October

Once we got back to school after fall break we got back into our regular routines somewhat. One night during family scripture study Megan modeled the armor of God for us. 

 Another night Rachel put together a Jeopardy game covering what we learned in General Conference. It was a good review. And she finished one more personal progress project with that.

 Rachel started personal progress at the beginning of the year and is nearly done. She has completed all except 3 of the value experiences and 2 value projects. She will easily finish before the end of the year when Personal Progress is retired and the new youth program starts.

More progress was made on our bathroom remodel. It took longer than they estimated and the company has been not great about communicating when people would or would not be showing up to work. But it is nearly done.

They somehow didn't get the message that with the closet, we wanted a door, too. They thought they were done except for the floor. When they came back to do the floor they also did the door. 

  When they tried to use the extra flooring that I had gotten, they realized that they didn't fit together correctly. I went in and talked to the flooring people and apparently last year they changed how they fit together, so they told us how to jerry-rig the old and new flooring to fit together. After another missed appointment, the guy finally came yesterday to finish the flooring which he estimated would take 2-3 hours. He worked 5-6 hours, and is coming back Monday morning to finish the very last part which will hopefully just take 30 minutes or less. Now I need to paint it.

I go in to help in the kids classes most weeks. Megan gets me twice--one time in Mrs. Parks' class in the afternoon, and a different day in Mrs. Hager's class in the morning. She loves it when I come in. And hates when I leave.

 They have a little stuffed animal dog in Mrs. Hager's class they get to read to when they get done with their centers. The kids all love it so much.

 Mrs. Parks has stuffed puppies that the kids get to bring home for the weekend when it's their turn to be star student. Megan was so excited to bring Snowball home.

 Snowball comes with a journal and the kid who has her for the weekend is supposed to write about their adventures together. Megan really took that to heart and wrote about every little thing they did, filling an entire page with her writing. I was so impressed and so was her teacher. Most kids write a sentence or two.

 Snowball rode with us to Desert Willow for School Beautification Day (aka Make a difference day), but luckily stayed in the car because the kids helped paint rocks and she would have gotten paint on her for sure, based on the kids clothes afterwards. :)

The following Saturday Annie had a Mathleague competition at Desert Willow and I helped out as a volunteer.

 Annie did a good job for her first competition ever, and afterwards we headed over to Cottonwood to join the rest of the family who were at the Stake BBQ/community picnic that everyone who helped out at various schools for Make a Difference Day (which for most schools were that morning) were invited to. Annie was worried when the math competition was running late, and when we arrived I found out why she was so anxious to get there--she headed straight for the dessert tables. Classic Annie.

My friend agreed to help me make t-shirts for my family, but she didn't realize what she was getting into. I thought it would be fun to have matching shirts for when we go places together, and it would help us keep track of the kids a lot easier, too. But with 10 kids and 8 adults it was a lot of shirts to do, especially with the pattern that I made.

 After we got done with the kids' shirts we were running low on vinyl so we modified the design and did a small pocket design for the adults. It helped us finish a lot faster, which was good because it had already taken about twice as long as we had planned. I still need to make her some treats to thank her.

The day after Halloween the kindergartners did their community helpers parade where they dressed up as someone who helps the community in some way. Megan couldn't decide between being a vet and a mom, so she went to school with a vet outfit, a stuffed dog, and a baby. But by parade time she just had the dog with her. She's probably counting on me watching her babies while she helps the doggies. ;)

 They were all very cute.

Yesterday Rachel and Annie did a great job at their piano recital. Sister Bauer is a great teacher and these girls do a great job at practicing most every day. They're making great progress.

Fall Break-Week 3

We made it through Fall Break! It feels like quite the accomplishment. We certainly get busy during school, running around to after school clubs, doing chores and homework, and trying to keep track of everything. So it was a nice break from all that, but we made up for it by keeping busy in a different way. We tried to schedule in some dull moments, but the kids managed to fill the time with fun anyway.
For the last week of break Savannah also had her fall break with Law School. So we didn't do quite as many things with cousins as we did the other two weeks. I think both sets of kids were happy to have some chill time at home. We did, however, still hang out quite a lot.
Sunday night Grandma had McKenzie and Peyton stay over night since they were on fall break now, too. Annie and Megan wormed their way in and got to join in the sleepover, too. Monday morning Megan, Ryan, and Peyton came to workout group with me while McKenzie, Rachel, and Annie stayed at Grandma's to play games.

 They spent the day going back and forth between everyone's houses having fun.

 At about 3pm we all headed off to the Marana Pumpkin Patch. Family selfie:

 It was fun going with all the Knight clan. We kind of scattered partway through, so I didn't see much of Rachel and Annie, but I think everyone had a good time.
The petting zoo:

 Rubber duckie races:

 The giant slide was a huge hit.

 The mountain of straw is always a big draw, too.

 They fired up the swing ride while we were doing the giant slide over and over and over, so the kids were excited to jump on it.

 They turned a tractor and a fire engine into a playground with a slide attached, but Ryan spent way more time in the driver's seat pushing all the buttons and levers.

 The jumping pillow is Jacob's favorite part of the whole place, and it was a big hit with everyone else (that didn't have back problems), too.

 Motorized tractors:

Real tractors that didn't move: 

 We got there at 3:30, about a half hour after it opened, and stayed almost until it closed at 7pm. When we had to leave Megan was devastated. She cried the whole way out to the car and driving home until we turned on some music, "I don't wanna leave! I don't wanna leave!" Definitely lots of fun was had (even though we didn't actually get any pumpkins) at the pumpkin patch.

Tuesday Ryan went to play with his friend, Donovan while I went to a YW presidency meeting. Megan was excited to finally be allowed to go to a meeting with me--she usually is very sad when I leave her at home to go to a meeting. She realized after a while that meetings aren't that exciting. After Ryan came back from his playdate, we headed to Bookman's and all the kids except Rachel got to finally use their $10 gift card from Bookman's that they get every birthday. (Ryan has had his since March, so it's been a long time coming.)

Wednesday Rachel headed to the temple with friends while the rest of us went to workout group, and stayed after for a baby shower for one of our workout buddies. Partway through workout group I got a phone call from the bathroom remodeling people that were supposed to have called the day before to tell me when to expect them (but didn't call), telling me they were at the house. I ran home to let them in and headed back to the church for the rest of workout group.

We came home to the demolition guy making good progress:

 We left Thursday for Patagonia Lake and came back on Friday to some progress:

At Patagonia Lake we had a good time. We went with the Allens, Reimanns, Grace/Parkers, and the Knights. We set up camp and the kids headed down to play at the beach for a while. That night we had one fire set up for all of us (I think we figured 7 adults and 21 kids, plus 4 more adults and 2 more kids that came on Friday to play).

We realized after not too long that we should have gotten two fires going to make roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and warming up a little easier. Live and learn.

The kids mostly slept ok, except Rachel who had a hard time sleeping, and Megan, who had a tummy ache. And when Megan is tired and not feeling well she has no volume control, so I took her into the van to try and contain the yelling and not wake up everyone else in the campground. She fell right asleep and just woke up off and on through the night, falling asleep pretty quickly each time. I tried sleeping on the back bench of the van very unsuccessfully. After 2 or 3 hours I moved to the passenger's seat and dozed off and on for 30-45 minute intervals for the rest of the night.

The next morning we had breakfast then broke camp.

 We managed to find a geocache and the kids ran around enjoying the great outdoors. Then Ryan wiped out playing tag, or something, and cut up his knee pretty good. There was a decent sized flap of skin and after trying to wash it out with water squirting out of a water bottle, I figured we probably needed to take him to the doctor and have it cleaned well, and probably stitched up.
Thankfully, Justin and Todd had driven down and arrived less than a half hour before in my mom's car. So we were able to take off in her car and everyone else was able to stay and play for the day. That was one of the little miracles of the day. If it had been the night before or even an hour before we may have packed up everything and had the whole family leave to take him to the doctor, but having the smaller car available to take let us leave the van that would fit everyone else to drive up later. Ryan was having a lot of pain and was having a hard time calming down, so when Jacob offered a blessing he said yes, he wanted a blessing. But he didn't have consecrated oil, and no one else did, until Savannah remembered that she had been meaning to take Todd's keys out of her backpack all week long, but never had gotten around to it, so they were still there with a vial of consecrated oil. Then as I was packing the last of what we were taking with us in my mom's car I remembered the children's Tylenol I had grabbed on impulse as we were loading up the car, and got it out for Ryan. That kicked in about 10 minutes later and greatly eased his pain. All those things seem like little miracles to help make Ryan's wipe out a little easier to deal with.

So I drove Ryan back to Tucson and to Urgent Care, with a stop off at McDonald's to grab lunch. By the time we checked in and ate our lunch we were getting called back to our room to get checked in. The quick check in did not translate to a quick visit. It was at least 45 minutes before we were seen by the doctor or nurse practitioner, during which time Ryan played on the iPad and I fell asleep a couple of times.

They cleaned out the wound and put in two stitches with Ryan turning white as a ghost a few times from the pain. But he didn't cry, just expressed his fear and pain very articulately, considering. We kept him distracted by him playing this fraction/decimal game on the iPad--he's a number's boy and doing math solves problems. (Get it?) :) 
When we were done he decided he wanted a Slurpee, but since 7-11 wasn't close by and Target was and had Icee's (which are the same thing), we headed there to get it for him. And found a fancy iced cookie that had "Ryan's World" on it. It cheered him right up. He was proud of how tough he had been, and so was I.

 He wouldn't let me take a picture of his wound while we were at the doctor, but a couple of days later he told me it was ok to take a picture of his stitches now that it's starting to heal.

We've got to go back to snip off the stitches in two weeks.

Meanwhile, back at Patagonia Lake the kids were having a grand old time.

Showers were definitely in order when they got home. They all had a great time, though. And despite the stitches, everyone was happy we got to go camping with good friends at Patagonia.

Then Saturday we did our one last adventure of Fall Break: Disney on Ice. Jacob wasn't interested in going with us, so we went with Grandma and some of the Knight cousins. Todd wasn't interested, but when Savannah wasn't feeling well on Saturday, Todd ended up taking his kids, anyway.

 There was 2 hours of awesomeness. Megan was ready to leave about 15 minutes before the end, so she lasted pretty well. Besides ice skating, there were some acrobatics on trampolines and on ropes from the ceiling, catapults, and other exciting elements.
Beauty and the Beast:

 Toy Story (the green army men were most of the kids' favorite part):

 Coco:

 Aladdin with lots of pyrotechnics:

And lots of others. We met Jacob at Chick Fil-A to eat, then headed home to veg out for the rest of the day. A regular Sunday, and now the kids are back to school and another quarter of learning and fun.