoordinated.

I had a Relief Society activity Tuesday night that I really enjoyed. It was called Chocolate and Chatting. So we were supposed to bring a project that we needed to finish. Then we could chat while we worked on it and eat chocolate in between. It was tasty and fun and I got to work on finishing a project. Sounds pretty perfect, doesn't it?

I started walking with a friend on Tuesday nights, just so we could get together and chat, so I did that, too. Which was good. I needed to walk off all that chocolate. :)

We got to play with friends at the Springville Reservoir on Thursday for a few hours. Springville has so many fun outdoor activities like that that are totally free. And I'm so bad about taking them unless I plan it with a friend. It seems like a lot of work to get everybody in swimsuits, get everyone towels, put sunblock on everyone, get water toys, snacks, and water, have everyone go to the bathroom, get everything and everyone loaded into the car, along with the umbrella, drive there, get everyone out of the car, haul all that crap the two blocks to the water, take people to the bathroom again, and then sit around in the heat and wipe tears when they get splashed too much. Doesn't that sound exhausting? But somehow getting together with a friend makes all that worth the while, so I try to plan things like that fairly regularly.

We also watched Spiderwick Chronicles this week because we finished the sixth (and last) book in the series. I also got The Wizard of Oz from Netflix. We finished those books a few years ago, but I didn't think they would be able to handle the wicked witch at the time. We meant to watch it on Saturday, but we didn't make it home on time, so we'll probably watch that this week.

Saturday was a fun day. I went up to my mom and dad's house to help my mom get some work done. Her hip is giving her a lot of problems, so it's hard for her to do a lot of moving around. When I got home from that around 2:30, we got ready and headed to the Provo Rec Center. We didn't get home until almost 7pm! My kids love the water. I guess most kids do. :) So we ate some quick foods for dinner, played a computer game, and put kids to bed. I finally finished revising my ending after they were in bed. Yay! It still needs a tiny bit of tweaking--there were a couple of threads I forgot to pick back up, and I want to revise the first chapter based on critiques I got at the conference I went to. But hopefully the writers block monster will not rear its ugly head this time and I will be able to finish it completely in the next couple of weeks. I like this story, but I'm really looking forward to being done with it for now so I can work on something new.

We have a busy week coming up, too. I'll try to remember to take pictures because these posts are way more interesting with pictures, especially if they're of my cute kids. :)

This last picture is a little bit random. My mom has made small blankies for Emilia and Mira, but Cecily didn't have one. When my mom asked what colors Cecily would like on her small blankie, she said "all of them!" So she got a rainbow blanket. She loves it. My mom was also cleaning out some stuff and found that Hello Kitty shirt, which was Cecily's size, so Cecily got that, too. This is a picture of how she laid all of it out to wear to Grandma and Grandpa's house Sunday afternoon so she could show them the things she was so excited about. She is sweet and I love her bunches.

More swimming and Father's Day

Swimming lessons were good again this week. Cecily, my girl who will not let even a drop of water touch her eyes when she's bathing, actually learned to dunk her entire head under the water at swimming lessons and enjoy it. Yay!

Cecily playing dead, taken by the lovely Mira.

Tuesday the pool heater was broken and the water had gotten so cold that they canceled lessons. I thought it was fortuitous because that day, the summer dollar movie was Lego Batman and we were going to have to be late because of swimming lessons. Lessons ended at 10 and the movie started at 10. We got all ready and arrived on time and they sold out! I didn't even know that was possible. Especially since I paid the money to buy a pass that covered all the movie showings. They were offering a showing of Captain Underpants as a consolation prize, but none of my kids were interested in that. We were all pretty disappointed and annoyed.

We ended up going clothes shopping. As summer came on, I realized I didn't have a lot of shirts I could wear without something layered over the top. And I didn't have a lot of skirts that were in fashion. Besides, since I'm in the Relief Society presidency in my ward, I have to sit in front of all the women every week and even knee-length skirts can show a lot more than I'd like from that angle. Since we were at the mall anyway because of the no-go movie, I decided to look in one of the stores. And then I saw that Sears was going out of business and had 40% off everything, so I wanted to check out their selection. And then I had to look at a third store in Spanish Fork because a friend had recommended it for dresses and I wanted to see if they had cuter/cheaper things than the 1st store because the first store had a TON of cute things, but they were pricier than I would have liked. So it ended up being an epic shopping trip (from 10am until 5pm!). My kids were with me the whole time and they were so good. I rented Lego Batman from Amazon for them to watch that night. They earned it. :)

Emilia had a church activity on Thursday. Her activity days leader has a pool, so she got a pool party with pizza, lucky kid.

I kept myself busy with serving a sister in the ward Monday, cleaning out the garage to get ready for a garage sale that the kids wanted to put on, putting old bookshelves and other furniture in the classifieds, picking up a new set of bookshelves, rearranging the playroom, plus all of the normal weekly stuff.

My parents came down Friday afternoon to bring us our new couch. The old one was one of Cecily's favorite places to jump, despite our continued admonitions to NOT do that. Since it was only a $200 couch to begin with, you can imagine how well it held up. Can you visualize the vinyl peeling off and the springs falling out the bottom? It served us well, and I actually loved that couch while it lasted. But it was time for something new.

The garage sale didn't go super well. Mostly because it was all toys and a few furniture items, so no one wanted to get out of their cars to look. We only had four shoppers, so the girls only made $7 each. They were only open for an hour and a half, so for a 6 yo and and 8yo, I think that's a decent hourly wage.

Saturday was productive but fairly relaxing. The girls had the garage sale until about 10:30, then Steve mowed the lawn, I played a new computer game for a couple of hours (which is weird for me--I almost never play computer games--who has time for that?), we cleaned bathrooms, and Steve chopped down the low-hanging branches on our Russian Olive tree while I made bbq chicken and salad for dinner. Then I took a couple of hours to cut all the newly-trimmed branches into manageable pieces while Steve played with the kids. I played the game a little bit more before bed. (It's addicting!)

Wilda asked me to make dessert for Father's Day dinner and when I asked Steve what he wanted he told me to pick something gluten-free and make it. (I'm trying to eat gluten free because it seems to mess with my skin and my moods pretty bad. I don't remember if I've mentioned that before.) So I got on Pinterest and found some things that looked tasty. Normally I go for chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate and Steve goes for lemon or berry stuff. But last night strawberry ice box cake, funnel cakes, or fruit pizza sounded really good. I thought I was set! So I asked Steve which one he wanted and he was like, "What about that crumb cake? Or that chocolate cake looks good." Ugh. So then I was like, "What about banana split icebox cake?" (because that has fruit and chocolate). And he was like, "Well if you're not going to listen to me, why did you even ask?" So I thought, "Fine. It's Father's Day, I'll make what he wants. So I decided to go with Better Than Sex Cake because at least that has whipped cream and is chilled. So I ran to the store to get whipping cream and gluten-free cookies or candy bars to put on top. Of course they were out of whipping cream. And of course, the gluten-free oreos are $5 for 1/2 the number of oreos than a normal container. So I got Cool Whip instead and shelled out the 5 bucks for oreos because, darn it, if I wasn't getting my berries, I was at least going to get the decadent chocolate cake. (It turns out it didn't matter, because they were completely out of strawberries too. Haha!)

Steve got spoiled for Father's Day today. Smith's had Ribeye on sale for 6.77 a pound, so we grilled that up, along with fresh corn on the cob, watermelon, a salad, baked potatoes (because Steve hates corn), and sauteed mushrooms. *sigh* That's a meal to go down in the record books. So good. Plus we had my decadent cake for dessert. Add a great game of Castles of Mad King Ludwig to round out the evening, and it was a practically perfect day. I hope all of you fathers out there had a wonderful day, too!