The Grand Tour

The Family Arts Festival at the MOA was also back in its full glory!  We have been going to this event for years and years and it's always fun to see what they come up with.

 The main theme of the festival was a grand tour of Europe based on their Old Masters paintings, but they also had some activities set up all around the museum.

The first project was to decorate Venetian-style masks.

Miles came up with the cult of orange eye masks.

Molly has a bejeweled butterfly.

Elliott's bear has a face on it made of other shapes so that "it can smile for me".

We also decorated frames to go with an exhibit about frames downstairs

They also had lots of props and photo ops!

The BYU Ballroom dancers taught the kids a dance.

This rainbow string art never gets old.

We always eat lunch at the MOA cafe, and they had a ton of French food options this year.  They also had a confusing ordering kiosk that probably took MORE effort from their workers than ordering at the counter.

This fraisier cake was a delight.

The kids loved the first French pastry so much that they begged for a Paris-Brest, too. It's basically a bike wheel-shaped eclair with hazelnut cream.

Giant yarn art!

Cyanotype prints.

We also went on an adventure through the sculpture garden.

The 8-bit deer made a surprisingly good water bottle holder.

Kicking Off Summer

This summer is the summer of all the parties.  Everything was fully closed during 2020 and then mostly closed during 2021, but there is SO MUCH going on this year. We went to two big summer kickoff parties in two days!

Our first stop was the Lindon Summer Kickoff.  It was close enough to walk (even if the kids thought the 18-minute walk was totally unfair).

They had a free rock wall.  Miles loved it and climbed right to the top, Elliott refused to touch it, and Molly got stuck about halfway up because she just wasn't quite tall enough.

Everyone got a free Kona Ice!  The other main attraction at the party was a big foam machine, and all of the kids thought that was sticky and not very fun, so we headed home once we finished our snow cones.

The next day, we went to the big summer reading kickoff.  The theme this year is Oceans of Possibilities so they threw a big Hawaiian luau!

Playing Aloha bingo!

We got our snow cones early because we sensed the line would get very long, and we were right.

Pineapple bowling

Kick the flip flop through the hoop

This had an official Hawaiian name but was basically bocce ball.

There was a scavenger hunt to find Hawaiian images that took you all over the park.

Undersea watercolor resist paintings

Tiki bags!

The library always knows how to put on an amazing party!

Shrimp and Smoothies

Miles put a lot of cooking projects on his boredom buster binger this summer.  The first project he tackled was shrimp and grits in an andouille cream sauce.

The only contribution I made to this project was to tell him the shrimp were thawed enough.  Seriously, he made this whole dish by himself!

His next cooking adventure was acai bowls.  Those aren't hard, but he did do a beautiful job and shared the rest with Elliott (Molly was at a friend's house).

At the Speed of Elliott

Molly and Miles did a full-day space mission together this summer.  While they were off defeating galactic villains, Elliott and I had the full day together.  This was the norm for years but it's been a while since we did that!

We took a very Elliott-speed trip through the grocery store.  He brought his own money and wanted to buy a donut for his brother and sister to share.  After he bought the donut, he realized he still had more money and wanted to buy an ice cream.

So...we stopped and bought an ice cream.

I actually had to go to two grocery stores that day, but he was fine with it because he got to play with every single balloon at the second grocery.

We put together his Kiwi Crate.  We cuddled up and watched Octonauts.  We read stories on the couch.  None of those really happen when he has older siblings who tend to set the pace for the day!

It was a great day, but he was still pretty pumped to pick up his favorite space explorers at the end of their missions.

The Hunt for the Night Watch

Another of Miles's activities was to create a scavenger hunt.  He made us a really elaborate escape room-style scavenger hunt that went all over the house and even to the playground!

The idea is that the Rembrandt painting The Night Watch was stolen and we had to retrieve it.

Our first clues were in the "exhibit of travel paintings" across the museum.  We decoded the clue and it sent us to the kitchen to speak to the chef.

The chef gave us instructions to find the criminal, which took us to an obstacle course on the playground.

Once we found that the criminal had bombed a bridge, we had to rebuild it with dominoes.

That sent us outside, to talk to a man who said the rocks were speaking to him, so we needed to decode the message.

That sent us to this super-legitimate passport.

And a message to decode inside.

That got us a flash drive with a hidden message.

That took us to a locked box and some math puzzles to give us the secret code.

We saved the painting and cracked the case!  Miles did such a creative and detailed job inventing the scavenger hunt!