We spent the 4th of July long weekend up at the cabin, Friday through Monday (Monday was the 4th). It was a chill visit with just the five of us. We made a fruit flag for breakfast, set up a tree swing, and hung out on the water with our kayaks and our new paddle board.
We made it back to Livermore in time for a potluck dinner with friends and the local fireworks. It was a good feeling to be surrounded by unmasked crowds downtown - finally, a taste of normalcy! The fireworks were excellent, too!
I saw a fox on my morning walk along the trail by my house. I love how close to nature we are, even in the suburbs!
Jack and Gemma have been attending the Nelson's chess club when we're in town on Wednesdays. They're having fun with it. The family who runs the club always has creative adaptations of chess for the kids to try out, like playing double games as teams, where when someone captures a piece, their teammate can place that extra piece on their board (playing on two boards, side by side).
Hazel wanted to go to the movies with her friends Aarna and Raeya, and asked me to drive. Well, I decided I might as well bring Jack and Gemma and watch the movie as well. Great idea in theory - but man, Minions: The Rise of Gru was sooooo lame!
Hazel spent a few days at girl's camp. It was her first real year of camp: last year, they met during the day at the church building, and the year before, they met online and we went on a trip instead. I don't have any pictures of Hazel at camp, but I do have a picture of the morning we had Logan and Paige George over to play because Katie was at camp and Ryan needed to go to some work meetings.
I drove up on Thursday to bring the girls home. I'm glad I did: the drive was beautiful, and I got to hear from Hazel and the other girls I drove home all about their favorite parts of camp while it was still fresh.
We went to a production of Newsies at the Bankheaad Theater. It was so fun that all the kids were talking about wanting to try Drama in high school. I definitely made some happy memories through my drama experiences.
Jack decided to crochet a Super Mario for Jonah for his birthday. He found a pattern online and whipped it out in a couple of weeks. It is so fun to see what he can make!
The day he finished the Mario, he started a yarn weaving tutorial. It was like he didn't know what to do without a project!
Todd went with Hazel and Jack and some other youth from our ward boating with the bishop. Someone caught this sweet pic of Todd on the wakeboard. He's still got it!
We blocked out some time for "Cabin Week" this month. Todd couldn't take that much time off work, but that didn't stop me and the kids from living our best lives. April ditched her man, too, and brought her brood up Sunday afternoon. We spent the next couple of days at the playground, on mountain neighborhood walks, playing at the lake, and eating delicious food. Literally every other second of the day was spent playing games, games, games!
Baby Ellie is nearly two now - unbelievable. The kids were wild, wild, wild. Somehow, April and I still got in lots of talking time. My favorite was the second night, when we remembered to go out on the porch and soak in the stars before we went to bed. They are stunning up there in the dark night.
The Wilmoths left on Tuesday afternoon. That gave my kids and me about 48 hours on our own. We enjoyed the calm, reading and drawing and knitting. We also spent a morning at Big Trees State Park down the highway, and an afternoon at the lake on the paddle board and the kayaks. The weeds had completely overgrown our driveway to the point where you almost couldn't see it (so much so that I drove into a wood post and took the side bumper off the van!) so we pulled weeds for 30 or 45 minutes and came up with an enormous pile, enough to fill two kitchen garbage bags. We went for a wildflower hunt Thursday afternoon and filled a vase with a lovely bouquet that we thoroughly enjoyed the rest of Cabin Week.
Chrissy and Gordon picked up Todd after work on Thursday and drove up to spend the rest of the week with us. Todd crashed on the couch immediately after dinner and contributed nothing to the social scene until the next day. Evidently he worked from 5 am to 11 pm pretty much every day while we were gone. While I thought that was a ridiculous waste and he really should have carved in some Me Time, at the very least going to Wednesday night basketball at the church, he was delighted with how he "got so much done!" He is a man of extremes.
Well, our living room was helter-skelter, because we took advantage of Gordon's audio prowess and asked him to help us reconfigure televisions, DVD players, speakers, and Internet systems, but that didn't stop the moms and kids from playing game after game. Perpetual Commotion was the crowd favorite.
While Todd and I took the majority of the kids to the playground and the huge rocks the kids like to play hide and seek amongst, Chrissy and Gordon stayed back with Daniel and Gemma and were treated to an animated read-aloud with accents. I caught the tail end of it, and I must say, it was thoroughly entertaining.
We didn't take any pictures while we were out on the water (I really should bring up a hip pack so I dare to bring my phone with me) but we spent a great deal of time on the kayaks and paddle boards. Day One was at Bear Lake, and Day Two, we packed up a picnic and spent a good chunk of the day at Utica Reservoir, where we added cliff jumping to our itinerary. While the kayaks were fun, it seemed most everyone preferred the versatility of the paddle boards. They can fit three people on them easy, and if you're not the one with the paddle, you can lay on your back and enjoy floating amongst the pine trees while other people do all the work. We ended up buying a second one in time for Cabin Week, and we did not regret the purchase.
Jack has been bringing knitting to church for months now, as something to do while he listens in Sacrament Meeting. His primary teacher, Brother Rickards, commissioned him to knit him a winter cap, providing him with an inspiration picture and the yarn. Jack has worked on it off and on for a long time instead of just sitting down and focusing on it, It got to the point where we started saying he had to give it ten minutes before he picked up another project. We all rejoiced when he finally completed it. It turned out awesome!
We drove out to Utah for our Bingham Reunion. We had to get up super early on Thursday to get into Logan in time to meet at the temple for a sealing session with family names. It was quite special. Mom found the names and had several of us do their earlier work for them, so that when we all met up, we could seal children to parents. I loved being in the temple with family: we haven't made a tradition out of that. Possibly, we've only been in the temple together for each other's own endowments and sealings. We were missing several beloved family members, but the feeling of being together in there was quite different from any other gathering. We all decided it was something we should do more often.
Friday's main activity was going up to Second Dam in Logan Canyon. It was a hot day, but it felt wonderful in the shade, and the water was fun to wade in. Hazel caught this snapshot of Grandpa catching. a nap on the bench. Apparently, napping is just what men do when they get old! (Cough, couch, Todd!)
We checked out this lovely waterfall near the hobbit caves, also. It was a very pretty spot.
We noticed several new, gigantic car wash businesses along Logan Main Street. I don't know, something about them lured the kids in, like they had to be a million times better than a dinky California car wash. Well, Todd caved and we checked it out. It was hilarious, the oooh and aaahs in the car. The big brushes! The fruity smell! The colorful foam! I swear, the overreactions were amazing. There was an entire row of these vacuums for customers to use afterward, and the kids enthusiastically cleaned up every crumb of food and clump of dirt and left our van as fresh as can be. They marveled at how this entire experience cost less than our boring, simple, much less flashy carwash at home. Everything's cheaper in Utah!
Emily and her family are in Thailand right now, still on their nomad adventure, so unfortunately, Emily did not get the hit of nostalgia when Caprice pulled out Mall Madness, a game from her childhood that Emily also owned and loved. It was fun to hear the recordings and think about all the good times.
Gemma couldn't walk past Nana's flowers without stopping to catch grasshoppers. Every time we went anywhere, on the way in and on the way out, she spent a few minutes with the bugs.
We made the drive up to Grandpa Bingham's house to check in on him. It's hard to carry on a conversation with him in such a large group. My kids and I are definitely not the ones leading the Q&A, and it turns into a long time sitting quietly. We decided we ought to carve out time to visit Grandpa on our own next time, so we can have a good visit like we did at Grandma Holley's house last summer.
After a while, I snuck out with my kids and gave them a memory tour of the house instead, showing them all the spots that have stories from my childhood: the pink room Emily and I always slept in, the game room we played Sorry and Ping Pong in, the bathtub that flooded when I was babysitting and I called 911 ... We slipped into the food storage room, which I did NOT spend much time in as a child, and made a delightful discovery: Barry + Cindy written all over the walls! We laughed and laughed. Dad denies he wrote any of it, threw the blame on his little sister, Carol. We all signed our names on the wall as well, with the year next to it.
One of the best parts of the visit was getting to spend an extra lot of time with Grandma Holley, now that she's living with my mom and dad. She has her own room and spent a lot of time back there, but we would go in her room and have conversations, and once or twice a day, she would come out to the living room and share stories with the whole group.
She told me that the first time she rode a horse, someone helped her onto the horse's back, and she just kept going and fell off the other side.
Her first date was around the age of 12. The boy picked her up on his bike - she rode the handlebars and they went to the movies.
Last year for Christmas, she bought herself a beautiful puzzle with a landscape picture and a border of animals and birds (made by some nature conservancy). She spent several weeks at the table in her house working on it, and when she was finally done, she left it out for a few weeks more. She couldn't bring herself to box it up yet when she had put so much time into it, so she slid it onto a cookie sheet and under her guest bed to give herself some more time to grow unattached. Well, she forgot about it until one day, she was vacuuming in the guest room and heard a few pieces clink up into the vacuum! Oh no! What did my tenacious grandma do? She took the vacuum out to the shed and dissected the contents of the bag until she found all three missing puzzle pieces. Then she packed it all up in the box, taped it up, labeled it "All pieces here" and donated it to the multiple sclerosis society.
We went to the Logan Aquatic Center Saturday afternoon. Everyone had a blast on the waterslides and the diving board. My kids always had a willing aunt or uncle to go with them. Ryan, especially, seemed to be burning off stress and having a blast.
Gemma was an old pro on the high dive.
Hazel was doing cartwheels off the diving boards! I've never seen her do that before, and she made it look so effortless.
Jack would pencil dive off the high dive, or flip from the low dive.
We caught on video, Gemma doing a belly flop dive off the low dive. One of the reunion activities was making a short film, so this one and some other falls made a great gag reel.
The kids took Dollie on the water slide for their video, where she comes to life and her ambition is to beat Todd in a waterslide race. It was super funny!
Xiao taught me, Jack, and Hazel how to play Mah Jong. It was addicting! I have no idea how the scoring works - we just had to trust her, ha.
Gemma got stung by a wasp on her eyebrow. Her eye puffed up for the next day or two. It was so sad! Jack got stung by a wasp on his bum. He had a hard time sitting down at first, but thankfully, it seemed to heal more easily than Gemma's. That'll teach me to make my kids play outside, huh?
Because Emily's family wasn't there, the only kids were mine and Scott's. It was nice to be able to give them so much of our focus. Ethan and Gemma bonded hard and played animals and other imaginary games almost constantly. Elise won all our hearts with her sweet voice, hand holding, and hugs.
Our last night in Utah, we went back to Dad's cousin Delbert's horse ranch for another magical experience up close with horses like we had last summer.
Well, it didn't turn out quite the way we imagined it would. One of the mares was a fiesty mama who was in a bad mood. All the girls were standing together, petting other horses, when Big Mama felt threatened for no good reason and swept her head over the group in an aggressive manner. Gemma ran, Hazel ducked, and shockingly, Xiao got bit on the back, lifted off the ground, and tossed a foot away by Big Mama! It was ridiculous.
No one felt safe after that. Delbert was not as apologetic as we thought he should have been, the mean horse was tied to the fence in time out, and then all the kids were still encouraged to ride another horse while Xiao and Ryan went into the house to assess the damage and get cleaned up. It was intimidating. No one enjoyed it. We got out of the pasture pretty quickly afterwards. Xiao ended up with a bite on her back the size of Ryan's fist, with a bit of broken skin.
It wasn't enough to make Gemma stop loving horses fiercely, but the rest of us are feeling much less favorable towards them.
Since we were in Preston, we made a celebrity stop at the high school in honor of Napoleon Dynamite.
