So, summer is 10 days away from ending and all my kids are back in school already. I don't know what it is about the start of a school year, but it is always the most difficult time emotionally for me. ALWAYS. It's also always the start of slower times, being able to get caught up on chores and having a cleaner house...so who am I to complain?
Before Kenzie and Ben left to the University we did go on some adventures together. We went ATV'ing up in our beautiful mountains with our friends Jason and Rachel.
At one point we got pretty wet crossing the creek...you wouldn't believe how much of that water entered the car and soaked us...or maybe you would if you've done something similar. Think no windows anywhere in the ATV.
It's amazing the places these machines can take you.
Yes, I did get pretty muddy...my kids thought it was hilarious.
Poler jackets are the best when it's cold and you want a coat and a blanket.
We also hiked up our local mountains...and took cool pictures together.
And did perfect handstands....
And tried to teach our younger brother to do the same.
We picked huckleberries. All of us picked huckleberries, but Kenzie and I picked the most when the boys went fishing and we had a girls weekend together. Yes we did fill those nalgene bottles, we know...AMAZING. Yes we rewarded ourselves dinner and two girl movies after all the good picking we did.
And sometimes we worked out together (I don't know if I can really say together because Ben lifts a lot more than me and we really kind of work out parallel to each other and don't get in each other's way but I'm going to say together for the sake of this blog).
We don't only lift weights together but we also bike together and yes, that's a wasp sting on my left shoulder that I got after crashing on my mountain bike going uphill (don't ask but hit a rock wrong) and falling off the side to a cliff (okay just a really steep bank with a big log that I hit with my back) and scraping my legs all up. I am getting a lot of bike crash scars lately. But really, what I'm trying to ask here was wasn't the crash enough? Did I really have to get stung by a wasp too? That's what I was thinking while I was trying to catch the boys on the downhill. I never caught them.
Jordan started dental school amongst all this busy-ness.
We also did things like watch the Barbie movie and argue about whether it went too far in criticizing men or not (hours and hours and hours and days and days and days of debate), watch the Oppenheimer movie (personally I thought it was slow and boring...but I'll give it credit for good history), go camping and buy lots of backpacking gear (Brad) and just wind down our summer in a good way...for the most part. I mean we are human and not everything is perfect so there were some fights...like the fight about whether or not the camp food was good enough or not between the boys...but really I think they were all just very tired and easily irritated.
Then Kenzie and Ben packed up and went back to college the same day Jake and Riley had their first day back at school. Riley is a senior...didn't get a first day picture of either but I did get a second day picture of Jake who is a sophomore now.
He's trying to make his hair curly. It's all the style now. Just gonna say it, this isn't his best smolder though. It's more like a "are you really going to take a picture of me like this mom" look. Yes Jake I am and I'm going to post it on our blog. By the way Jake just keeps growing and growing and growing. I don't know when it will stop.
Also, just after the kids left I was on a walk after dinner and caught this beautiful sunset with the moon.
When my kids got back to Utah they got to attend a wedding of my niece that I had to miss because we are short staffed at work. So here are a couple of pictures from the reception.
Here's a picture of Ben and Kenzie with a cut-out life size picture of their cousin, Rick, who is on a mission for the Mormon church in Argentina. I think this tradition of having a cut-out life size picture of a child serving a mission at a reception probably started out as a joke but most mormon families do it now. It may have been the first time Kenzie and Ben saw something like that at a reception.
And here's a picture of everyone (Ben, Kenzie, Molly and Jordan) with my sister Anjee's family, minus my niece Kelsey. Love Jordan's smile. For some reason that makes me think of his pictures when he was little.
Then, since I missed my kids so much, I decided to visit them over labor day. Really, I just had some time off and didn't want to stay at home during the motorcycle rally and didn't want to fish and camp with Brad and the boys so I headed to Utah. I mean, I did miss my kids too but not that bad after only two weeks.
We decided to go to Lagoon together.
I also had a goal of hiking to the top of Mount Timpanogas. So Molly, her brothers Jacob and Kaden, Ben, Jordan and I set off Sunday morning to peak. However, peaking wasn't meant to be that day because when we got to the saddle, and were at the spot to make the last ascent to the top the wind picked up and none of us really had the right gear for the weather we were facing. I'm still going to call it good though because we did hike 14 miles and went up 4300 feet. My knees were killing me by the end. I hate getting older. We saw tons of water, beautiful wildflowers and whole herds of mountain goats.
We also did get some rain on the way down (it didn't last very long) and because of the rain we did get to see this beautiful rainbow on the way down.
Molly caught the perfect picture of it.
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