Mandie's Birthday

My birthday was split between two days.  On my actual birthday I was surprised by Holly in the morning.  She had a scavenger hunt set up for me.  I got an envelope at each location.  The first sent us to St. Vincent's thrift store on a treasure hunt.  I got a gravy boat that looks like a turkey.  We then went to Goodwill where I was "forced" to buy some new shirts.  We also went to Sonic for some cheddar peppers and Pastry Perfection for some donuts.  Russ took me to lunch at Red Lobster.  Our ward was having a desert/movie night so we ate lots of desert and watched Despicable Me.  The next day Rusty made us this breakfast. We canned pears, went on a hike, and tried to go ice skating.  It turns out dollar day at the ice skating rink was enough of a madhouse that we gave up on that idea and went to a movie at the dollar theater.  We also made a stop at Costco and ran into Joylynn Moore, a dear friend of mine from Arco.  She was my 4-H leader who taught me how to make pies and bread. She also came to Manti when we got married and did my hair on my wedding day.  It was so fun to see her and visit with her.  We finished the day off with steaks for dinner with Mike and Holly.  Happy Birthday to me.

Biggest Egg Ever

 That ginormous egg is for real.  I found it in my chicken coop one day.  Poor chicken!

Halloween Shirts

 Every holiday needs a craft.  I found t-shirts on sale near Halloween and found something cute to do with them.  We printed Halloween clip art, cut it out, traced it onto parchment paper, then layed it on the t-shirts.  We filled a spray bottle with bleach water and sprayed the shirt.  It discolored the shirt everywhere except under the parchment paper cut outs.  Some of them turned out better than others. The smaller cutouts allowed the bleach to bleed underneath and looked less than perfect.  All of them were cute enough to wear.

Save the Worms!

 I came out of the back door of the house one afternoon to this scene.  Katelyn and Elena had flooded this area.  This happens quite often.  The kids call it the Amazon River or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  This time they were catching the worms they had flooded out to "save them."  However, to save them they were putting them in a cup full of water.  I taught them that the worms come out to get away from the water, so putting them in water wasn't very good for them.  They filled the cup with dirt and saved the worms.

Zoo Boise Butterfly Exhibit

 We get pretty excited when summer rolls around and the butterfly exhibit at Zoo Boise opens up for the season.  This was a particularly good day to go.  I think the butterflies were attracted to the tie-dyed shirts we had just made.

 Rusty and I have heard tale of the plane wreckage at Loon Lake near the Secesh River area above McCall.  When we planned a few days away for backpacking this summer we decided that would be our destination.  We spent three days and two nights backpacking.

It only took us a few hours to get to the lake.  Those 5 miles went by no problem.  We brought supplies to go fishing but found the lake to be an undesirable fishing location.  It was only about a foot deep for a good 50+ feet into the lake.  We looked for a place to camp and found the camping locations near the lake to be very overused and kind of dirty.  So far it sounds like a mediocre trip but those little things didn't matter because I was spending time with Rusty in the outdoors.  We spent some time walking around the lake looking for the plane wreckage.  We found it and that was pretty cool.  I didn't expect that much of the wreckage to be left.  It started raining pretty hard while we were looking so we took shelter in the plane.  That worked out great for me but Russ was underneath a big hole and he got more wet than he would have out in the rain.  After we left the wreckage we decided to work our way away from the lake to find a less used place to camp.  Our plan for the second day was to follow a trail shown on the map that led to some high mountain lakes and fish there.  We went toward that trail and found a great place to camp.  If anyone had ever camped there before you wouldn't have know it.  It was perfect and quiet and fabulous.  We packed extra light on the tent, using only a piece of visqueen and some rope.  We packed extra heavy on the food and ate right!  We ate hamburgers with the works and chocolate fondue with bananas, strawberries, toasted coconut, and toasted almonds.  

Our second day of hiking was a bit harder.  The trail that was supposed to be there to follow was MIA.  We went up and around and down and further than the five miles the day before wandering in the wilderness.  We ended up coming down a really steep mountain in an attempt to get to a main trail.  We knew it would be on the other side of the river, but hoped we would find a place to cross.  After an hour or so of deliberation and investigation we found our way across the river and found another great spot to camp.  It was a chilled out night and we hiked out the next day.

Russ and Ridge

 blowing off the driveway...

and watching the Priesthood session of general conference.

Spirit of Boise

 We have been to the Spirit of Boise morning balloon launch one other time.  Ridge loved watching the balloons blow up and fly away.  We tried to go last year but missed it.  When I heard they were doing a kids morning with free tethered balloon rides I knew we had to get there this year.  As a bonus, my parents were in town on their way to Northern Idaho to visit Darci.  We almost decided against the tethered ride when we saw the lines, but then watched how fast they were moving and went for it.  It was so fun.  Due to the weight limits we had to split up for our ride, but we all got to go.  So fun.  Hopefully Russ can get there with us next year.

and...First Day of Preschool

 Ridge was nervous to start preschool with Ms. Laura until he found out Amy (Holly's sweet sister) was the assistant teacher for Ridge's class.  He LOVES preschool and is learning so much.  Plus he is exceptionally cute!

First Day of School

 How cute are these two?  5th grade and 2nd grade here they come!

Butterfly Garden

 Ever since we did the butterfly experiment on Kauai I have wanted to find a way to watch more monarchs make their great change.  We have a small flower garden area in the back yard that I thought might be a great spot to try to create a butterfly garden.  The only place a monarch caterpillar will lay it's eggs is on milkweed.  It turns out milkweed is a difficult plant to find.  I had to order mine from monarchwatch.org.  I planted it in the late spring.  It didn't look like much.  Actually, it died.  Then out of the roots of the dead milkweed new milkweed grew.  The new plants limped along all summer.  One day, out of the blue, I glanced down at my sad little plants and saw a caterpillar.  I pretty much started yelling with excitement.  Then, to make it even better, I spotted a second caterpillar on a second plant.  The caterpillars were gone the next day, but we found one of them hanging upside down under our table a few days later.  We watched it go from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. Good story until I found aphids all over my now beloved milkweed. I sprayed it to kill the aphids and it killed the plants.  Maybe I will get new ones out of the dead ones again?

First Peach Crop

Our first ever peach crop on one of the peach trees we planted last year.  The tree yielded 3 peaches. They were delicious. We were pretty excited.  Hoping for more next year.

Trick or Treating in August

One evening when I had the young women over for an activity Ridge asked Rusty to take him trick or treating.  Earlier in the day we had gone to a craft store and they had their Halloween stuff out.  I think that is why he had trick or treating on the brain.  Russ told Ridge that you can't go trick or treating without a costume.  Ridge disappeared and a few minutes later he came back with a costume on.  Being the Dad that he is, they went trick or treating.  Russ took him to a few people that we know well.  He ended his August trick or treat with two full size candy bars and an otter pop.  He was pretty excited.  We did have to tell him that the next time he would get to go is October.

Floating the River

Floating the river is one of our favorite summer activities.  We can make the trip from our house and back in about 3 hours.  Sometimes we take dinner with us and eat while we are floating.  We jump out and swim. We bring snorkels and watch for fish as we float by.  Occasionally we will stop and stack rocks at one of the stacked rock beaches.  Ridge has a little shark that we tie to the kayak.  His name is Sharky and he loves the river as much as the rest of us.  We look for the lights of Bronco Stadium and get excited when we spot them.  It is sad when floating season is over but we look forward to next year.