The rest of October

After Fall Break, we got back into our regular routine for a short while before the craziness of birthdays, and holidays started up at the end of the month.

 Ryan and Annie finished their Reading Fair projects. Ryan did his on Mighty Truck and Annie did hers on The Princess in Black. Both of them did a great job. I'm sad I couldn't find a picture of Annie's project because she made an awesome castle.

We went to the kids' school to help out at their day of service. We picked weeds and had fun helping clean up around the school.

 We got a new fridge in October. It's nice having a working ice maker again.

 The kids were happy to get out the Halloween decorations. We have these blocks that say "Happy Harvest," except that the kids liked to play around with them a lot.

 Jacob's favorite version of the blocks was "HAV THERAPY" with a couple blocks left over.

Jacob and Ryan went on a bike ride and came home with some pretty awesome "helmet hair."

 Jacob reading to the kids.

This book is pretty cute on its own, but Jacob is the preferred story teller/book reader because he changes the stories to make them more exciting/crazy.

Fall Break Week 3

We kicked off the last week of Fall Break with a hike in Sabino Canyon. Megan had dance class that morning, so she went before we headed off.

McKenzie and Peyton had stayed overnight at Grandma's house since they had Fall Break that week, too (they just get one week), so we all headed up there together.

 The kids were great hikers, and with the more than usual rain this fall, there was plenty of water at Sabino Dam.

 With the cooler weather we had not encouraged the kids to wear their swimsuits, but that didn't stop most of them. I think Megan and Rachel stayed dry, but the others waded in deep enough to get wet. Or slid on the water slide rocks. McKenzie especially was excited about the slide rocks and went repeatedly. Megan has formed a super love of Peyton and they are super buddies every time they get together. They spent a lot of the time on the hike and at the water doing stuff together.

 The last week of Fall Break I finally got to one thing on my to do list: sorting through the kids clothes (and cleaning out their rooms and toys) and getting out winter clothes (long sleeves and pants). Megan was super excited for some "new" clothes and wanted to show them off with her goofy face.

 It was Ryan's turn to conduct Family Home Evening, so he put together this "stand" to conduct from using our lap board for the laptop and a stool, and the remote for the microphone.

Everyone wanted to use it, so Ryan promised he would set it up for them every week.

When I was picking Annie up from gymnastics she saw this hawk catch this bird. We pulled over right next to it to get a closer look. It's a Coopers' Hawk, I think. Shortly after I got this picture he tried to fly to a tree, but the bird got away, and he was left to chase after his dinner again.

Since we weren't able to go on any big trip over break, we decided to do a mini vacation and headed up to Phoenix for Friday and Saturday. We went to the Arizona Science Center, which had some cool stuff, but some parts required too much learning and not enough doing for the younger kids to enjoy and they got impatient in a few areas. Megan did like this play lab that had a few dress up items to become a scientist.

 There was a cool water play area, but with Megan's aversion to getting wet she wanted to watch from the other side of the glass for the first bit. There was a water cyclone and tracks that you could send balls along, some of which ended in the water cyclone, as well as other cool things.

 She did go into the water area eventually and played a little with the water controlled percussion instruments, but mostly stood against the wall out of the splash zone enjoying watching all the craziness.

This lifesized shadow box was pretty cool. The kids had fun getting behind it and doing different poses and playing around.

 We had lunch at the restaurant they have on site. It had several GF selections, including Brownie Bites, so Jacob was able to have a good lunch right along with the rest of us. The girls got cake pops for dessert and Ryan got an emoji cookie.

 The kids were ready to leave the science center earlier than we had anticipated, but it worked out just fine. We got to check in to the house we were staying at through AirBNB and had time to swim in the (freezing) pool, and sit in the nice hot tub there before dinner. Then we had dinner and movie night. Megan enjoyed the few toys they had in the house.

 Rain started during the night and when we checked the weather forecast we saw that it was the remains of a hurricane moving in, so we decided to try and beat the storm and skipped out on our plans for Saturday in Phoenix to start driving early. The rain was pretty heavy for one section of the freeway home, but for the most part it was ok. Since we had missed our Saturday activity in Phoenix, we decided to stop at Jump and let the kids play for a while there before we officially were home from our mini vacation. It was Jacob's first time there, and he had a good time, too.

 This little boy thought Rachel was super cool and everywhere she went, he followed. It was kind of funny to see. He was probably Ryan or Annie's age.

 Jacob the photobomber:

 Photobomb!

 Rachel discovered that candy corns can turn her into a vampire!

It was a fun-filled 3 weeks of break. We managed to get ONE thing on my to do list done, but lots of fun was had, so we'll call it a win. Now it's back to school and back to the regular routine. Thank goodness. :)

Fall Break Week 2

We kicked off week two of fall break with a trip to the park. Ryan's friend met us there, and with the weather cooling off a bit, it turned out to be the perfect day for the park, and about 5 families from our ward showed up while we were there, too. Megan's friends Emily and Abigail were there and they had lots of fun together.

 Tuesday Megan's friend from preschool, Cora, came over to play. They had lots of fun together and dressed up like princesses.

 Annie's friend, Laura was able to come play, too, making for a super fun time for everyone.

 Ryan had fun chasing the girls around and when I had him stop, they came looking for him after a little while so he could keep tormenting and scaring them. Apparently the screams I had been hearing were all happy screams.

Friday we joined some friends to go to Patagonia Lake for the day.

We were happy to go with the Reimanns and Allens and Parkers. Jacob had to work, but luckily Dan and Jason had their off Friday that day and came along and were put to work manning the oars for the rafts we had brought along.

 The kids had fun in the cold, cold water, and playing in the sand and finding lots of little shells.

When it was time to go home I was glad to have made the trip, but also glad to not be camping there that night. By next spring I'll be ready to attempt camping with the kids again.

Saturday and Sunday were General Conference. We were excited to hear the announcement about going to 2 hour church and more responsibility for teaching the gospel in the home. It is exciting to be a part of the Church as we see more evidence every conference of the hastening of the work of salvation.

We did our traditional bike ride between Saturday sessions of conference. Because my parents live so close now, my mom joined us for the ride, too.

We got back just in time for the afternoon session to start.

The kids were excited to get a conference packet to color. Ryan and Megan made their Child of God crowns.

 Sunday we had lunch at Grandma and Grandpa's between sessions, then headed to our house for the afternoon session, since there was more space for the kids to go if they got too antsy and couldn't sit quietly for the whole session.

 They made it about half way through the session before the fun of playing with cousins won out (though they did come back to listen to the Prophet when he spoke at the end of conference).

Fall Break Week 1

Fall Break was a fun-filled time. We managed to cram a lot of fun into three weeks.

Ryan had his friend Derek come over and play one day and they had a blast together. We got out the jumping castle for some indoor fun when it was hot outside, and left it up for the whole first week of break. It got a lot of use out of it and the kids got a lot of energy out jumping and playing on it.

 For the last half of the week the kids got to stay with Grandma and Grandpa while Jacob and I went on the Laurel High Adventure with 5 girls from church. We went and camped by Roosevelt Lake in central Arizona. It was SOOO hot when we first got there. It was a relief to get in the water. We did some knee boarding behind the boat that Brother Lewis brought up for us that first day. It was a great thing to start on and all the girls got up and had some fun before we went back to set up camp and cook dinner.
The next morning we went to Tonto National Monument cliff dwellings.

  We hiked up to the cliff dwellings and were able to see the remains of the houses that were built hundreds of years ago. It was really cool. (But the weather was very hot.)

 We soon returned to the lake and tried some skiing and wakeboarding and tubing. I was able to do some waterskiing, crossing the wake several times for the first time in my waterskiing career. ;) When I was ready to call it quits I tried to drop a ski and managed to stay up for maybe 4 seconds, which I thought was super impressive for me. :) I also got up wakeboarding:

 It was so much fun! The girls had lots of fun, too, and got to all try something (or multiple things) they hadn't tried before and bond more.

Saturday there was a multi-stake activity in the evening we wanted to get the girls home in time to go to, which made for a nice low key morning, then the drive home. It was nice to get home early afternoon and have time to decompress and unpack a little before Sunday hit.

Fun with friends

We had parent/teacher conferences in September. All the kids are doing their normal, exceptional work, and are well behaved, helpful students, so we went out to Baskin Robbins to celebrate.

 The next day was a half day since it was still parent/teacher conferences. Megan had been invited to a friend's birthday pool party and she had lots of fun there, even though the pool was super cold. I was happy when she decided she preferred a floatie to swimming on her own so I didn't have to stay in the water anymore.

 That afternoon with the kids getting out of school early, they decided to have some friends over. Rachel's friend Madison came, and brought her two sisters, which gave Annie and Megan friends to play with, too, since they were the right age.

 Ryan's friend, Caleb came, too. They had lots of crazy fun together.

 While I was cleaning out the garage one day I found these 4 tiny white balls on our beach umbrella. I thought they might be lizard eggs and after a quick check on the internet I decided I was right. I put them in this bucket and left it in the garage, and a few weeks later I went out to the garage for something and saw that two of the eggs had hatched and one of the lizards had already run off, but one was still in the bucket.

 After the kids took a look at the lizard, we let him run off to a corner of the garage. He's welcome to stay and eat all the bugs, but I'm guessing he headed out of the garage after all the scary kids went back inside. It was pretty cool to hatch our own lizard eggs. The other two never did hatch. Maybe the bucket in our garage isn't the best lizard egg incubator?

All my kids are super into drawing and gifting pictures. Ryan organized this outpouring of love. I think he drew most of the pictures, though others including Megan (maybe others?) did contribute. He was so excited about the surprise he had arranged for us to find when we went to bed.