Halliday Family Blog

Today Ana went back to Spain.  Kirstyn was especially sad.  She really liked Ana and had a great time with her while Sarah and Brittany were at camp.  It’s weird that it’s been an entire year since Carmen went back to Spain last summer.  Time has really flown!

We are glad that the Gaul family asked us if we could take Ana for the final week she was here.  We look forward to keeping in contact with her and seeing how she’s doing.

Today Sarah and Brittany came home after having a great time at camp.  They were exhausted, but couldn’t stop talking about the great experiences they had there.  It looks like that they will be going to the same camp next year and are excited about it.  Angela wants to go to camp with them next year, because all three girls will be going.  It will be Sarah’s last year, Brittany’s fourth year, and Kirstyn’s first year.

When I got home from work, we ate dinner and then went to Phillips Park nearby to watch the American Legion Band perform…

Before we left the park, Ana grabbed the camera and wanted a family picture taken with her.

After that we drove Wendy’s and got frosties!  Ana hadn’t had one yet and so we thought since it was her last evening with us, we would treat her to something awesome!  When Carmen stayed with us, it was her favorite!  True to what we thought, Ana absolutely loved them!  🙂

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!