Diamond

I had a busy day one Monday.  I helped out at hearing screenings in the morning, then went grocery shopping at three different stores, ran home to do some quick cleaning, and headed back to hearing screenings.  I looked down at my hand and realized that the diamond had fallen out of my ring.  I tried to retrace my steps as much as possible, but it had disappeared.

Luckily, we found a jewelry repair shop that was able to fix it quickly and for a very fair price.  They also cleaned the ring and it looks even nicer than when Gerrit proposed 17 years ago!  It felt SO strange to not be wearing it for a week, though.  I kept panicking that I had lost the whole ring somehow and it did not feel right until it was fixed and back on.

You Never Know

Most of the time, the kids wait for me in the car.

Sometimes, the kids wait for me on top of the car.

We had a lot of conversations about how this is only acceptable on a car that is not now moving nor will be moving at any point in the near future.

It's All Fun and Games

Elliott, Gerrit and I had a great time at the Springville Museum of Art's opening party for their new "It's All Fun and Games" exhibit!  Miles and Molly were having a great time at a ward youth pool party, not intentionally excluded :)

Any visit to the museum needs a visit to the water sculpture in the interior courtyard.

The exhibit is all based on toys and games and childhood nostalgia, making it equally fun for adults and kids.

Elliott loved the giant bead toy!

I had a GigaPet in 7th grade but I was very bad at taking care of it.

There's a giant blanket fort and it was so soft that Elliott had to hug it.

A life-sized cardboard diorama.  I made a LOT of dioramas in elementary school but my kids have never needed to.

Elliott loved the bear toy in the giant dollhouse.

This giant marble toy was of course a huge hit.

Six foot friendship bracelet!

I had the exact same Polly Pocket in this painting series.  You can't really overstate how much I loved a Polly Pocket. There's also a Beanie Baby at the end of this line and I also really loved those!

Playing the handmade ceramic fishing game!

One of the benefits of coming to the opening party was the 90s retro snack table.  It could not have been cuter OR more exciting.  It was basically a table full of snacks that were peak elementary school and middle school.

Pop Rocks!  The little boxes of cereal we got as a treat for vacation!

AirHeads and Cream Savers were the most popular candies at my middle school and my mom used to pack me those packs of Twinkies as a special treat.

CapriSuns scream childhood soccer games and I had not seen a Dunkaroo since I was 14 years old at girls camp.

Elliott went a little wild with the snacks and could not have possibly been more excited.

It was also the quilt show at the same time so I made us see that after the party.

This is a quilt called "Knocking at Heaven's Door" and I love it.

All of this is hand-embroidered!

It's a spelling bee quilt and many of those words are in fact things that Miles had to practice for the state spelling bee.

The quilter made this for her great-grandson and it's just so charming.  Elliott would like to note that it should have an asteroid on top.

Such a good use of fussy cutting!

Elliott had a great time and already wants to go back and show his siblings the exhibit!

Robot Takeover

Our local grocery store has been remodeling all summer.  Every week, something new is different.  Sometimes you walk in and the flooring is different.  Sometimes you walk in and all of the food has moved to the opposite side of the store and the aisles themselves switched the internal order.  (That one, to be honest, has really thrown me). Sometimes you walk in and the cheese and lunch meat have moved from the center of the store to the back wall.  Sometimes you walk in and there is a Starbucks.  Sometimes you walk in and there is a big center sushi/sandwich/cheese island that did not exist before.

None of that, however, prepared me to walk in and see a bread robot.

You should note, for scale purposes, that this is about seven feet tall by ten feet long.  I had no idea that anything like this existed, but it smells great! No one is a bigger fan of BreadBot than Elliott.  He watched it for ten minutes, begrudgingly left, and then when I let him stay and watch while I checked out, convinced at least two separate people to buy bread from BreadBot solely based on his enthusiasm.  Macey's should hire him!

First Day of School 2024

We're back to school! All three kids have some pretty big firsts this year.

It's Molly's first year of junior high!  She is taking accelerated math, French 1, PE, honors history, study skills, science, honors English, and 7th grade choir.  She'll switch PE for ceramics in January.  She was a little worried, but was thrilled to find out she has at least one class with all her friends and in many cases, three to six classes with her friends. This also means she has lunch with most of them.  Her favorite classes so far are English, choir, and math!

It's Miles's first year of high school! He's taking computer programming, honors English, chemistry, Secondary Math IIIE (which is basically trig/pre-calculus), seminary, AP world history, health, and orchestra.  Computer programming and health are half-year, so he'll switch those for PE and engineering principles in January.  So far, his favorite classes are computer programming and seminary.

It's Elliott's first year in ALL!  His class has 23 boys and 7 girls and it will be his first year with real homework projects.  He has really loved Mrs. Larsen so far and is happy to see a lot of friends in his class.  He's also happy that his friend Kyrie is at least in his specialty group so he still sees her every day.

Hailpocalypse

 Molly and I ended Back to School Night at the junior high heading back to our car in a downpour, so at first, when it started raining the next night, I was just grateful that it had waited until we were already home from the elementary school Back to School Night.

I was not expecting it to very quickly turn to a monstrous hail storm.

I can't overstate how loud this storm was.  The hail just slammed our house for about 15 mintues, and the hail itself was larger than any hail I've seen here.  It was also part of a 40 minute torrential rainstorm, and it doesn't usually rain that heavily for that long here so everything flooded.

We were very lucky to not deal with any flooding in our house, but many of the houses around us flooded.  I was supposed to have a church meeting that night, but the woman in charge had flooding AND our church building flooded so it got cancelled.  I saw videos later of State Street and the flooding went right up to the business doors in Orem! We had several friends who were out driving or picking up dinner and they all said that things were pretty scary.

That's my back porch.

Our front porch had a full waterfall going off the edge.  Miles thought it would be fun to run under it. With no shoes.  Without realizing that a storm cold enough for hail is also going to have pretty cold rain.  I like to call this series "Teen Boy Realizes The Stupidity of His Plan in Six Pictures:

It really looked like snow! In the middle of August!

Getting Ready for School

The start of August always has a lot of work to get ready for the new school year!  I'm PTA president at the elementary this year, so I had a lot of extra meetings and planning.

The PTA throws a back to school breakfast for the teachers with kolaches, yogurt parfaits, and tables full of school supplies for them to take back to their classroom.

The road work was a plague on our school commute last year.  I naively assumed it would be done over the summer. It should not have been a surprise when Molly and I showed up to Back to School Night at the junior high and found that the road to the school was blocked off for road work.  It's a single outlet road and the only way to the junior high, so naturally back to school night was the perfect time for this...

I spent all of Back to School night at the elementary manning the PTA booth, but I did get a brief break to take Elliott to meet his teacher and then got a nice unobstructed view of the balloon art since we left after pretty much everyone else :)

Book Basket Swap

Molly's friend Ruby held a book basket exchange for her birthday party this year.  Molly and I had so much fun putting together a basket based on one of her favorite books!  

She chose The Firefly Summer because she wanted to pick a book that she thought any of her friends would like, but also possibly may not have read. (It's a pretty recent release).  

Here's what she put in her basket:

*The book

*A beach towel, because the book is set at a family camp on a lake.

*A pool float (ditto)

*A notebook, because the main character is given a notebook with memories of her mom.

*S'mores supplies, because they eat them in the book

*We made a firefly jar using a mason jar and a little string of LED lights to go with the title and with the plot

*A little necklace of a locket and key charm to match one the main character wears.

Molly got a basket themed on A Ring of Endless Light with adorable seal and penguin stuffies and cute themed snacks from the exchange, and she's very excited to read the book now! The moms of all the girls invited are now planning a mom edition party for the end of September and I'm excited to make one myself!

Permitted

One of Miles's summer goals was to get his learner's permit, and he passed the test on the first try! It was worlds different from my own experience.  We set up an appointment, sat for about 3 minutes, and then he took his test on a computer in the corner.  I waited outside in the summer heat for over an hour for mine and then the test was paper, so it also took some time to get results.  This is definitely a huge improvement :)

We need to actually get him driving now...Gerrit is planning to have him practice in the church parking lot and then we're going to sign him up for driver's training through the high school.

Bedtime Stories, Year Three

I'm so happy that we've kept up with reading stories together even though the kids are older and constantly busy!  It's been really fun to have those shared family memories and discussions about the books.  Here's what we've read since last year's post!

Princess Academy is a long-time favorite of mine and I thought the kids were old enough to enjoy it now.  It's a little slower paced than some of our other read-alouds but the kids still ended up liking it.

Minerva Keen's Detective Agency was chosen for October because I like to do a mystery or something a little scary.  It's Only Murders in the Building for tweens and a lot of fun, although if  you can't handle snakes and/or insects, this may not be the read-aloud for your family.

No One Leaves the Castle was also chosen specifically for October. It's a classic locked room mystery but set among all kinds of barons, magicians, bards, and bounty hunters.  It's funny and has some exciting plot turns, too.

The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone was the perfect listening choice for our trip to Disneyland.  It's about a girl who has to bring presents to her ten aunts after the death of her parents and she has a different magical adventure with each of them.  Molly has since read the second book in the series and has the third in her TBR pile.

Willodeen is relatively short and lyrical.  I think we all wanted to see the hummingbears afterwards!  It talks a lot about interdependence of ecosystems but in a magical way.

The Swifts has an extremely cool concept where everyone in the family gets a name from the dictionary (The main character is named Shenanigan, for example).  It is also pretty intense and the level of violence/overall content is right on the border with YA fiction.  After Molly got very freaked out from an early death, I ended up self-editing as I read out loud. Definitely for older readers!

The Puppets of Spelhorst is very short.  I love Kate DiCamillo's writing and I loved that all five puppets have such a distinct personality.  It feels like a fairy tale and it was extremly fun to do the wolf voice.

The Curious League of Detectives and Thieves: Egypt's Fire was one of this year's Beehive nominees.  A young boy hides in a museum after his mother's death and then helps solve the theft of a ruby from the museum's Egyptian exhibit.  This one is action-packed and funny and let me do a lot of accent work.

Elf Dog and Owl Head is one of this year's Newbery Honor books.  It's set during the pandemic when a boy finds a dog that happens to be a hunting dog from the elf kingdom.  He befriends a boy from the owlhead world and gets drawn into the magic.  It was so, so well done and we loved this one!

Seekers of the Fox is the sequel to one of last year's books and was just as exciting as the first book in the series.  We're very excited to read book three soon!

City Spies: City of the Dead continues the series!  My Australian accent has gotten mildly better as the kids have watched Bluey. There's a new spy in the game in this book with very mysterious motivations. This one deals with stolen Egyptian antiquities and is, as always, so much fun.

The Eyes and the Impossible is this year's Newbery winner and a gorgeous, gorgeous book.  You will laugh! You will cry! Johannes the dog stays with you for a very long time.  The park in the book reminds me a little of the Presidio in San Francisco crossed with Central Park.

The Unforgettable Logan Foster is another Beehive nominee.  A young boy who has lived in foster care meets his new foster parents and discovers that they are superheroes.  This is action-packed and Elliott in particular adored it.

Crenshaw was recommended to us at the library summer reading program and I thought it would be in the vein of the movie IF.  It is actually a very emotional story about homelessness from the perspective of a child.  It's not what we usually do for our readalouds but it is extremely well done.

The Mystery of Locked Rooms is a fun, high-action story of three tween escape room fans trying to find a treasure in an abandoned funhouse to save one girl's family from losing their house (Molly is convinced I'm only reading books about childhood poverty now).  Our family loves escape rooms so this was a really fun pick for us!

We have lots of plans for future read alouds!  We want to read sequels from The Curious League of Detectives and Thieves, Thieves of Shadow, City Spies, and Unforgettable Logan Foster.  I also have a few other books from various Beehive and Battle of the Books lists, and then I just sort of always keep an eye out for any new books that might be fun, too.