A Busy Saturday

It has been a little while since our last post.  We have taken a bunch of random pictures since then, maybe I will do another post of those later.  Here are some pictures from last Saturday, which was fun and busy.

We went to the Eastern Oregon Arts Festival in the morning.  There were some really neat painted pictures and some amazing photographs.  I could have stayed and admired all the artwork a lot longer than my girls were able to stand.

The sun makes this hard to see, but the kids love face cut outs.  Whitney especially liked that this famous painting is found in a Boy Meets World episode.

Adding their hands to the tree.

There were some fun things for the kids to do.  Here they got to decorate "fossils" - or shells pressed into plaster of paris.

The kids each got to pick a flower to plant.  They all picked such beautiful colors.  Now we will see if my lack of green thumb can keep them alive for a few days.

And eating a Popeye popsicle; these popsicles were delicious.  I probably will never make them, but all my kids got their spinach in for the day.  Plus there were bananas and pineapple juice and vanilla yogurt.  It would make for a good smoothie also.

And obviously the hit for the whole festival was the bounce house with a slide.  There weren't a lot of kids at the festival, so my kids got lots of time bouncing.

We had a fast late lunch after the festival and then we went down to the Tri-Cities.  My friend from high school was in town signing her new freezer cook book.  Thanks for the copy, Micah.  I am excited to try new things.  We decided to meet at the merry-go-round.  The girls loved riding the horses.

Adam seemed not to really notice.  He and I stuck to the sled.  The girls had so much fun and it was good to catch up with my friend for a little while.

Afterwards, Will and I dropped the kids off with my parents and we were able to go to the temple.  It was wonderful doing sealings together.  Then we had a very late dinner of Greek gyros.  They were delicious.  I need to learn how to make them.  We spent the night in Pasco.  So it was very busy but very fun.

A Super Scooby Doo Party

It was only like six weeks late but we finally had Whitney's Scooby Doo friend party.  Thankfully, Whitney was very patient as she waited for a Saturday that would work for everyone.  And it was an awesome party if I do say so myself.

We had roughly an extra 15 people here, so it was a bit crazy.  But we made it work.  First the kids decorated bags for goodies with stamps and stickers and markers.

I told the kids to come get their goodies but when they got there the goodies were missing.

The kids had to follow a bunch of clues to find their prizes.  At the bottom of each note was a clue to the identity of the monster - a footprint, a piece of a bag, a paint brush, some circus peanuts, etc.

Only Whitney was able to figure out that it was the ghost clown who did it.  Will was very good and pretended to be the monster and the kids chased him around the yard.

After finding their treats, we played some Scooby Doo games.  This one was Pin the Glasses on Velma.  The girl who got the closest won a big pair of fake glasses.

Then it was time to make Scooby Doo collars.  It is hard to find small circular foods, but we managed to make some yummy Scooby Doo collars.

Whitney shows off her necklace - I mean collar.

Then it was time to go outside again to do a Feed Scooby and Shaggy relay race.  The kids fed them sandwich pieces.

This was a catch the monster game by trying to drop a box on the escaping villain (who was taped to a truck).

And time to open presents.  Whitney said that was her favorite part of the party.

And finally we decorated dog bone shaped sugar cookies.  That is what Whitney requested instead of cake.

Anyway, it was really fun.  I think the kids had a good time and Whitney was all smiles.  Hooray!  Now I have a few months break before the next party.

Rexburg (Part 2)

Some more Idaho happenings.  We squeezed a lot into two days.

We took a walk around the BYU campus.  It made me miss the college life.  There is something so wonderful about taking classes and feeling the spirit on the grounds.

Megan loved looking at everything; we walked very slowly so she could catch up.

This was inside the museum on campus.  It was like the Beane Museum in Provo.  Look at those big eggs.

Kylee and Chas have some awesome two-handed kites.  I couldn't get the hang of them, but they were pretty cool.  

This is us at the escape house.  You get "locked" into a room and have to solve all the clues to get out.

By solving a morse code message we figured out how to get under the drawers into a secret underground basement (taking a slide to get down).  That was fun.

And we stopped the bomb with only 4 minutes left; you have an hour to get out.  So we cut it close but we saved Rexburg from the explosion.  The great thing was that everyone was involved.  We all helped solve different things.  I will definitely be looking for more escape houses to do.

Kylee picked a yummy Mexican restaurant to celebrate graduating.  I ate a lot of chips and salsa; my favorite part of Mexican restaurants.  

Anyway, it was such a fun trip and so fun to have a family reunion.  I am glad we all get along so magnificently. 

A Trip to Idaho

We made a very fast trip to Idaho to see my sister graduate from BYU-Rexburg. It was quick but we packed a lot of fun into two days.  Will wasn't able to come and Kaitlin is on her mission, but besides that it was like a family reunion, always fun.

We drove all night Thursday evening, which is great for the kids and less great for the drivers.  But having three drivers helps; I think we were all able to get a couple of hours of sleep, on and off.  We arrived at Rexburg and the girls were ready to go.  Here we break out some coloring things for them at Kylee and Chas' house while we try to decide what fun things to do.

We went to the Rexburg library; it was huge compared to the ones around here.  There were even a couple of fish tanks.  

Trying out the cool spinning chairs with Uncle Chas.  My girls took to them really well.  I wondered how well they would do at this new place with some 'new-ish' people, but none of them had any problems.  Thanks for being a cool aunt and uncle.

After the library was duck feeding time.  These ducks were not afraid of humans - really not afraid of humans.  It was the first time I got a duck to eat a piece of bread straight from my hands.

And eating our picnic (what we didn't feed to the ducks).

Rexburg must love their candy because I saw two specialty candy shoppes.  We went to one with 100 different flavors of root beer.  My parents bought one for Will to take to him.  The girls picked candy over soda pop.

Kylee and Chas' apartment is not large enough to comfortably fit everyone, so we went down to play in the lounge.  It has a big television and a pool table and a few games.  Here Adam has a conversation with Aunt Allison.

Kids are falling off the big chairs.  Thanks for the ride Uncle Zach.

And this is the graduation.  Elder Rasband from the quorum of the twelve came to speak at the big ceremony.  I really enjoyed his talk.  All of my children slept through this; I guess we really wore them out during the drive and busy day.  I wasn't able to hear most of the other graduation because Adam was teething and super grumpy, but I did get to see Kylee walk across the stage (but no pictures, bummer).  

Congratulations Kylee!  Good work.  I will put up some more pictures later of other fun things we did in Idaho.

Easter (Part 2)

So Easter means it is egg hunt time.  I remember many a fun egg hunts from my childhood.  The hunt is almost as good as the candy, maybe even better.  So it was fun to get out and get involved in several community egg hunts this year.

Here we are waiting at the Hermiston library.  I was kind of amazed at the number of people who turned out for the hunt.  There must have been at least 100 kids.  But there were still enough eggs for everyone.

Megan finds a big treasure.  Unfortunately, she started crying when I tried to help her and didn't collect as many as she could.  But oh well.

This is at the Umatilla library hunt.  Thankfully, it was much calmer.  I didn't worry about losing a child or anything like that.

We heard about Hermiston's flashlight egg hunt and I decided to go try it out this year.  I just took Whitney and Rachel.  This one was kind of a bust because each egg just had like a sticker or an eraser in it (later I learned that the pediatric dentistry clinic sponsors this).  So my girls were not impressed.  We probably won't go back next year.

We went down to the Tri-Cities and went to the big egg hunt at the Living Room church.  This one was really fun.  There were thousands of eggs filled with really good candy like mnms and snickers and all that.  Too bad I am not eating sweets.

They split up the kids by age group to make it more fair.  Whitney and Rachel went together and Will took Megan to the smaller kids one.

This was a bounce house slide.  We had to wait in a long line but the kids had fun going down a couple of times.

And free pictures with the Easter bunny.  They actually had a boy and a girl Easter bunny; Whitney wanted to sit with the girl one.

And Megan climbing up another bounce house.

Having fun.  The kids started leaving so we stayed for awhile longer and were able to play with the bounce houses without waiting in line.  The kids got free cotton candy and popcorn.  So that was a fun morning.

And we went down to my parents house right after church.  The eggs were already hidden and the girls were really cute as they ran around yelling 'candy, candy'.

Always a bunch of candy hiding in the bookshelves downstairs.

After this hunt, we went outside and everyone broke the colored eggs.  My mom had blown them out so they broke easily.  There were pretty colorful pieces all over the driveway.

I wanted a family picture for Easter.  Here we are in all our church glory.  And everyone is looking at the camera; that is pretty amazing.

  

 I hope everyone had a Happy Easter.  We sure did!