River Raft Trip

Monday, Tony and I went and rafted the Snake River with my parents, Tami and Casey, Casey's sister, Tyson, Olivia, and Tessa. We had such a great time! If you haven't done a river raft trip, I think this is a must. It was the first time for Tony, Olivia, and Tessa. They all had a blast!

The Group--minus my parents and Tyson who were sitting in the front of the raft.

(L to R: Tami, Olivia, Tony, Casey, Kathy, Taffy, Tessa)

One of the highlights of the trip was stopping at this nice little cliff for a little cliff jumping. As Olivia and I were climbing up, we decided that we HAD to jump since climbing back down on that ledge would be WAY scarier!! (Olivia is on top, and I'm still climbing up.)

Taking the plunge! (with my nose plugged like a dork, of course)

Tyson kept us entertained the entire trip, riding his part of the raft like he was in a rodeo, hooting and hollering the entire way down, tackling Tessa off the raft and into the water, and showing off his mad cliff diving skills. Here he is mid-backflip. (Sorry the picture is so blurry. I stole all these from facebook, and this one came out super small. I lost a lot of quality enlarging it.)

Here's the crazy guy way up in the tree. Can you see him? Apparently the cliff wasn't nearly high or dangerous enough.

Cowabunga!!! (Okay, so he didn't say this, but he should have.)

Fire Alarm Season

Every summer, around the end of July, I am very rudely awakened by my fire alarm. It will beep about three or four times, then stop. I will start to doze off again, just in time for it to sound AGAIN. And again. And again. This will continue for several nights over a couple weeks' time. For the first summer in our house, we just endured this--having many sleepless nights over our schizophrenic fire alarm system. The next summer, we took the batteries out of the alarms, only to find out that they work WITHOUT the batteries in, too.

Last summer, after the first couple nights of this torture, I think I discovered the cause. About that same time of summer, we have these tiny little bugs that come in through our window screens. (And our windows HAVE to stay open all night to cool things off enough to make the days bearable this time of year). They usually congregate around my bedside lamp on the wall, and in the bathroom all around the vanity lights. By the next morning, they're always dead all over the countertops. Strangely, this lasts about the same amount of time as the fire alarm mayhem. Hmmmm. All I can figure is that after the lights go out, the little bugs fly up toward the little green fire alarm light in my room and cover the smoke sensor, causing the alarm to go off. Genius, I know!

Anyway, last night, around 1:30, the alarm sounded for the first time this summer. I laid there, hoping that this would be one of those nights where it only goes off once or twice, and then quits. We weren't so lucky. After about twenty of thirty minutes of not more than a three minute break between outbursts, and a very scare little girl in my bed (Mylie is TERRIFIED of the fire alarm), we did what we had to do. I grabbed a ladder, which Tony climbed up to remove the battery, then I was off to the utility room to flip the breaker that controls the alarm. So hopefully we can sleep in peace over the next couple of weeks until those pesky, fire-alarm-loving bugs leave. In the meantime, I'll be praying we don't have a fire, and welcoming any suggestions for a better way to deal with this problem.

Annoying, I know.

So I just finished doing one of the most annoying things in blogging--"catching up on my blog." This really is a pet peeve of mine, enough so that I'm usually pretty up-to-date on my blog, but I have been slacking. Blogging really is NOT a summer sport. So I decided to put this little note at the start of this seemingly endless string of posts. If you are like me, and after reading one post, see that there is another posted on the same day, you may think to yourself (or say out loud), "What? I don't have time to read more than one post from you right now." And then you skim through it (out of courtesy, I guess?) and mumble something about not having enough time after all that to post a comment, then you can just stop now. However, if you choose to read on, don't say you weren't given fair warning. And if you acually read all of these posts, and even take time to comment on any of them, my hat goes off to you. You are an amazing example of patience, dilligence, and blog-reading stamina!

Cokeville Trip

I go to Cokeville all the time, but I don't think I've ever really blogged about it. For one, it's only an hour and twenty minutes away, so we really do visit there pretty often. For another, we rarely do anything "blog-worthy" while we're there. But this time, we tried to.

I actually went over to take care of my mom's yard for a couple of days. She is in Alaska, my dad was in Florida, and the girl she had hired to take care of it had youth conference, so I took my kids and went over. Basically, I just needed to keep everything watered (which is really a task!) If you haven't seen my mom's yard lately, you should make it a point to go see it sometime. It is incredible! But if you're not going to be in Cokeville, and you are curious, click here to see just a bit of what it is like.

In Cokeville, you can't water your yard between 11am and 5pm. So we took advantage of that NO WATERING time and did a couple of fun things.

On Friday, we hiked Big Hill in 90+ degree weather. Why, you ask? Because I'm crazy. Connor had been asking to do it for quite awhile, so I decided we'd go for it--just me with all three kids. Needless to say, it was a little rough, but we made it, and now they know what Cokeville looks like from up on the hill.

Mariah did walk for a very short stretch. Other than that, she was on my hip, and Mylie was holding my other hand. Fun way to hike, right?

We made it!!

Saturday, we headed to Bear Lake. If I had known the weather forecast, I would have done Big Hill on Saturday--much cooler with some wind--and the lake on Friday when it was HOT. Oh well. The kids still had a great time.

Cheese! (Mariah actually says this now whenever I'm taking her picture.)

I don't know how she does it, but here's Mylie rockin' the ophan 'do.

"Mooooom! Why are you always taking my picture?!"

Yard Update

As promised, here is the first yard update:


Probably the most exciting thing that has happened around the yard this summer is the addition of a complete sprinkler system and some new sod. I wish I would have taken a picture of this view last summer so you could have seen the weeds (but I know you all know what weeds look like--now picture them covering this entire area and being about waist-high!) Needless to say, we were ready to trade that weed patch for some grass. Here is a picture taken the afternoon before the sod came.



And here is the AFTER view! With an amazing crew, we were able to lay about 7,000 feet of sod in just about an hour and a half! Thanks again--Heidi, Dan, Angela, Dale, Frank, Michelle, Diana, and Roger. There are a few spots that aren't very green yet, but because we did sod in the front, I know that they will bounce back and it will all look GREAT soon enough.

Here's the garden this year--minus the corn and the raspberries, which are to the left of my camera view. We have onions, radishes, lettuce, peas, carrots, potatoes, and broccoli this year. How exciting!

There's not much to update yet with my flowers, other than THIS: My daisies have gone absolutely CRAZY! They are completely taking over my tie wall beds. They are beautiful and very happy, but I'm sad to say that I will have to pull a lot of them out this fall to replace them with some bulbs and a little more variety.

Really, this is the tragedy of the crazy daisies: This little guy is a real beauty, but nobody can see him because the daisies are hogging the entire flowerbed! I thought I'd give him a little attention on the blog.

Haying Season

The other day, I was asked two questions by somebody that used to live on a ranch. "Is Tony haying yet?" and "Do you just hate haying season?" My answers were "Yes," and "No"--in that order. I then explained why I don't just hate haying season. For one, Tony doesn't hay after dinner. And if he's close to home, he will even come in for lunch sometimes. So I still see him just as often, or more often, than I do during the school year. Also, Connor and Mylie enjoy going haying with Tony, and I enjoy getting those little breaks when they do. Finally, we have made a lot of fun memories during haying season. The first one I can think of is going out and eating lunch with Tony on his birthday in the shade of the tractor (before we had any kids). Another great one (which has become an annual event) is our family camper sleepover out at the pivot. Each year when they're haying their pivot, which is about halfway to Evanston, Tony's grandpa takes his really nice camper out there so they have a place to come and eat lunch, dinner, or even stay overnight if somebody decides to work late. So last Monday, we all packed up and had dinner, FHE, and movie, and a family sleepover in the camper! It's fun for everyone.

Just chillin' in the camper!

Enjoying some strawberry milkshakes and a movie.

My beauties in the morning.

WOW!

The entire family all piled in the tractor and baled hay for awhile after breakfast.

It's What Fun Is!

About three weeks ago, the kids finished their Safe/Respectul/Responsible sticker charts, so it was time to make plans for Lagoon. We wanted it to be a really fun day, so we left Mariah with a babysitter, and had a few other people go with us so we could all take turns riding with each other. And I decided that I really just wanted to have fun with the kids, and not worry about documenting the entire day, so I didn't bring my camera. We had a BLAST! I spent about the same amount of time with Connor and Mylie, letting them choose which rides they wanted to ride and laughing and screaming right along with them. Connor surprised me (sort of ) by riding every single thing he was tall enough for--including Wicked and Colossus! We even spent a couple hours in Lagoon-a-Beach, which was a lot of fun, too. At one point, while sailing through the air on the swings, I almost started crying when I realized how much fun being a mom is. Nice place for a spiritual/emotional experience, right?!? My 77-year-old Grandma Oberg came along, and even rode the Spider with us. She's awesome! The entire day, the Lagoon slogan just keep going through my head: "It's what fun is!" And a day at Lagoon with your four and six-year-old is WHAT FUN IS!

But wait, you say, I see pictures ahead. That's right. We went back for more! About an hour before we left Lagoon the first time, the power went down and a whole bunch of rides were out of commission. So they gave us free passes to come back another day! I didn't tell the kids about this, and on the day that our Brady family reunion began (which was held near Huntsville), we all loaded up to go to reunion . . . and then I drove to Lagoon! They were surprised and excited to go back. This time, we had Mariah with us, so I didn't get to ride as much, but even Mariah got to ride on a bunch of rides and they all had another great day at Lagoon!

Mylie loved being the "big" sister and showing Mariah how to ride all the rides.

Mariah was mesmerized by the animals on the train ride.

Beautiful Mylie!

I couldn't really get a picture of Connor on any of the rides since he was only interested in the ones that went really fast or really high (or BOTH!!) But I did get this shot of him soaking wet right before we left the park. The smile on his face says it all.