Fun Times!

Friday, June 27, 2014

Busy, Busy June!

Wow! I can’t believe how busy our June has been!  I signed the kids for swim lessons, which they loved!  But it was hard for Sophie to be patient while we were there for an hour and a half, three days a week.
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By the second week I gave in and let Sophie put her suit on and just sit on the top step.  She loved it!  The life guards and teachers didn’t seem to mind, but I thought I should keep an eye on her since I was letting her swim during lesson time.  I sat right by the edge of the steps, and Sophie decided to get further and further in.  At one point, she slipped under the water and my mom instincts kicked in.  I got into the pool, shoes and all, and pulled her out!  She was fine, but I was all wet the rest of the time, and it was cold!  The life guard didn’t even notice and another parent went over and gave him a hard time.  The next day, I let her get in again.  This time, no problems happened and Sophie was happy having fun.
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On June 14th, Jefferson was baptized and confirmed a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  It was such a perfect day!  Jeff chose his dad to baptize and confirm him, his two grandpa’s to be the witnesses, his cousin, Tyler to give a talk on the Holy Ghost and his Nana to give the closing prayer.

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Our good friends, Chris and Nick, were also baptizing their daughter, Calli the same day.  We had to get a picture of them all together.
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After the baptism, we had everyone come over to our house for dinner.  We missed a lot of our friends and family that couldn’t make it, but we ran out of food, so it was a good thing our group wasn’t bigger!
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We are so proud of Jeff and the choice he made!
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Nana made him “it’s great to be 8” cupcakes.
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Jeff got a lot of neat gifts for his baptism.  He loved getting his own set of scriptures with his name on them!  He’s even been reading them almost every night on his own!
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The next day was Father’s Day.  I felt bad it wasn’t super relaxing for Tom.  He had to help at the retirement center’s sacrament meeting after our own meetings were over.  But we tried to spoil him.  He got a sound system for our upstairs TV that was a Father’s Day/Birthday present.
Tom is such an amazing dad!
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That night, we went to my dad’s house for family pictures (hence the matching colors) and dinner.  I love my dad and I’m so grateful he’s still with us. 
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I feel bad I haven’t done more fun things with my kids yet this summer.  So one day, we spontaneously went bowling.  I took Cedric’s friend, Charlie (his mom told us about the free bowling), so it was me and five kids!  I think if I didn’t have a toddler running around, it would’ve been a lot more fun for me.
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However, Sophie loved bowling too!  It was just hard to wait her turn.
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Another girls night with Tiffany and Chris was a welcome break.  Mani/pedi’s and a movie, “The Fault in our Stars”.
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Speaking of movie, our whole family watched “Sleeping Beauty” together in preparation for the movie “Maleficent” that just came out.
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Jeff LOVES scouts!  He got to make and shoot bottle rockets for pack meeting.
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And then he got to go to cub country for two days of scout camp!  He was in heaven! (Thanks, Tiffany for the pictures!)
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Lily decided to make a fire pit in our back yard.  It sat there for a few days, when Jeff decided to actually start a fire in it!  I got quite mad, to say the least.  This is the after photo.
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I had the opportunity to go to two youth trips this month.  We had our ward Youth Conference June 12-14.  I only stayed through Friday, because of Jeff’s baptism, but it was such a fun and neat experience.
We stayed at a really nice cabin in Mount Pleasant.  Sometimes I was more one of the kids than one of the leaders.
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I didn’t get any pictures of our first day, but we did a service project at a small food pantry, went swimming and played games the first day.  We had amazing food and several devotionals.
Crazy Averi!
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Hayley and Kenzie were my car buddies.
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The next day we had a yummy breakfast then headed into Manti to go to the temple.
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A lot of the group had siblings or parents with them.  This picture is of the orphans, with out any other family there.
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I was asked to be the adult leader to sit with the kids who were not going into the temple.  We had the waiting room pretty much to ourselves and after listening to a spiritual message, we just texted selfies to each other and chit chatted. 
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Here’s all the leaders that helped with Youth Conference.  I was about half the age of all the other leaders and about double the age of all the youth, but it was still a fun group!
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Then this past week, June 23-26, we had our girls camp.  This was an amazing week!
Here’s our before picture.  We ended up having eight girls come and about eight leaders.
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We headed to our camp sight, Timpanogos Cave Camp Ground, around 3:30 and brought up tin foil dinners for our first night.
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We had pre-made roasting sticks and I made mine to look like a hot dog.  That night we did S’mores and I tried my first roasted Starburst, mmmm.
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That night was cold and I didn’t sleep well.  Which helped get me up early that morning.  We had breakfast and headed off to hike Timpanogos Cave.
We got some fun pictures while on the hike.  Again, I was more one of the girls then a leader. 
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Finally made it to the top and ate our lunch.
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The caves were amazing! I hadn’t been in a couple decades, so it was fun to go back.
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The rest of the day we just relaxed and hung out at camp.
One of the fun things we had at camp was “tree-mail”.  Everyone had a little slot and we’d put notes and messages in them for each other.
Here’s one of the things I made to put in everyone’s tree-mail.
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We also had secret sisters and the girls enjoyed making crafts for each other’s “sister” and sneakily giving them to each other.
That night I slept 100X’s better!
The next day we had a nice breakfast.  Here I am eating while the girls are playing pranks on me.  I didn’t realize I had over 80 photos taken on my phone while I was eating and Averi doing goofy poses in the background.  I picked the best one to keep…
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Then we did certification.  This was nothing like camp certification was when I was in young women’s.  We played a couple rounds of Bingo and talked about the different things on our Bingo cards as we played.
My good friend, Chris and I played as well.
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Then we learned rope tying using pull-n-peel Twizzlers.  It was such a fun way to do it!
Here’s my friend, Stacie and I showing off our licorice knots.
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We had lunch and then made necklaces and practiced our skits for that evening.
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I was on dinner crew and we made quite the feast!  Grilled chicken, dutch-oven cheese bread and potatoes, grilled pineapple, green beans and cake!
That night we had the bishopric and their wives come up for dinner and skits.  Their skit was absolutely hilarious!
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We also had a guest speaker come and talk to us.  She was amazing and compared our lives to participating in an ironman race.  It was an amazing spiritual hour.
After, we had dessert and got in our warm clothes and snuggled around the fire.  We had a wonderful spiritual night sharing our testimonies with one another.  That’s always one of my favorite parts of girls camp.
We went to bed quite late, but that didn’t stop the girls from toilet papering our tent.
The next day, we slept in, packed up and got ready to go.  We revealed our secret sisters.  Mine was Jackie (also, in our skit we did David and Goliath. Jackie was David and I was Goliath :).

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We had two awesome priesthood holders who joined us as well. 
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And an amazing camp director, Tammy (unfortunately, this was the only picture I had of just her).
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We had a great time and it was hard to see it end!
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Tom took several days off work to help with the kids while I was at youth conference and girls camp.  His mom also helped with one of the days.  I was amazed with how well Tom does with keeping up with the kids and the house.  When I got home from girls camp I commented on the clean floor (he even deep cleaned the tile grout!), the garage, laundry, kitchen, happy kids, etc.  He just said "I had to find something to fill the time".  I hardly get half that stuff done in a day, I don't know how he does it!  I'm such a lucky girl.
The month’s not over yet!  We still have several events in the next few days.
To be continued…

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