Cinco Ranch Football Season Begins!

So my boys are not going to Cinco Ranch High School this year, but they have plenty of school spirit! They were counting down the days to the first game and decided to deck themselves and their comrads out with face paint and school colors for the event. I helped them mix the maroon paint and did some of the face painting, but then I had to grab my camera as the whole gang just had a face-painting fiesta! Enjoy!

Spencer making the Cinco Ranch sign

Dover painting Coulter's face

Dover painting Taylor's face.

Josh Davies

Spencer is NOT excited. I repeat, NOT excited.

Taylor found this wig at a game last year. So vogue!

Marcus was the terrorist, I mean bedouin in the group. He finally consented to get his eyelids painted.

A motley crew!

Our neighbor who is a sports photographer took their picture at the game. You can see the 2 he took by clicking this link: http://www.photosbymose.com/Football-Current-Season/2010-08-26-CRHS-V-vsKF/2010-08-26-CRHS-Vars-vs-KleinF/13523743_WD9Vm#985261842_GkHiG Silly boys!

Family Vacation to Fort Walton Beach, FL

Heather came to visit and a few days later on August 16th we headed to the east coast to a family favorite vacation spot: Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Three years ago we went there at the recommendation of our bishop and fell in love. So we decided to do it again. When we got there (a ten hour car ride), three other families from our ward were already vacationing at the same condos. So we jumped in the pool and enjoyed their company for the first few days. They left and we stayed. This is Spencer with one of our ward nursery members.

Inside the condo watching an I Love Lucy episode on tv. The couches were wet half the time. :) Almost every night we watched a Harry Potter movie, which turned out to be one of the funnest memories of the trip.

Two cool dudes.

There were good waves the first couple of days. There was a bunch of algae in the water which was gross.

Here's some of the four Katy 2nd Ward families in Florida.

Our condo is the one on the bottom with a surf board standing up on the porch.

We took family pictures, but you'll have to go to Heather's blog to see them.

Besides the pool and the beach, we went into Destin and played at a place that had go-karts and mini golf.

Beautiful art graced the playland, Heather had to take a picture.

We melted half way through the golf course and headed back to air conditioning and water!

The last two days of our trip, the water was completely clear of algae and there was smooth water, not one wave. The water was gorgeous!

Our last day in Florida we rented a pontoon boat for a few hours and zipped around.

Ahh, the life!

We motored over to Crab Island which is a submerged island about 3-6 feet under water. We rented some snorkels and fins and explored the water. It was very relaxing. Emily collected about 6 hermit crabs in a bucket. She let all but one go the next day.

What a great vacation! We highly recommend it for anyone! We went when school started for the Florida schools so that we paid off-season prices. A very reasonable vacation!

Girls Camp

We had a wonderful, but terrifically hot and humid girls camp. This would be an ideal place in October or November, but not August. (August 9-14) I was ward girls camp director and we had 9 1st through 3rd year girls who were fantastic!

The theme for camp this year was "There's No Place Like Home" taken from The Wizard of Oz. Since the YM/YW scripture/theme for this year is Be strong and of good COURAGE, it was fun to base the camp theme loosely on that. So our ward had to think of our name and we called ourselves the Daring Dreamers and our color was the rainbow and we got rainbow suspenders and our theme was "The dreams that you dare to dream really do come true." (From the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow) We had to make a flag and this was ours. One of the girls brought the rainbow strips and another one wrote the words, and the rest of us stitched it all up!We shared this camp site with 2 other wards. It's an official Girl Scout camp and it is awesome!

This is the bathroom. Emily and her friend, Rebecca.

This was taken before the testimony meeting.

Inside the AIR-CONDITIONED lodge. The 5th year girls are leading the girls in camp songs. Behind the girls are all the ward's camp flags. Such creativity!!! I was blown away.This was a great theme!

Here are our 9 girls plus one of their 5th year youth camp leaders waiting for more singing.

At this camp there is this great statue. We got some pics with it.

Getting props ready for our skit.

After our skit. The judges didn't get the point of it, so they gave us the "Psychotic Award", but that's ok, our girls had a blast with it! :D

TIMBER!

We have five trees in our backyard that have been nice ornamental, shade trees. They blossom each spring and look beautiful, then have rich green leaves during the summer and fall. About wintertime, it gets cold enough to have them change color and the yellow leaves are gorgeous. When we moved into our home 13 years ago, they were little and cute, but they have grown gigantic and they were taking over our yard. Soooooo..... I decided they had to go. A few weeks ago, we cut all the big branches off the first tree and broke the branches and stuffed them into plastic bags and the garbage men hauled them away. Then Sr. D gave the project over to Taylor and any friends/cousins who wanted to join him and earn some money.

Uncle Jeff heard about the project and brought his chainsaw to help out. Well, Monday, July 5th, our project went into turbo charge mode! :) He took the last three trees down, and chopped them up. We had Taylor, cousin Dover, cousin Brian, and friend Markus working on bundling.

The branches kept falling into our neighbor's yard. Luckily they weren't home, or we would have really freaked them out. Especially on the last tree. Uncle Jeff was sawing at the trunk after having removed some heavy limbs, and Taylor and Brian were pulling on a rope, but the tree went the wrong way and landed on the fence. (See video below!) Several fence boards were casualties in the crash, and we have bought new ones. Hopefully today we can get those fixed.

It looked like we had had a hurricane! I don't know how Jeff didn't feel overwhelmed at this sight! And it was 102 degrees outside, about 75% humidity!

This is Tuesday with almost all the work done. The bundles are to the left of the picture, where we will carry out manageable piles that our garbage men will be willing to haul away. We also have a pile of bigger pieces of wood that we may Craigs List as firewood and give away to the first taker.

What a project! Thank you Uncle Jeff for being Mike Mulligan for a day!

And thank you to Taylor, Dover, Brian and Markus for all the manly labor! They got money, tans and a total body workout, so I think they came out ahead! (You can see the poor fence in this picture)

And here's the video of the last tree coming down. Wince, wince.

Our Fourth of July

For our Fourth celebration, we had Uncle Jeff and Aunt Shelby's family, and Uncle Brandon and Aunt Mindy's family with us. We had a great dinner: steak, potato salad, baked beans and a big yummy fruit salad. Then we gathered and Uncle Brandon taught us about three values that are on the penny: E Pluribus Unim (out of many, one), Freedom, and "In God We Trust." It was really good! Then Sr. D taught us about how Christ's atonement gave us freedom to act and not be acted upon unless we sin. And that if Christ gave us freedom, we should try to preserve it in our country. It was a very nice devotional that may not have happened if it wasn't that the 4th was a Sunday.

Then we had cake!!! Shelby made white cakes, cousin Rachel made cherry jello, cousin Jared poked holes in the cake and I poured the jello in. Once it had chilled in the fridge a bit, we cut the cake, squirted whipping cream on it and sprinkled it with blueberries and sliced strawberries. Emily added a flag toothpick to finish it off. It was as delicious as it looked patriotic!

We all went out and enjoyed Uncle Jeff's firework display (with a little of my own inserted in too). In Texas we can sure celebrate. We can buy stuff that shoots up in the air and explodes and Jeff had one that shot off about 90 small colorful explosions above us for our finale! Thank you Uncle Jeff!