Super Saturday

Yesterday was SO MUCH FUN. We spent the day doing stuff as a family (78% of a family - we missed you Summer & Rachel!). It doesn't get much better than that (unless we are 100% percent anyway).

We started off at the Orange County Marble Show.

There were chances to learn from marble experts.

 And lots of opportunities to ooh and ah over cool marbles...

...like this one which was maybe 2 inches in diameter and had a city inside.

There were nifty wood things to display your marble collection on.

One nice guy told the kids that they could each pick out ten of these marbles for free - fun!

I took a while choosing some beautiful marbles made by the Santa-esque guy in the marble vest. He made all these at the Jabo plant. He told me you can rent the equipment and make your own marbles. When I bought ten of his marbles, he said, "Thank you for liking my art." I really liked that. I'll have to say that whenever someone buys a book from me (if I ever get around to selling them).

This was my favorite table. If I had money to burn, I would have had a bonfire right here! The guy takes credit cards because...

...he was selling all these gorgeous marbles from different artists. They were expensive. 

My favorite ones were the galaxy marbles like in the picture below. They were amazing! It was really like holding a little universe in your hand. Because you look through a convex surface, it looks so much bigger inside than you expect. I picked up my favorite and asked, "How much?" He nonchalantly said, "Oh, for that one, $5,000.00." Eek!

While the kids were waiting for me to make my final purchases, I let them mess around with my camera in the hall of the hotel. This was my favorite snapshot, by far.

We got back on the freeway and headed to the beach! Woohoo!

It was an unusual day at the beach. For one thing, we saw a sea lion swim up close where the people were swimming! By this photo, he (she?) was further away, but at one point, the sea lion was as close to the sand as where the water would come up to my torso. He (for the sake of simplicity) popped up and the woman swimming close to him yelled and ran for shore. The sea lion simultaneously yelped and dove in the opposite direction. I don't know who was more startled.

The other weird thing that happened was that Gwen was stung by a stingray! We have been going to that beach for decades and that has NEVER happened. She was in pain and bloody, so Stan and I went to ask the lifeguard what to do for her and he called another lifeguard who came and picked her up in a jeep. He took her back to the lifeguard station where they have buckets and hot water, just for stingray victims. Yeah, victims plural. There were four others when she got there and five new ones when she left. They just kept moving down the row as new victims arrived and chatted while they filled up with new hot water as the buckets cooled off. One of the lifeguards said there were more stings yesterday because the water was calmer than usual and stingrays like calm water. Chalk one up for rough surf, huh?

I didn't get a lot of pictures, but here is one of my boy at the beach. One of the best things about the beach was hanging out with the Pellegrinos :)

And, finally, some of the marbles I bought. The two dark ones are Stan's, the two small ones are vintage, the two marbles next to the biggest one were made by Santa Claus Man and the last one, the purple and green is a
Jabo Joker 3 Run.

Provo

Last month sometime, I don't even remember which week without looking at the calendar, the five youngest kids, Summer, and I (Stan was in California and Rachel was in Indiana) stayed with my brother and sister-in-law in Genola while we worked on getting Summer settled at BYU. There may also have been some (a lot of) fun going on that week, too.

I remembered that there were fish tanks in the basement of one of the buildings on campus, but I didn't remember which one, so I asked at the information desk, "Where are the fish in the basement?" She had no idea what I was talking about, but after we looked around the wrong science building for a few minutes, a more informed person sent us to the Widstoe building. Besides seeing the fish and crustaceans, we saw a student working in the growth chamber and I was able to tell the kids that that is what their dad did when he was at BYU.

We also went to the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum. More than one kid was confused when I excitedly told them that we were going to the Bean Museum. They caught some of my enthusiasm when they realized we were looking at animals instead of legumes.

I really like this picture of Summer, but I couldn't tell you why. Maybe I am just sentimental about anything Summer since we all miss her a lot.

There were walls of child eye level heads that lent themselves to the following silliness -



I also got to see some college roommates and had so much fun! Michelle fed us lunch and my kids played and visited with her kids. It felt so nice to be in her home and it was wonderful to see her and her family :)

Summer, Naomi and I also went out to a long, delightful lunch with Karla, Kathleen, April and Kelly. Summer understood that much better why I had so much fun in college after she hung out with these wonderful women for a couple of hours. My cheeks hurt from smiling and laughing when we were done!

Some of the other, non-photographed things we did were to help Summer get a state ID, a bank account, books and food. We ate at the Creamery on 9th and at the Wilkinson Center. We went to the Museum of Art (no pictures allowed) and helped the girls who were moving out of Summer's new apartment clean the bathrooms (strangely enough, that was part of getting Summer her state ID!).

I started following a blog a couple weeks before our trip and the blog author was teaching a class the week we were there. I was SO excited to be able to take a class from Karleigh Jae! Here is the book I made.

It was sewn using a double needle Coptic binding. I hope I said that right!

I love the endpapers :)

The day Summer was in Freshman Orientation, I took the younger kids to Cascade Springs. The road was closed, so we went around the back way. It was kind of nice because I got to stop on the side of the road and show the kids some lilacs, one of my all time favorite flowers, which don't grow where we live.

The most exciting part of the day was seeing a baby moose, just a few feet away. We kept hoping we wouldn't run into its mother, and we didn't - whew!

We also saw a snake :)

It was a lovely day and a lovely trip, but it turned bittersweet as we said goodbye to Summer.

We can't wait to see her again!

Spring Break! Road Trip! Woohoo!

The kids and I (Stan had to work and we missed him) hit the road last week. We headed east and stayed with my darling friend Mandy in AZ. These signs on her fence made me smile. I'm guessing the first one is spot on, but the second one is a little bit of an exaggeration.

Here is her dog Ginger...see what I mean?

The kids LOVED Ginger and they also loved swimming.

Mandy made a chocolate cake for Heather, whose birthday was on Thursday. Heather really scored. She had three different birthday cakes this year. Amanda and I took care of the beaters!

Here is a video of the amazing birthday candle Mandy put on Heather's cake.

We had fun listening to Amanda and David play the piano and drums together. When they were done, David let the kids mess around and play his drums. They had a blast.

We spent an day (during which we went shopping at some really fun stores) and two nights in AZ. It was wonderful spending time with Amanda and her family.

The next day, we headed east again. The desert we drove through, especially for the first hour or two, was beautiful. The picture doesn't come close to doing it justice. There were flowers of almost every color of the rainbow in bloom. My favorite was the ocotillo - so lovely!

I am glad my sister-in-law Steph gave me the heads up, because when I saw the Gila Valley Temple on the side of the road, I stopped and we had lunch, instead of driving by with my mouth hanging open in confusion :)

We went to see Matt, Steph and their darling girls in NM next. They had pu pu platters for dinner when we got there. They were amazingly delicious and I ate way more than fit in my stomach...oooo full!

Matt and Steph also had a cake for Heather (cake #2 - lucky girl).
Aren't the cherry blossoms pretty?

Here is birthday song video #2. Can you guess what my favorite part of the video is?

After dinner, Summer and Rachel both got on Facebook and chatted with each other. I kid you not.

We piled most of the kids in the living room which is just how they wanted it, at least until the middle of the night, when some of them wandered in to the room I was in to snuggle.

Here are all the cousins together.

We spent two nights and a day with Matt and Steph. The day we spent with them, they took us to the coolest place, Hueco Tanks State Park. The pictures pale in comparison to reality. It is a honeycomb of boulders, caves and crevasses to climb and crawl through - kid (and parent) heaven.

Opal, Matt and Steph's youngest.

One of the many crawl spaces.

You never knew where someone would appear. I looked up and there was Matt.

Steph and their oldest, Ruby.

Coral, their middle girl.

Gwen was really in her element.

Here is my beautiful Heather on her 13th birthday.

After we hiked around for a while, we ran all the kids through the restroom and started on our tour. I thought the old archeologist who was our guide looked like the Pied Piper most of the time.

Here is Newspaper Rock, with paintings and graffiti layered on top of each other from the 1800's to thousands of years ago.

The cactuses were blooming.

The kids were excited when the guide showed them a rock smoothed by woolly mammoths wanting a scratching spot.

These masks were some of the older paintings on the rock walls.

These are more recent and were painted by Apaches.

He took us to one spot near water that had a slide smoothed by generations of Native American children playing. Our kids did their part to erode.

Naomi was a trooper on our hikes. She kept going and going until she tripped and fell near the end and then she wanted carried for a bit. One of the men on our tour said she did better than some of the adults on a hike he took a month before. It was a wonderful day and especially fun to spend it with Steph and Matt :)

Somehow, I ended up with three kids in bed with me that night, on a full sized fold out couch. When I woke up in the morning, Michael had a leg over me on one side and Naomi had a leg over me on the other. It was tricky getting up...

Friday we headed back to AZ to stay one more night. David planned Mandy's birthday party for that night, a bit early, so that I could come. It was so nice of him and so fun. Somehow, Amanda got me on the dance floor which brought back memories of stake dances when we were teenagers. How did the time go by so fast?

Here she is with David and her son Nathan.

We made it home safe and had one more birthday party, this time with brownies and ice cream :)

Happy Birthday Heather!