Camping.

Day one. Meal one. Loving life. :)

Camping.

Day one. Four hours in. Already dirty.

they are ready to go camping! Unfortunately I am not ready to go. Packing is the worst part of any camping trip.

"Im glad that i live in this beautiful world heavenly father created for me." when i see beautiful things like this it makes me so grateful. I have a feeling that is why heavenly father created sunsets, so that we would maybe just maybe stop to be grateful every once in a while.

Kem got her first sting today. And on the inside of her thigh. What an awful place for a sting. I did not see it since grandma came to the rescue so not sure if it was a bee or something els. Regardless, she is walking around like she just got off a horse. Poor baby.

More pics of our hike date...

It was a blast. I encourage everyone to go on a hike date at sunset. 

 

I warned him that this would be put on the internet and he still refused to take a good pic, so here it is...

 

We tried and tried to get a self portrait, but failed...miserably... 

It was so fun. I wanna go again. Tonight!

Choices and consequences...

Day One:
Kman refused to participate in his swim lesson. He sat on the side of the pool for the entire half hour while the other kids learned. After swim we went to the park and had a picnic and he had to sit on the blanket with  me and not play. He was so upset. Then we went home and he took a nap, which he does not normally do. I was just sure that he would learn his lesson from missing out on fun things and that he would participate in his lesson. I even warned him that we had planned to go to the big water park the next day and if he did not participate in his lesson tomorrow that he would have to sit on the grass while everyone else got to play in the water park.  I thought that surely he had gotten the message and that he would have no problems at swim lessons the next day.

Day Two:
WORSE!!! He did not even go near the pool where his lessons were. He threw a huge fit and created a huge scene. I was so mad that it took everything I had inside to not pick him up and throw him in the pool to drown. So against all my wishes and my heart pangs, we went to the water park with grandma and cousins and while everyone including mommy and kem went down the water slide and played in the sand boxes, he sat on the grass. HE HATED IT! he was so mad. And I kept asking him, are you mad at mommy or are you mad at yourself for not going to swim lessons. About 45 minutes into our fun, he came to me with no prompting and said "I am sorry for not going to swim lessons." Later he asked if he "crap-e-rates" (LOL) could he stay up from a nap? It was very difficult for me to stick with the consequence when he was clearly sorry, but I know that it will pay off.

His face lets you know how mad he is, hopefully he learned something...

In all of this I have thought about how our Heavenly Father deals with us. I wonder if he gets angry like I did? I know I am an imperfect being and I am sure he can hold his anger better than I did, but really, I wonder.

 And then I was thinking, does it hurt him to inflict consequences? There is no better example of how to deal with people using tough love than our God who we know loves us more than we could ever imagine. But he still lets us suffer the natural consequences of our actions, even if we are sorry.

Does it hurt him when we cry out and ask him to take away our pain, when he knows that it is what we need, and he knows that taking away that pain and suffering will only delay our repentance.

It was hard for me to not let k man go down the water slide today, but I knew that it would be better in the long run. I am not comparing myself to Heavenly Father by any means, but he is the great exemplar, and maybe next time I will try to not be so angry, but I do not regret sticking with the consequences.

we desperately needed a date away from the little monsters. First option was to use our gift card to red robin and see a free movie. Door number two was to break out our new tennis rackets (Bleh.) option number three was to hike the butte and watch the sunset. Seems like an easy choice but the sweaty 40 min. hike is hard to choose. It ended up being awesome and beautiful and despite being out of breath for most of the hike we talked more than we would have at the movie.

"and remember how Kem ate them faster than we could pick them."

remember the blue berries.

One day I am going to look back on my life and think "Remember the summers at the Bethel house when the kids were little and we had blue berries. good times!" simple pleasures in life make it worth living.

Yes please!

An attack on daddy's foot.

jared stepped on this tack and i could not help but laugh because k man thought we said attack so he was saying look at that attack on daddy's foot. Lol. Jared might have been mad that i was laughing and taking pictures but do ya blame me. Lol silly boy!

Does this make me a tri-athelete

Yep... I did a triathlon

yes... I cried (in the middle)

yes... I almost gave up (in the middle)

no... I did not give up

yes... I finished

no... I did not enjoy the bike portion

no... I was not sore the next day (crazy right)

yes... I ate olive garden bread sticks afterwards

yes... I did it with my bestest friend in the whole world

yes... she kicked my butt at the bike portion (by 15 minutes)

yes... I kicked her butt at the swim portion (by 3 minutes)

no... I did not run the whole run portion

heck yes... I wanna do it again

YES... I will train more for it next time

  

 

almost done...

Girls Camp

This summer has been CRAZY... if you have not figured that out from my lack of posting, I will just tell you, we are staying busy. 

One crazy thing from this summer was girls camp, it was over a month ago, and I still feel like I am recovering from it. Don't tell people, but I just finished unpacking. 

I love girls camp! 

I have gone to the same girls camp almost every year since I was 12.  I love it so much that I beg them to let me be a unit leader. This year, however, they asked me to be in charge of certification. That meant that I bunked with all the stake leaders. You must know that when I was a girl at camp, we called the stake leaders the "oldie moldies." I truly did feel a little aged.

 

There is just something about being away from home and all the distractions of the world and singing silly songs at the top of your lungs that is super exhilarating to me.

I thought that I would miss working so closely with the Young Women, but I felt like working on certification gave me plenty of opportunity to work closely with the girls and not just one unit, but the whole camp. I was very nervous about it, but I ended up loving every minute of it. 

My brain baby this year was what I called "rain barrel of knowledge." The theme this year was Noah's ark and "flood the world with light." So I came up with this idea and it was a blast. Every time the girls signed off a certification requirement (kinda like merit badges at scout camp) they could put a cup of water in a 52 gallon water barrel. I had it calculated to overflow by the end of the week, but it felt like it would never get there. But sure enough by day three it was nearly full... 

Also... every time they put a cup of water in the barrel, they also could put a name of a leader that they wanted the barrel to be dumped on, and at the end of the week those names were tallied and...

Obviously the entire 52 gallon bucket could not be dumped all at once, but 8 girls were able to share  light that had been drawn from the rain barrel of knowledge. 

IT WAS AWESOME!!

Oh, and I made a cheese cake in the dutch oven. I know, awesome right?

Swimming!

K man had his first swim lessons today. He loved it. When i came to take a picture of him he said "Mom I went under! go back to dad." so independent and proud. He is growing up so fast!

Open gym.

Took the kids to the open gym at a gymnastics place near our house. At first i was not sure it was a good idea but as the kids warned up they loved it and it got out all their energy. They had tons of stuff 0 jump tumble and flip on. Definitely worth the five bucks!

my litles!

I may be a little bias, but I think that I make cute babies. You must know that in the past, a formal photo session of my kids does NOT go well, but I take photos of other peoples kids and the only pictures of my own children are snapshots. Plus Kman has been asking me where the photo shoot is since I leave once or twice a week to go to the photo shoot. So we went out and did our own photo shoot. It was WAY better this time than in the past. I think I like them growing up a little, but I will miss them being little. Glad I could catch it so I can remember.

(please ignore the logo, I posted these on my business Facebook page and I am too lazy to re-size them again for the blog.)

Se did really well till about half way through when she put on this pouty face and repeated "all done."

Pool.

Would you believe me if i told you that i actually took my camera to the pool and i took a few pictures but had to also snap one with my phone. So the phone one is the one you get to see because it is easier. Maybe one day i will take good pictures of my kids. But for journaling sake i will continue to snap the easy shots. Today we went to the kiddie pool. Had to skip Kem's nap because of the pool hours but it was worth it and she was a good girl. It was fun. We will do it again!

Wild.

We love picking blackberries. The kids would eat them all day if they could. Kem was shoving four at a time in her mouth. This is one really awesome perk of living where we do, they grow wild everywhere! Love it.

Did you know?

Did you know that home depot has a free workshop for kids every first Saturday of the month? Its awesome. Jared makes sure to take the kids every time. They build things like frames and boxes and bird feeders. This time they built a mini cork board for their room. Kem picked off all of her cute stickers but she loves to hammer or as she calls it "Knock it."