So we had some quality family bonding time yesterday with 13 hours in the car making our summer trip to see family. The ride went well. As expected little A did not like it and not even a Hershey's kiss could make her happy at the end, but the rest of the girls did great and Daddy did his best to keep A happy and we made it! If any of you are here in Utah give me a call or leave a comment and hopefully we can get together!!
So we've been on a mission. Yesterday we went to a pond to catch bugs for M's bug collection and flowers for E's dried flower collection. They are very excited to show their collections to their grandparents next week so they've been working hard before we leave. However the pond did not work out yesterday. There weren't any flowers and the only exciting bugs were damselflies and dragonflies.
The damsel flies were easy to catch and there were so many it was boring after awhile. The dragonflies were impossible to catch. A friend caught one that was dying (therefore easy to catch) and E hit down a dragonfly and another girl got her net over it but they cut it's tail off. However M and the other friend did not catch a dragonfly. M spent a good 2 hours running around like crazy trying to catch one. She found this particular species that was beautiful and she worked so hard to get one but no luck. Well we decided to go back there this morning with our friends and try again. The adults got involved but no luck. They are SO fast and change direction so quickly.
We decided our dollar store nets just weren't big enough so we ate our picnic lunch and went to the hardware store :) We found a nice long dowel for the handle and some good sturdy copper for the net and some flowers for E. Then we went home for quiet time. I called Daddy to tell him of our plans and he suggested some O rings to attach the copper to the dowel (instead of wrapping a thinner copper wire around and around!). Thankfully there were some in Daddy's toolbox so when Daddy was done at school we loaded up the kids and supplies and Daddy's toolbox, picked Daddy up and had a picnic dinner at the pond. I quickly sewed up some tulle fabric and Daddy skillfully put the net together and they were off on the hunt! E had lots of fun catching damsel flies and then holding them in her hands and watching them. M tried and tried but still no dragonflies. Mg took Daddy's hand and kept pointing out the dragonflies to him. And sure enough...Daddy caught 4!!!!! He couldn't catch the "beauty" that M wanted (there weren't very many out that time of day) but he caught 2 different kinds of brown ones and two blue ones (E's favorite one).
We called our friends and they met us at the park and we gave them one of our dragonflies and let them borrow our net until they got theirs finished. Of course we got home later than I thought and the kids will probably be dragging tomorrow but we have dragonflies for the collection and had a nice time together as a family. I told Daddy that he was wonderful and amazing - not only did he figure out a much better and simpler way of making the butterfly net he took his girls in hand and went out chasing dragonflies. Looking at them from across the lake was fun watching all these girls with their nets following Daddy as they tried to sneak up on dragonflies - they were on the hunt!!! Daddy said he said he felt very manly hunting dragonflies with a pink net :) We love our Daddy!!!
from today's activities...
1) me running around the pond with a baby in one hand and a bug net in the other trying to catch dragonflies
2) me playing soccer with other adults from the ward. I had one goal - to not pull any muscles. Mission accomplished. Lofty goals, huh! I am going to have a good sized bruise on my leg - my badge of courage. I seriously have not done any sustained running since I've had kids so I was going to "take it easy" tonight. Not possible. I'm too competative, plus I love the rush of running fast. I can't say I was good tonight but they put up with me and it was fun. Okay, walking back to the car with horrible jello legs wasn't great but I actually swept and vacuumed when I got home so that's not too bad, right?
The big girls are busy working on their collections. M has loved catching bugs since she was 3, especially butterflies. In the past she has fed them to the preying mantis she's also caught but we don't have one this year and so I suggested a bug collection and she loved the idea. Our friends came for dinner the other night with styrofoam and bug pins and helped her get started. She had just caught her first dragonfly and is really excited. We went to a pond today to try to add more bugs. She saw a gorgeous type of dragonfly and spent the morning trying to catch one, but no luck. I promised we'd come back.
E decided on a dried flower collection. She enjoys bugs but doesn't have an interest or patience to chase them but wanted a collection. She decided on flowers and is really excited about it! She found her first one last night. We had hoped to find more at the pond today but there weren't any flowers. Thankfully on a scooter ride back to her friends house she found several. I read today that pansies dry the best so I told her we'd go get some to plant if she would take care of them and she's really excited about that. I'm glad the girls have something to be excited about. I think Mg is starting a rock collection :)
***Bragging Moment!*** Last night our ward had a service project where we were moving mulch from a big pile and spread it around the sides of a bike path right behind our house. Since Daddy is one of the people who helped set it up we were there a little early and stayed until everything was cleaned up (which I didn't realize was way after the girls bedtime!!!) Our sweet E was out there working the entire time. She used rakes and shovels to help spread the mulch around and worked so incredibly hard!!! All the kids were hanging around me waiting for otter pops but I had to call E over to come get hers (and she got an extra one at the end!!). When she was done she went right back to work!!! M worked hard too but also enjoyed being with her friends while E just kept right at it! Daddy says he remembers being that way at service projects growing up - glad he passed that trait along, and way to go E!!!! I love my girls and am so proud of all of them!
Make the best of it!!! The air is so bad here that the last several days have been "spare the air" days which means....the buses are free!!!! It just so happens that there is a bus stop outside our apartment complex so we teamed up with a neighbor and her son and rode the bus to another friends house. We hung out there for a little and then walked to a different bus stop and climbed on...7 girls and 2 boys all under the age of 8!!! (and three adults!). The kids did great and it was so much fun to watch them - they were so excited!!! We rode to a park, played for a little bit and then planned to ride the bus around the loop of the city. It went well except at the main bus station our bus turned around and went back the way we had come instead of continuing on the loop but they had lots of fun (and it was air conditioned and relatively out of the smokey air and we were with friends and it took a long time and it was free!!!!). We played at our friends house again while we waited for the bus to take us back to our house and had a it was a great day. As soon as we switch computers I'll put some pictures up. We've had our "delta breeze" come and we've cooled down quite a bit and the smoke is better and we might even attempt a family bike ride this afternoon if it's not too hot. Everybody is finally getting healthy and we're getting really excited about our upcoming Utah trip - we can't wait to be with our family! We're so grateful to have great friends here though who are spontaneous enough to be ready to hop on a bus in 15 minutes!!!
Hm, I haven't blogged for awhile. Sorry! We are switching over to a new computer and being the obnoxious person that I am I wanted to take the opportunity to clean up the computer. So deleting unncessary files, duplicates, etc. Then I realized I wanted to back up all of my emails which are substituting for a journal right now so it seems my spare time lately has been copying and pasting emails into word documents. I'll be happy when this is done, soon!!! I also got back into family history work and have made some fun discoveries and having a good time doing that. All of our pictures are either on the portable hard drive or on the camera and I don't feel like moving them back and forth to the log so I won't have new pictures for a few more days. But soon!
We've been enjoying summer. We've had some colds and such take turns among different family members so we haven't gotten out a lot but we've been doing lots of reading and library trips (and hooray for their free video collection!!!). The girls each have a sewing project they've been working on and just finished and as soon as the computer is done I hope to get picture for them to make a scrapbook of the last school year. Things to keep busy with during hot afternoons! And of course there's makeup time and bubbles and water bottles and such. Hooray for summer!!
I had one of those nights a few nights ago. I fed the baby about 10:30pm but by 11 I just couldn't get to sleep. I turned on the air conditioner. As I was almost asleep Mg came to crawl into our bed. It turns out she was coming down with a sinus and ear infection and was on antibiotics the next day :) About 11:45pm a burn I have on my arm started to itch - I tried to itch around it like I usually do but accidently scratched the burn scabs off and drew lots of blood. I finally stopped the bleeding and such and fell asleep after midnight. About 1:45 Daddy shot out of bed - he NEVER does this. If the house catches on fire at night time I will get the kids and bird out of the house and let the fireman know my husband is upstairs because I doubt we could wake him up. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit but he certainly doesn't shoot out of bed. Based on his actions I drowsily figured out that he thought there was a spider in our bed. He put Mg back in her bed and turned the lights out. 15 min later there was a spider on me and I knew it. I hit it and started scratching and my knight in shining armor again jumped out of bed, turned the light on and bravely destroyed the big black spider in our bed. That's the 2nd spider in the last few weeks...grr. So it took awhile for the adrenaline to go away but I eventually fell back asleep. AT 3am the baby woke up - she's cutting a new tooth and had a cold. I fed her and went back to sleep. She woke up at 5am again but went right back to sleep. At 6am her sisters decided it was time to get up - and it was time for me to get some sleep. My knight in shining armor galantly let me sleep in that mornining and we're grateful I had just gotten new videos at the library to keep the little ones happy while he worked. Best days of our life!!!
Today I was a horrible mom - and it was wonderful!!!! The smoke here has been absolutely horrible from all the wildfires burning the state up. You just choke when you go outside. The temperature has been crazy, too. The weatherman said we would get some relief tomorrow when the temperature drops to 105. That's relief!!! With the smoke and the temperature we have severe bad air quality and should not be outside at all. We've done pretty well in the house the last few days but last week we planned a play date for today at a fabulous park right next to the kids school. We planned it for today because that is when the kids "reading room" at school is open for 2 hours for us to check books out to read and we've been enjoying that so we were going to meet them right after we checked out our books. This morning the other mom and I decided maybe a 1/2 hour in the smoke would be okay - the kids just needed to get out!!! When we got there we discovered that the sprinklers were on at the soccer fields next to the playground!!!! Although it was 10:30am it was already in the 90's so sure - run around and have fun!!!! The kids just loved it and had a great time (I wish I had my camera!!!!!!). We ended up outside for 2 hours and totally soaked but ever so happy!!! And now they're quiet and tired and should be nice and calm this afternoon. I gave them a popsicle when we got home since my throat didn't feel great after being in the smoke - that redeems my bad mom status doesn't it?! I'm sure the popsicle will take care of their lungs too, right!!! Oh well...it was still fun and how often do you have a few soccer fields full of sprinklers going off to run around in!!! I hope the smoke goes away soon!
Well that's enough rambling for today. Look for some new pictures and such next week (I hope!). I'm off to go preserve some more emails!!
