Balloon Fiesta 2014

In October I made my annual early morning trek to see the balloons, or as Marianne calls it, the "balloon festia". Bekah, Beau and Marianne came, while Jacob seems to have inherited his dad's aversion to early mornings and crowds. 

It was a beautiful morning and everything went smoothly - we had a smooth, fast ride into the park and the weather was perfect. 

Surprisingly enough, Marianne was initially terrified of the balloons. She loudly proclaimed her desire to go home, leave, vacate the premises as soon as possible. But eventually, as the sun came up and everything wasn't so dark, she decided that she did enjoy seeing the balloons.

 This is the whole reason I go to the balloon fiesta - to run through the balloons! I love it!!

 I loved this balloon the most - the momma and baby whale.

I love our tradition of going to see the balloons! It really is an incredible experience!!

Chones Expedition 2014

The 2nd Annual Chones Expedition took place again in September at Granite Gap, NM. Granite Gap is in the very southwestern corner of New Mexico, and it's one of Rus' favorite places to visit. Attendees were Rus and the boys, Jake and his son Russel, Carla's son Ben, my brother in law Eric and his three sons, my brother Tyler, my dad, Rus' dad, and his uncle Lloyd.
Here are a few pics from that:

 Ben and Russel, good buds

School Was Two Miles Away, Uphill Both Ways

We are blessed to have a bus that stops directly in front of our home, with a wonderful bus driver, Jim, a grandparent himself, who knows every single kid by name. I'm sure you must be able to guess the saintly qualities he possesses to successfully manage a bus load of kids twice a day, every day.
My kids are not always well behaved on the bus. Beau is loud and invasive, Jacob is stubborn and private, and Bekah seems to think she's Jim's right hand man - in charge of keeping the peace. There have been a couple of occasions when the kids all exit the bus and I'm assaulted with a hurricane of accusations aimed at a sibling and everyone is either crying or yelling as they enter the house.
So glad to have them home, I think to myself with just a touch of sarcasm...
About a month ago this exact scenario played out, and when the kids were finally done yelling and crying, the details gradually unfolded:
Verse 1:
Jacob was sitting in the front seat of the bus, right behind the driver.
Bekah got on the bus and wanted to sit with Jacob.
Jacob said no.
Bekah insisted.
Jacob staunchly refused.

Verse 2:
Bekah sat anyway.
Jacob pounded her back.
Bekah yelled that she had to sit there to help watch the bad kids on the bus. (Ironic, no?)
Jacob pushed and pounded Bekah.

Chorus:
Jim told Jacob to stop.
Jacob wouldn't
Jim told Bekah to move.
She wouldn't.

Repeat Chorus three times.

Finale:
Bekah moves to another seat.

They somehow survived the rest of the 15 minute ride home, and I was met with extreme sadness and agitation. I listened to both sides, appealed to expert witnesses (Beau), and sat on it the rest of the night without doing anything.
The next morning, Rus and I explained to them that they had both lost the privilege of using anything with wheels to get to school, because they obviously could not be expected to behave. I asked what their plan was to get to school, and they eventually came to the conclusion that the only way to school was to walk.
Jacob yelled at me the entire 45 minutes that he normally spends getting ready for school, but somehow, at the designated time (45 minutes before school was to start, 15 minutes before they normally have to be ready), he was outside, backpack on and shoes tied and he and Bekah headed off for school. Bekah was thankfully quite resolved to her fate.
I texted Jim and let him know that the kids would not be riding the bus, that they had lost their privilege and would be enjoying a supervised walk to school. He replied that they had gotten quite mad at each other they day before and that he was sorry. I replied that it was not his fault and he shouldn't have to deal with that. He replied, "Thank you."
Beau (my favorite child of the moment), rode with Marianne and I in the van and we slowly, slowly followed them down the hill, through the stoplight, over the speed bumps, around the corner, and to the school. Two miles.
This is the blurry picture I took through the windshield and texted to Rus, along with "it was a most painful morning with Jacob. But they are walking now." He replied, "That may not have made their day. But it made me chuckle."

And guess what, by the time they arrived, they were both in great spirits, laughing and talking with each other. I even hauled their backpacks for them the last half mile because they weren't scowling anymore.
I showed them where to meet me at the end of the day, handed them notes to give their teachers explaining that they were to walk, not ride the bus, and waved goodbye.
Jim texted me to say that I had good kids - they had both come up to him and apologized for their behavior.
I think Bekah enjoyed telling all of her classmates about her "extreme punishment."
At the end of the day, I met them and again followed them home. Up the street with the speedbumps, Up the street through the stoplight. Up the road with more speedbumps. Up, up, up. Water and goldfish were provided. Pleas for a ride were denied. Backpacks were hauled in the van. I'm not kidding when I say it is quite a hill to my house. It's probably at least a thousand foot elevation change. It's awful. But with minimal complaining, they made it up. I only had a few homeowners look at me like I was a creepy stalker following innocent children.
At the driveway, we discussed proper bus behavior, and I reiterated that they would have to walk again if they ever behaved that way again. We compared times - 20 minutes on the bus or 50 minutes by foot. Luckily, they saw the advantage to having someone drive them.
We went inside where they wrote letters to Jim, apologizing again for their behavior and sharing with him their favorite parts of riding the bus. Jacob agonized over his letter, but eventually came up with one that was minimally heartfelt.
It was quite an ordeal. But they did it, and hopefully, the next time Bekah asks Jacob if she can sit with him, he will simply say...
Yes.

Happy happy birthday

[I'm still here...it's computer troubles that have kept me away...and a busy life that I cannot recollect the details of...]

Yesterday was my birthday, hooray! Rus's work decided he should celebrate on the beautiful sandy beaches of the Florida panhandle. So I decided to celebrate at my parent's house, knowing that if I stayed home no one would be nice to me. We headed to their house Friday night (have I mentioned they moved to a town only 45 minutes away?!) My mom made a delicious dinner and my dad started a fire in the fire pit outside. The kids roasted hot dogs and we all enjoyed the perfect weather and the warm fire. My mom even made dirt cake, something I used to ask for on my birthday when I was a teenager. Beau had gone on a field trip to get a pumpkin and he was so excited to carve it. He had bought a carving kit at at Goodwill a few weeks ago and had grand plans for that pumpkin. With only a small amount of help, he designed, carved, and gutted his pumpkin and we all enjoyed sitting in the dark living room later and admiring it.

The next morning the kids let me sleep in, I got to go for a run, and my dad made me breakfast. He also tried to decorate my door with scrumptious grown up candy (Ferraro Rocher and ghiradelli) but after 45 minutes of intense efforts conceded that I'd like it just as much on the floor. (Apparently it was too heavy for the tape.)

The kids played in the beautiful 80 degree weather and my dad and mom and I carried out plans for an over-the-top trunk or treat project. Our ward trunk or treat was last night and we took it upon ourselves to make a catapult that could launch "pumpkin poop" aka puffy Cheetos at various items hanging in the trunk. The catapult was awesome. I envision coming up with 100 different uses for it over the next year. The kids at the trunk or treat loved it and wanted to do it even when there was no candy being offered. Our trunk won the decorating contest and we are now the proud owners of a large pumpkin. 

Other fun events from the day:

Rus called while sightseeing with a coworker and I made him sing happy birthday to me on speaker phone, in front of his coworker. He actually refused but then I guilt tripped him into doing it. Thoroughly embarrassing him made my day.

I received a bunch of texts and phone calls from friends and family and really enjoyed visiting with them. Tyler was the first and Lindsey was the last and there were many other wonderful salutations in between.

My mom made me a birthday cake. I don't remember he last time she baked anything! It was an Irish Apple cake with a custard sauce. It was beautiful and delicious. She put 32 candles on it, and darn it, lighting all those candles took so long that the cake had an extra layer of spears on the top.

My friend Taffy also made me a cake, a hummingbird cake, and it made the most scrumptious breakfast treat.

We went to a birthday party for a new friend, Sidney, who will turn five next week. Marianne loves Sidney, and they play so well together! I painted Sidney's face to go with her princess costume that she was going to wear for the trunk or treat. And then I painted her mom's face and another mom's face just because at Halloween you can get away with that. ;)

I told my boys a month ago that I was going on strike this year. I was not going to make or buy them costumes because there were just too many tears over the awesome costumes I made them last year. They were not as devastated as I would have hoped. Jacob decided to wear the snake costume and Beau the snow leopard costume, both great hand-me-downs from my sister Amanda. Bekah decided to be a witch (she is really not very original, but it makes less work for me), and Marianne decided to be a princess like her friend Sidney. I love how Bekah's face painting turned out.

Rus was thoughtful enough to buy and stash a gift for me that my kids presented to me after the trunk or treat. I told Rus that a really nice pencil sharpener would change my life. It would make homework time a breeze and bring me daily measures of happiness. It had to be super nice class room quality. I know it sounds lame, but I tried to buy it for myself several times and couldn't do it. And I really wanted it. We have all spent several happy minutes just today sharpening dozens of the pencils Rus got me to go with it. Marianne is sharpening pencils as I type. 

Did I mention it shuts off when the pencil is perfectly sharpened? No pencil eating here! And it can accommodate six different sizes and shapes of pencils!

So happy...

I live a blessed life.

Part 3: Martin's Cove

We happily (and hopefully noisily at 7am) left Guernsey, WY and headed to Martin's cove, a quick three hour jaunt away. We were there in time for church. The Church has quite an impressive campus there. [It includes the large meeting room, some housing, a visitor's center, and numerous smaller "period" buildings.] We met in a nice large room for testimony meeting. [The room was filled with dozens of missionary couples and other families visiting the area.] Bekah bore her testimony, it was so sweet. We all attended primary with Elder and Sister Grover, and our family members were the sole recipients of their wonderful lessons! [It was so great that these missionary couples had activities and lessons and snacks planned just in case they had someone there visiting!]
Roger and Louise of course know a couple that is serving in Martin's Cove. They are the Erekson's and are from Edgewood, NM. After church they took us to the "Route 66 Missionary RV Park" where all of the missionaries that are serving there live. Many of the missionaries bring their own RVs, but there is also some housing available there. We all enjoyed a really relaxing afternoon visiting with the Erekson's. Beau told me that night that he had the most fun that afternoon playing in the gravel at our campsite with Marianne. We were treated to dinner with all of the missionary couples at a pavilion at the campsite that night. I was feeling a little under the weather, and it was a shame because the food they made looked delicious.
Monday 8/4
Elder and Sister Erekson treated us to breakfast at their trailer - which the kids thought was a mansion compared to Nana and Big Papa's RV. (Which is a mansion in its own right when compared to our pop-up.)
Afterwards we headed back to the Martin's Cove campus so we could go on an authentic 5 mile trek - handcart and all, guided by the Ereksons.
We started by seeing the "baptismal font" in the Sweetwater. Isn't that neat that you can be baptized in the actual Sweetwater River?
Next we visited Fort Seminoe and learned about the "valley boys" who were part of the rescue group for the saints who were struggling and in very precarious circumstances on their way to Salt Lake City. These saints would not have survived had it not been for the rescue groups sent by President Brigham Young to give them aid and nourishment and hope at a very bleak part of their journey. Fort Seminoe is where the members of the church who were crossing the plains in wagons left many of their goods so that there could be room in the wagons to carry the sick. Martin's cove is where the rescuers took the saints, in the wagons, to get them out of the harsh weather conditions and give them respite so they could continue their journey.
The Sweetwater river snakes around and the saints had to cross it repeatedly. We only had to cross it twice and both times we had the option of using a bridge. But the first time, Big Papa wanted to carry the kids across the Sweetwater himself. I was really impressed with that.
Nana and Rus pulled the handcart across.
Marianne really latched on to Sister Erekson. They were buddies the entire time. That day, Marianne got dressed because of Sister Erekson, let me do her hair because of Sister Erekson, and walked more than she probably would have because she got to use a walking stick like Sister Erekson.
At one point in the trek, we left the handcarts and walked a mile back into Martin's Cove. Elder Erekson spoke with us there and told us how Wyoming doesn't have a temple, but it has Martin's Cove. It is a sacred place and the visitors there are asked to treat it as such.
Elder and Sister Grover, our primary teachers, were manning the station at the trailhead for Martin's Cove. We had to get a picture of the kids with them.
The rest of the trek wrapped up nicely.

Epic Seven State Road Trip: Part 1

Our family dared to do the impossible this summer: go on a 12-day road trip pulling the pop-up trailer and camp all along the way. It started with wanting to go to Mt. Rushmore. If you make it through all of these posts, you will find the presidents' carved noggins in NONE of them...it turns out that the week we planned to go was the same week when all of the motorcycling world planned to have a rally at Rushmore. BUT. Since we'd already opened up the door to the idea of a road trip, and talked with Rus' parents about doing part of the trip with them, we were committed. Instead of heading through Nebraska to South Dakota (as originally planned), we rendezvoused in Nebraska so the men could tour a bullet manufacturing plant in Grand Island. So, just to put it all succinctly: I'd rather explain the route of our trip by saying it was to not go to Rushmore, rather than admit that it was to tour a bullet manufacturing plant. Anyway...
Here's our trip in a nutshell:
Day 1: Albuquerque to John Martin Reservoir, CO
Day 2: John Martin Reservoir to Grand Island, NE
Day 3: Stay in Grand Island
Day 4: Grand Island, NE to Guernsey, WY
Day 5: Guernsey, WY to Martin's Cove, WY
Day 6: Martin's Cove, WY to Soda Springs, ID
Day 7: Stay in Soda Springs
Day 8: Soda Springs, ID to Rexburg, ID
Day 9: Rexburg, ID to West Yellowstone, MT
Day 10: Stay in West Yellowstone
Day 11: W. Yellowstone, MT to Yampa River State Park, CO
Day 12: Yampa River State Park, CO to Albuquerque, NM
I took notes each day to try to keep things straight, so I'm just going to type those up here and include as few possible of the hundreds of pictures that we took...I've added some comments to my notes, they are contained in [brackets]. So here we go:

Thursday 7/31
Woke up in John Martin Reservoir campground. I went for a run from our campsite (which is at the base of the dam) to the top of the dam...thought it'd just be a couple miles but in the end it was four. Funniest thing - all of us were chasing Marianne around the campsite and when we got close to her she just stood there and her pants dropped spontaneously and we were all laughing. [We laughed about her "super power" the whole trip, actually.]

Here we are at the top of the dam:


We stopped in Kansas at the Fick Fossil Museum and the lady (a Mennonite), was so nice to the kids - she opened up a beautifully restored fire truck and let the kids climb in and play. They loved all of the shark teeth in the museum. [Apparently there was a couple who ranched in that part of Kansas and they found thousands of shark teeth on their property...from long ago when it was part of the ocean. This same couple started the museum.] The kids also loved buying souvenirs. [Oh gosh. The kids were souvenir OBSESSED. They could not wait to spend the money they had saved all summer!] We played on the playground. They had a merry-go-round, all fun and games until Jacob fell off.
Oh! And in Colorado we passed through a stretch of road where we saw at least a dozen ornate box turtles trying to cross the road - some successfully, some not. We stopped once to get two out of the road. [Turtles pee buckets when they are scared, did you know that? And they weren't scared by huge semis zooming by, they were scared by me picking them up! I didn't get peed on, though.] We saw a little guy in the road and decided to keep him with us for entertainment. We put him - actually her, the kids named her Rose - in a laundry basket. [You can tell the sex of a turtle by it's eye color. Boys have red eyes. Girls have black eyes.]

It was fun to watch her try to escape. At one point, Marianne said, "The turtle's gone!" And when we looked, she wasn't in the basket! We looked for a minute and found her climbing up the seat behind Marianne's seat. We kept a closer eye on her after that. [We found Rose a great home at our campsite in NE. Some might say "sudden transferring" her was cruel. But they didn't see that stretch of shell-dappled highway in CO or the quaint stream we left her by in NE...]
We were happy to pull into Mormon Island RV park, Grand Island, Nebraska, and see Big Papa and Nana waiting for us. [Here's our campsite.]

And better yet, they had dinner ready for us! We enjoyed a slow morning before Rus, his dad, Jacob and Bekah headed to Hornady, a bullet manufacturing plant, and Nana, Beau, Marianne and I headed out to the Stuhr Pioneer Museum. We went to Railroad Town in the museum, a little town replicated circa 1894. There was a schoolhouse, bank, mercantile, barber shop, millinery, tin smith, blacksmith shop, and train depot, among others.



Nana and I enjoyed it, while Beau's favorite part was buying stuff at the gift shop - a little stuffed animal wolf key chain and "gold" candy.
We all met up for lunch back at the RV park and after a short siesta we headed to Island Oasis Waterpark. It had two sinisterly tall slides that Bekah loved but I swear took the skin off my back. [I screamed like a little girl. I thought I was going to die for about 2.7 seconds - how long it took to drop roughly 3000 feet.] It also had four other water slides that everyone loved, a wave pool that Nana especially loved, and a fun lazy river that we rode with inner tubes. It was fun for all of us!

Total time it took us to get from Albuquerque to John Martin Reservoir: 8 hours
Distance: 367 miles
Driving time: 5.5 hours (i.e. how long it might take if you didn't have kids, or a husband with a small bladder)

Part 2: Grand Island to Redneckville RV Park, WY

We packed up and headed out early from Grand Island, intending to go as far as Scott's Bluff. We stopped at a Cabelas so the men could look for .22 ammo [another hidden agenda of our trip]. They found some and the kids found mini-multi tools for only $6! They were thrilled. [These tools would become the bane of our trip. One was always, always lost.]
The next stop was the Golden Spike Tower in North Platte.

It is an eight story tower overlooking the world's largest rail yard, Bailey yard.

It is three miles wide at the widest, and eight miles long. The kids - and the adults - enjoyed watching the trains move around the yard, the engines assemble, and the train cars slide down the rails in the hump yards.

Of course the kids bought souvenirs at the gift shop. We ate lunch there, in the RV. Beau caught a frog. His second frog in as many days. He's a frog whisperer.

Our next stop was at Chimney Rock. There is a really nice visitor's center there. If you visit, you'll learn what the Native American's name for the landmark was. The kids enjoyed loading up a 1/2 sized wagon with provisions...and perusing the gift shop. [We learned what a relief it was for pioneers and other west-ward travelers to see this obvious landmark. Rus and I were even relieved to see it after driving in the flattest country imaginable for two days straight.]

We made our final stop for the night in Guernsey, WY. We got in late, and the only campground we could get into was a cramped little one located between a canal and a golf course. Perk - there was a small (tiny) play structure there that kept Marianne entertained. Downside - a big group with too much beer. We cooked over a fire - the campfire mac and cheese I'd found on Pinterest was a hit!

Time it took us to get from Grand Island to Guernsey: 11 hours
Distance: 383 miles
Driving time: 6 hours