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!

Swim Team 2010

Ok, so I thought I'd walk down memory lane just a bit and show a then and now of two of my boys. These two picture were in June 2001.
This is now June 2010. (The boy on the far left below, Ben Brown, is sitting right in front of Spencer in the 2001 picture.) The four boys on the left in the picture below had just won a relay race. They have all been swimming each summer together for the past 10 years.
Waiting for their ribbons after a race
My picture taking at the meets this year was pretty sorry. My camera delayed just enough to get weird action shots. But these are what I've got to work with. Here is Spencer swimming breast stroke.
Taylor swimming freestyle
Spencer swimming butterfly
This video shows a 50 yard freestyle race. Spencer comes in first place and Taylor comes in second.



This is those four boys swimming the medley relay at the Meet of Champs, the last meet of the season with all the fastest swimmers on all the teams from two out of five divisions. Marc Outlaw first swims backstroke, then Ben Brown swims breaststroke. Spencer then jumps in and swims butterfly and Taylor finishes with freestyle. They got first.

This is Spencer swimming the freestyle event at the Meet of Champs here. Our children usually don't get put in the individual races because if they are in the top three, they get slated for the next day at the All Star Meet (which is always on Sunday) with the best of the five divisions. (Relays only swim on Saturday, so the kids participate in those.) And we chose as a family 12 years ago that we wouldn't swim on Sunday. But for some reason, the coach had him swim anyway, and he won! Of course he didn't swim the next day, but that was cool.

Oh Danny Boy

Emily took an 8 week group voice class which ended on May 24th with a show of all the girls singing one of the two songs they worked on individually. They also had a group song. Emily sang Danny Boy and did a great job I thought. Here is our video of it. (If you are reading this in an email, the video won't come up. Click on the link to the blog at the end of the email and you will see it.)

A Spencer Post

Spencer got himself a ukulele and he really likes it. He has learned a few songs on it. It is so little!

On Monday, May 24, he decided to buzz his hair. He liked it at first, but now he is anxious for it to grow a little. I wanted some pictures and he humored me with some silly, attitude poses.

From Cumorah's Hill

Our stake put on a production of Steven Kapp Perry's From Cumorah's Hill. There were over 250 youth, and our stake center was not big enough, so we rented a local high school's auditorium for the event. We had a Saturday performance, and two performances on Sunday night there were so many people who wanted to come! It was a great experience for most. (Talk to Spencer:))Uncle Jeff and Aunt Shelby came out on Sunday just to see it, and left after the first show. Sr. D got roped into being a prophet. He wasn't too enthusiastic at first, but I think he warmed up during the performance. The prophets were a surprise for most of the youth, and they ended up being the hit of the show. Some kids wanted pictures with them, and I think he even gave out an autograph! He played the prophet Mormon and held a really nice replica of the gold plates. In this shot I got him out-of-era, holding something a little lighter and easier to write on! (Poor Mormon! A computer would have made things much easier to abridge!)

Here is the part of the cast that I came to see! (Unfortunately, I didn't do a full body shot, or you would see Mormon's awsome legs!) Here is Brian, Tommy, Taylor and his friend, Marcus Anderson

It was so nice that our cousins came! And I'm so grateful for the church organization and talented people who are willing to share their talents to bless the lives of my family and particularly my children!!So if these videos uploaded successfully, you can see and hear 20 seconds of it. Emily is wearing glasses and is behind a girl with a black necklace. Taylor is at the top with a tuft of hair and his eyes showing. The second video is a mistake. I didn't mean to put this one in. It is the last line of the show, but it cuts off the very last note. Uggh. And Blogger isn't letting me delete it. (Sorry!) So I'll put in the one I meant to do as the third video. It shows Sr. D coming out on the stage and onto the wings with his gold plates. It's a dark video, sorry. (That is if it is successfully uploaded.)