Home Life

Tonight we welcomed a Spanish student in our home for the week.  Ken and Angie Gaul and their family who hosted again this year went on vacation to Disney World and asked us if we would take their student, Ana Espallargas for the week.  We gladly accepted.  We wish we could have done the month-long hosting and had Carmen with us again, but we were very excited for the small opportunity.  This summer has been crazy and we couldn’t host becuase we would have been gone (either the entire family or most of it) for almost 3 of the 4 weeks.  Ana is great and her English is very good.  Kirstyn is especially excited becuase tomorrow Brittany and Sarah are going to girl’s camp and so she gets Ana all to herself until Thursday!  🙂

Today was a BIG day for Zachary…  He finished registering and picked up his shoulder pads for football!  He and I went over to St. Raphael school early to get in line to wait for registration.  We underestimated the wait and should have gotten there 30 minutes earlier.  When we arrived, the line was almost all the way around the school!  Come to find out that the program is so popular, there are about 3000 kids that participate!  🙂  We were in line about 5 minutes before it started raining!  😐  This wasn’t a light sprinkle, and soon we were soaked!  A nice guy in front of us let us stand under his umbrella for which we were very thankful! 

When we got in the building, we had a first year player pep-talk from one of the guys in charge of the program and then went and picked up Zach’s materials and shoulder pads.  He was SO excited, and couldn’t wait to get dressed!

Seeing him in his uniform was almost a sad thing because he is growing up so fast!  It was really cute and it was fun to have him try to tackle me.  He has a way to go before he can be a mean tackler!  🙂  He doesn’t hit very hard!  🙂  He has a camp coming up the first week of August and so he will learn a bunch of new things there.

Ben also wanted in on the action so he begged to get into Zachary’s uniform as well.  It was hillarious!  🙂

He so much wants to be like his big brother!  It was funny becuase the helmet was so heavy that Ben couldn’t keep his head up straight!  🙂  You’ll get your turn, Ben!

Today, Brittany had a belated birthday party because we were out of town on her birthday.  Just like she did in the past, she wanted to have her party at “Feed My Starving Children.”  Feed My Starving Children is a non-profit Christian organization committed to feeding starving children.  The approach is simple: children and adults hand-pack meals formulated specially for starving children, and the meals are shopped to nearly 70 countries around the world. 

This is one of Brittany’s favorite things to do.  She loves to see how many meals the group can pack!  There were 16 kids and 4 adults there and they had a blast!

Below are the statistics of  how much they did which is pretty amazing.  Doing this really makes you feel good inside.  We really admire Brittany for wanting to do this instead of having a party where it’s all about her.  She is really giving that way.

With the input of scientists from major food companies, the food forumula consists of:

   1.   Rice, the most widely accepted grain around the world.
   2.   Extruded soy nuggets, providing maximum protein at lowest cost.
   3.   Vitamins, minerals and a vegetarian chicken flavoring to give growing children the critical nutritional elements they need.
   4.   Dehydrated vegetables for flavor and nutrition.

The formula is packaged in small pouches—each of which provides six highly nutritious meals.  While the formula was designed to save the lives of severely malnourished and starving children, the ingredients also improve the health, growth and physical well-being of children who are no longer in immediate danger of starvation.

Way to go Brittany!

Today we got the DVD from Joyce Caywood of Benjamin’s photo shoot!  The pictures turned out absolutely adorable!  We were laughing histerically at some of the pics!  Here is just a small sampling of the pictures that she took…

We uploaded a bunch to my facebook site and also a photo site on Shutterfly so we could order prints and share more of these.  What a cute little guy!  🙂

Today is Zach’s birthday and he was very excited!  Last night we opened his presents becuase today, Sarah and Brittany took off for EFY in Bloomington, IL.  It’s a little quieter around the house now!  We asked him what he wanted to do and the first thing on his list was to go to McDonalds, have lunch, and play in the playland area.  Kirstyn tried as hard as she could to talk him into eating somewhere else, but to no avail!  🙂  It was quite humorous watching Kirstyn create a huge list of all the restaurants around that “she” liked and trying to talk Zach into one of those.  🙂

We got up early and did about 6 hours of yard work before resting the rest of the day and enjoying Zachs birthday.  The yard was a mess and the garden was even worse!  Fortunately, our neighbors did a wonderful thing for us and cut our front lawn which was very nice of them, but then had issues with their lawnmower.  The back yard took a LONG time to do because I had to bag the grass.  It was long after about 2 weeks no mow.  😐  The garden was totally overrun with weeds and a bunch of the plants were almost dead because they didn’t get watered.  It took us forever to weed, but it now looks a LOT nicer.

After lunch and playing at McDonalds, we were much in need of some quiet time as you can imagine!  Ben and Zach were exhausted after playing so we let them relax and they ended up both taking a nap!  🙂  Zach got up during the nap and put “The Last Airbender” tatoos on his forhead (got the tatoos from his Happy Meal).  🙂

We baked his cake, decorated it per his direction as a soccer ball, and had cake and ice cream with dinner.

It’s amazing how fast he is growing up…  Today we got the confirmation e-mail that he is registered to play football this fall!  🙂  He’s pretty excited and he has the size to play, so we hope that he hits harder than he gets hit!  It seems like just yesterday that he was as old as Ben.

Happy Birthday Zach!  We hope you had a wonderful day!

Today we arrived back home after 2 weeks of vacation and playing.  We are totally exhausted from the 26 hours of driving, however!  We left on Friday at noon after the Salmon River Days Parade (4th of July celebration) and took 2 1/2 days to get home.  Since we had 2 cars and only 3 drivers, we had to take it a little easier.  We stayed in Sheridan Wyoming the first night (at Angela’s brother’s place) which was very nice of them to let us do that.  We finally went out of  our way a bit and saw Devil’s Tower national monument.  This is partly where the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was filmed.  🙂 

After that, we drove to Wall, SD where we spent a couple of hours resting and letting the boys run around.  They got sopping wet and loved playing in the water!  Wall is where the famous Wall Drug drugstore was founded.  Wall Drug earns much of its fame from its self-promotion.  Billboards advertising the establishment can be seen for hundreds of miles throughout South Dakota and the neighboring states.  In addition, many visitors of Wall Drug have erected signs throughout the world announcing the miles to Wall Drug from famous locations.  Wall Drug says it gives away more than 20,000 cups of water per day during the peak tourist season (summer months).  It’s not too far from Mount Rushmore and the Badlands.

We stayed Saturday night in Minnesota and went to church in Austin at a VERY small ward that doubled in size becuase a family reunion was there.  Wow, that sounds like our family in Salmon!  🙂  We kept driving after that and finally got home at 6pm this evening.  I drove the whole way and Sarah drove for about 3 hours of it.  I am very proud of Angela who doesn’t usually drive that many hours but was a GREAT trooper and did it!  🙂 

We got everything unpacked and now are packing up Sarah and Brittany to go to EFY early tomorrow morning.  Their beds tonight will be just like another hotel bed for them.  They will be gone all next week!  I have the fun job of driving 2 hours south and picking them up on Saturday.  🙂

It’s nice to be home and get to sleep in our own beds tonight!

Today we went and did a little shopping with Mom and when we came back home, their mission call was in the mailbox!  We were SO excited!  The problem, however, is that Dad was out on a job a long way away and couldn’t come home right then.  That said, the call sat on the kitchen countertop all day unopened!  😐  It was amazing how calm Mom was all day.  We would have been jumping out of our skin.  They decided that they would open their call at 6pm when Dad got home.

We all met at their house, got all that weren’t there on the phone, and they opened their call…  Tokyo Japan!  🙂 🙂

They were so excited!  That is where Dad served his mission and where he really wanted to go back to!  We were all almost just as excited as well!  They go into the MTC on October 4th and will be gone for 18 months.  They immediately started doing research on it and reading up on what they needed to bring, etc.  That’s only 3 months away!  They have a lot to do to get ready.

Congrats Mom and Dad!  We’re excited for you and know that you will be great missionaries!

We had a laugh today…  This morning, the photographer that took the family pictures called up and asked if we could bring Benjamin over to do a photo shoot!  🙂  She loved Ben and how photogenic he was on Monday.  We met her at her studio and she took us over to a park with a pond.  A little girl about Ben’s age was part of the shot as well.  They were so cute!  🙂  She had him dress up lick Huck Finn (overalls no shirt and no shoes) and gave him a fishing pole which he absolutely loved!  She put him on a rock and got some pictures of him casting into the pond.  She then put the little girl by him in a cute sundress and took some more pics.  She also got some shots of his fishing pole over his shoulder, her holding a bunch of flowers, and them holding hands walking in the grass.  It was adorable and we couldn’t stop laughing!  🙂  She then took them over to a farm where they got pictures with a little pony, sitting on a fence, and other shots.  She’s going to send us a copy of the DVD with all the photos and we can’t wait to see it!  I think that Angela and I had just as much fun watching them as anyone else did!  🙂

Today Mark got set apart as a missionary and he will be going into the MTC tomorrow.  It’s hard to believe how fast time has flown!  Angela and I were married before he was born and so I’ve been in the family longer than he has!  🙂 

There was quite a crowd over at the church to support Mark.  Good luck Mark!  We know you’ll do great!  Well, it looks as if Mom and Dad won’t get their mission call before Mark goes into the MTC!  They have been waiting a couple of weeks and were hoping that they could open their call before Mark left.  Oh well.  Hopefully it will come before we leave!  🙂

Today all 47 of us went to a beautiful location in Salmon Idaho to have our family pictures taken.  A professional photographer was hired and she sure earned the pay she got today!  🙂  We first started out getting the entire family pictures taken, after which we did a bunch of pictures of just the grandchildren with grandma and grandpa, the kids, kids and spouses, and just the “outlaws.”  🙂  We then all had separate family pictures taken and individual pictures taken for everyone.  It was crazy keeping everyone together, but we did it.  Here is just a sampling of the family pictures we had done…

Were very impressed with the results!  We bought the copyright from the photographer and she gave us a DVD of all the pictures.  There were around 500 of them.  After we got done, she approached us and said that she absolutely loved our son Benjamin and asked if we would be open to having another photo shoot with him.  We were very surprised and said that he would probably love it.  We’ll see if she calls!  🙂