Happy Birthday, Megan!

 Megan wanted to celebrate her birthday with friends a few days before her actual birthday. She skipped synchro that day and her friends Willow and Cora to come with her to The Cove in Sierra Vista to swim and have some fun in the wave pool and on the slides. Her "cake" of choice was fruit pizzas. We had lunch, then ate a cookie or two, then headed down to Sierra Vista. (Ryan brought his friend, Dylan, along so he would have someone to hang out with while the girls had their fun.) 

Both the high and low dive were popular.

Hard to see the waves in the picture, but they all enjoyed the wave pool.

Though Megan turned 11, they still liked the little kid slide and did that one more than the big tube slides. 

After several hours, I managed to get everyone out of the pool with the promise of Dippin' Dots on the way home. Fun was had by everyone, and the girls enjoyed their time together.

For Megan's actual birthday, we celebrated with Grandma and Grandpa at our house with a delicious freezer cake.  

Megan got a couple of mini backpacks, some shelves to show off her crochet creations, a yarn organizer, a crochet pattern for Woodstock and Snoopy, and some other things, I'm sure. 

11 years old and ready to start middle school and take on the world.

That evening we were invited over to the wash by Grandma and Grandpa's house to do fireworks. Ryan loved lighting fireworks and helping Grandpa set things ablaze.

It was a good day to celebrate America's and Megan's birthday. Megan has grown a lot in the last year (she's almost 5 feet tall as she likes to remind us often), but not just physically. She has gotten much better at controlling her outbursts when she's feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. She's growing in confidence and is willing and even eager to try new things. One of the things she was looking forward to most is finding new friends in middle school, and joining some new clubs and trying some new things. 

Keeping busy this summer

 The kids filled up our short 7 week summer with their activities. Rachel worked at Kidco pretty much every day 12-6pm. 

Ryan and Megan both did swim team and really enjoyed it, and were both really fast. 

Megan also did synchronized swimming this summer. At the skills meet she won first place! 

Purple Heart had a great synchro team this year, all kids we know from Desert Willow.

Between swim team at 8-9am and synchro 12-1pm, and changing clothes and chores and lunch, that didn't really leave much time for outings during the summer, but it did set up a pretty firm routine.

Annie had 2 weeks of theater camp and played one of the knights of the round table in The Sword and the Stone. She had fun with all her theater friends.

The following week she went to cooking camp every morning, and hosted a craft camp at our house 3 afternoons, in order to earn some money. 

She also squeezed in her Health final (after finishing a semester's worth of work in the course of about 3 1/2 weeks), and made big progress on her ASL class over the summer.

Grandpa donated lots of his beads and charms and junk to the girls to sort through, and they picked out what they thought they might use in their jewelry making endeavors before returning the remainder. 

As the summer wrapped up, we got to see Megan and her synchro team perform How Bad Can I Be from the Lorax at the watershow. They got the award for having the best formations. 

Afterwards we went to celebrate at Frost Gelato with the team. Megan had a good time, but next year she's thinking she may stick with only swim team so she isn't quite as busy and has a little more down time. 

The first week of school, swim team practice was moved to the afternoon, then that Saturday was the city championships. Ryan and Megan both did really well at the championships. 

Megan came in first in butterfly, backstroke and freestyle, and Ryan came in 3rd in fly and freestyle and 2nd in breast and backstroke, though they didn't get medals for all those races, since they have a limit of how many races you can officially swim in, so they each had one race that was an "exhibition race." Megan also swam in 2 relays and did amazing on her leg of the relays, but the others on her relay weren't as fast so they came in 2nd and 3rd.

YW Camp

Rachel and Annie went to ward young women camp up in the White Mountains. Here's their summary of camp: 

On the way up I (Annie) rode up in Sister Howell's house and listened to Les Miserables music and learned all about the storyline. We stopped at a stream with boardwalks and ate lunch there before continuing on to our final location. 

It was a pretty typical camp, camping in tents. The worst part was that the bathrooms were just a bucket with a bag that we had to change out like 5 times a day. It was the worst.

One thing we did was drive around with flashlights trying to spot elk. One ran right in front of our car. 

We also went to some ancient Native American ruins. It was pretty cool. There was pottery shards on the ground and we saw a barn owl.

The sleep was not the best. Rachel slept horribly the first night, then got permission to sleep by Grandma Knight in the main cabin the 2nd night, and the last night got to share the cabin with Chloe, one of her best buds, who was there as a graduated senior and 18 year old, and therefore as a leader, so had her own quarters. Rachel saw that the Lord could turn that hard thing (no sleep, super hard 1st full day of camp) into something good (hanging out with Chloe one on one for one last time before Chloe heads off to college). 

YM Camp

Ryan went to Stake Young Men's camp up in the White Mountains. He wrote the following about camp: 

A picture of all the Young Men from the Desert Sky ward at camp

One of the days at camp, they brought in an untamed horse, and tamed it within four hours, while the trainer talked us through what he was doing as he went on. He also gave us many gospel parallels of the taming of the horse, some including God being like the trainer, and us as the horse, and how God gently leads us along.

Noodle fight representing how one of the scriptural battles where one side had less people, but were generally more skilled.

Archery, one of the many activities throughout the camp. Others were wood carving, Obstacle course, hike and spiritual thought, coping skills, and shooting bb guns.

Us standing on a large rock we climbed on the side of a river

June with friends

 Rachel kept busy with her job at Kidco during June. She did not love it, and wanted to quit, but persevered, and we're so proud of her for doing something so hard and not giving up. 

Ryan and Megan both did swim team, and Megan also did synchronized swimming, which kept us busy going back and forth to the pool a couple times a day, making it hard to fit in other adventures because of the timing of the practices. Both of them enjoyed the swimming a lot and next year Megan plans to just do swim team, not synchro, to be a little less busy.

Annie kept busy with various things throughout the month, including drama camp, cooking camp, her own craft camp she put on for kids so she could earn some money, summer school health class, and an online ASL class.

Judy organized a picnic day up on Mt. Lemmon so we could hang out with our old friend, Jillian Hutchings, before she moved from Marana, where she's been the last few years, to Utah. It was a fun outing and the weather was great, especially up on the mountain.

Grandma Campbell's siblings planned a get together before her sister, Nancy and Art, go on a mission, so Cari drove down with her, and they came to Tucson to visit while they were already close, in Phoenix. Ryan convinced Grandma to try out Pico Park, one of his favorite vintage video games, and a good time was had by all.

Megan has been going to the Merritt's house (friends in our ward), to play with their kids, since she is their adopted oldest sibling. She would go most Thursdays after school. Since we had more flexibility in the summer, we had them come to our house one day to hang out instead of going to their house. They had a lot of fun visiting and didn't want to leave. Megan is such a good big sister to them. :)