Let Summer Begin

Okay, Summer is almost over and I am just now posting about the start of our summer. I am a slacker I know. But from these posts you can see we have been quite busy. It is not all my fault, Eli just barely downloaded the pictures for me. He doesn't trust me to do it since one time I almost deleted some of them.

Kate graduated from pre-school at the end of May. She had a princess party and a graduation party at the dinosaur Park.

Kate and Ms. Debee

Daddy thought it was funny to feed the kids to the dinosaur.

Kate will be going to kindergarten in just a few weeks. I have very mixed feelings about this. I know she is so excited to learn new things and make new friends. I am looking forward to less fights between Kate and Beck, but it is hard to know I won't be there with her all the time anymore and that she is officially no longer a baby or a pre-schooler but a school aged child. Time goes by too fast. I just hope we can make lots of good memories to hold on to as the years fly by.

Summer Fun

This summer we have had swim lessons, dance class, an amusement park day, a vacation and many other fun things, but I thought it might be nice to post a few of the everyday summer things the kids enjoyed.

I bought a slip-n-slide on sale and I thought it would be fun for the kids, however they didn't seem to understand how they work.

Kiera loves digging in the dirt and she learned to climb the bolders in the back yard if necessary to gain access to her favorite past time.

She was so proud of herself and happy to be in the dirt.

Kate's favorite pastime is anything artistic. This girl will color all day long if you let her. I liked the crab she drew.

If she can't color then she will want to be artistic in other ways. Under the sea creatures by Kate.
Hopefully we can make the most of the few summer days we have left. We went to the park yesterday and we are going swimming tomorrow. I can't believe it is almost over.

Amusement Park Day

Every year my husband's work sponsors a day at the local amusement park. The kids love it more and more each year as they get older and are able to do more.

I think my favorite was going on the Odyssey with Kate. I let her have the controls and she did a pretty good job of getting us wet. I think the Bat and the Odyssey were her favorite rides.

Beck did better than I expected. He went on the Dinosaur Drop and even the Tidal Wave.

Kiera loved the carousel and the train and had a good nap.

One thing that was better this year was that we went earlier and left earlier, so it was not such a long overwhelming day.

Yellowstone

I have a lot of fond memories of Yellowstone and Island Park from my Childhood, so I wanted to try to re-create some of that for my kids.

I wanted to visit Big Springs and show the kids how big the fish can get there and let them feed them from the bridge. Unfortunately the seagulls got most of the bread, next time I'll just bring change for the fish food machines.

Another one of my favorite things was floating the Henry's Fork River to Mack's Inn, so I really wanted my kids to experience it too.

Kiera hated her life jacket, but eventually she got comfortable enough to fall asleep.

It was a lot of walking and our stroller got a flat tire at Mammoth. Eli and I took turns carrying the kids and we had to skip some of it because it was too many stairs with the small kids and strollers. We saw just about everything we wanted to though, but the kids were not as excited to see hot pools and geisers as I thought they would be. It was much hotter than I remember yellowstone being since it was 89 degrees and the afternoon thundershowers were a welcome relief. Kate had like 15 mosquito bites at one time. It was also windy and bright which made their eyes water and then they would get sunscreen in their eyes. Beck had quite a few melt downs and we teased that the Beck geiser was about to go off again. Eli has a pretty funny video maybe I can figure out a way to post. it.

On the way home we drove through Teton National Park and Jackson Hole. We planned to do some activities there as well but we were too worn out and didn't have enough time. We will have to plan a trip sometime just to visit Jackson. We did get to visit my brother-in-law Hyrum who was working at Camp New Fork. Eli was really excited because he worked there too as a teenager.

I hadn't been to Yellowstone in 17 years and so I was glad we could fit in a family vacation this summer.