September

Ivy has been talking about taking a ballet class and becoming a "ballet-er" for a long time.  I kept telling her that I would let her start when she started Kindergarten.  I wanted to sign her up at a studio that does the Nutcracker every December but they were so slow to post their schedule.  I was tired of waiting and a friend of mine reached out and asked if Ivy wanted to take a class with her daughter.  I knew Ivy would love that, so I agreed and signed her up.  Ivy has really been loving it and I'll try the Nutcracker studio next year.

 

Brynn picked to have me read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone when it was her turn and we finished at the beginning of September.  She even got to have the illustrated version.

 

One afternoon Ivy and I had a tea party outside and I taught her how to hold a spoon on her nose.  She thought that was a funny trick!  Later that day, Ivy got out the blocks.  Some afternoons she is better at entertaining herself than others.  This was a good afternoon-if she gets started on something, she can play on her own for quite a while.

We decided to go to Bear Lake for Labor Day, because....why not?  It's our getaway place when we need a getaway.  We were the only ones there, besides my mom for Friday night/Saturday morning and my dad Saturday evening and Sunday.  We thought it was a great idea to spend one of our weekend days playing (Saturday) and one of our days laboring (Monday).  

Brynn wanted to show Grandma her flagpole-climbing trick as soon as we got there.  Their flagpole is much higher and we wouldn't let her go all the way to the top but it takes her no time at all to make it pretty high.  Those trees are tall and she is even with the top of them.  The view is much better from their flagpole than it is from ours with that beautiful lake in the background.

   

The kids got in a Rhino ride that night.  It wasn't their only one of the weekend.

We skipped the beach that Saturday and opted for a hike instead.  I had never been to Bloomington Lake, although the kids had been a couple of years earlier for one of their Grandkid Camp activities.  So we decided to do that instead.  It was quite the drive up a windy dirt road!  But worth it to find that lake up there after that dusty drive.  It was a really cool place to visit.  Justin took the girls cliff jumping.  Stockton stayed back with me and my mom and entertained himself by jumping around the rocks.  Molly couldn't resist the rope swing and did it a couple of times before we left.

Molly on the rope swing

in the water she goes!

the kids dared Ivy to go all the way under-it was cold!

We had a campfire that night.  The next day we flew some kites and Justin gave Molly some driving lessons on the Rhino while Ivy tried unsuccessfully to stay awake.  We went home on Sunday late afternoon, ready to work the next day after a couple of days of play.

 

 

trying so hard to keep those eyes open

and failing

Our project on Labor Day was to build a fence in the pasture to keep the sheep away from the greenhouse and also to designate a spot for a future raspberry patch and orchard.  Justin dreams big and he has big plans for that area.  Also, the sheep had put a couple of holes in the greenhouse-they will be easy to repair but I don't want any more holes.  Stockton and Molly were huge helpers, the weather was beautiful, and they finished almost the entire fence in that one day.

 

They were able to finish the little bit they didn't get done the following day.  Stockton helped Justin after school until it was finished.  You can see that the weather by then had changed quite drastically.  They were layered and bundled.

 

We were invited to attend the endowment ceremony for one of Justin's priests and a good friend, Weston Grant.  He had his call to London-so cool!  This day was special for lots of reasons, but two stand out: 1. Temples have been closed since March and have sorely been missed.  I probably took them for granted.  No, I definitely took them for granted.  There is a peace there that can't be replicated anywhere else and it felt so good to feel it again.  2.  He had it done in the Vernal temple.  We had never been and it is always fun to visit new temples, plus Justin's mom grew up going to church there when it was a stake center.  All of his family is from the Uintah Basin so there is history there.  It was a great day!

 

I took pity on Molly and Stockton and their bus situation.  I have always made them ride the bus even though they don't particularly enjoy it.  But after that first week of school, I decided to give them a break and pick them up in the afternoon. Because of covid, the school district has a shortage of bus drivers so the middle school bus that they ride was having to make a detour each afternoon to the high school to pick up high school students.  They would sit in the bus for an extra 15-20 minutes, not being allowed to get out or open windows.  At the end of August this was almost unbearable.  The bus was horribly overcrowded and, even with three kids per seat, they sometimes had a hard time finding a place to sit.  Add to all of that the whole pandemic thing and I decided it was bad enough to warrant a ride home.  I called my friend, Jenny Webb, and we worked out a carpool.  That finds Ivy and I at the school every Tuesday and Thursday waiting to pick up but it has been worth it.  The kids get home a full 30 minutes earlier each day. 

In addition to ballet, Ivy was really wanting to try soccer.  I signed her up for the 4-week rec program.  She was so excited for that first game and even had Molly practice with her the night before.  She stayed excited right up until we got there and the nerves started to kick in.  She spent the first half of the game crying.  She would only stay on the field if I was right there with her, holding her hand.  She finally started to warm up after half time and politely told me that I could go sit on the sidelines.  After that, she loved it!  She had four very aggressive boys on her team.  She would get the ball and kick it and almost immediately one of the boys would be right there to take the ball.  She didn't care though and she was excited anytime she was involved in a play.  It was pretty fun and hilarious to watch.

the girl on the end never warmed up and cried through the whole season

 Eric and Heidi invited us to go crawdadding with them.  Justin was at work that Saturday but, since they were just up at Strawberry, I decided to take the kids.  Gene, April, and Brett also came up.  It was a good day-we caught lots and lots of crawdads.  We let them go before we left but I think it would be fun to have a crawdad boil next time.  Stockton liked catching them but he wanted nothing to do with them once they were caught.  All the girls took a turn holding one.

The neighbors were cutting down a couple of their trees and the kids were fascinated with the process.  They kept running out there to check the progress.

 

Molly got the kids involved in another movie.  "Monster Mash" was the production they worked on one full Sunday.  It was a good one, complete with a Frankenstein monster and a mad scientist.  Someday I am going to compile all these movies into one place so other people can watch them and enjoy them like Justin and I do.

 

At this point, I was picking so many tomatoes!  I would get this much about every third or fourth day.  It was hard to keep up! 

 Molly's soccer season was a different one this fall.  We were just glad that she had one!  They have the age divisions divided by birth year instead of grade so a large majority of her team are freshmen at the high school this year and had tried out, and made, the freshmen team which meant they couldn't play club soccer.  Molly's team was left with 5 girls who were too young to try out-those with fall or winter birthdays.  The result was that they formed a "provisional" team with girls spanning several years.  The 8th graders, obviously, but also some 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders who either didn't make the team or opted not to play high school soccer for whatever reason (several girls were involved in other activities/sports and this was an option for them without the massive commitment high school entails).  Anyway, this ended up being a great experience for her!  Number 1: she was able to see that it's not all about soccer.  You can still have a soccer life if you don't make or don't want to do high school soccer.  Number #2: her confidence grew in leaps and bounds!  Something about playing with those older girls (who were supportive) made her blossom.  She played with the aggression and confidence that we always knew she had but tended to hold back.  It was so fun to watch her play.  And it said something that, by the end of the season, all 5 of those little 8th graders were starting every single game.  She had such a fun season and I was so happy for her!

Stockton's graphics teacher is in our ward and she sent me this picture of him one day with the following message "I love having Stockton in graphics class.  He follows directions, he helps the kid next to him, and he makes clever projects!"  I already knew he was a good boy at school but it was kind of her to pass on that message.  She also has told me that every project he has done has a baseball theme and that she can always pick his out before checking names because of this.

If you ask Ivy right now, she will say that she loves coloring and cleaning.  Really.  She colors all the time.  She cleans when she feels like it and when it's a chore she wants to do.  Gene and Brett came up to help with a project one Saturday and she spent almost the entire day sweeping up the sawdust they were making.  She collected it all into piles and put them in grocery sacks.  She wanted the lambs to have a soft spot to lay come winter.  Don't tell her that I ended up throwing them all away.

 

The guys were working on the outside of our wall.  We still don't have any siding on at all but Justin wants to build a portico over the door before we get the siding up. He got all this really nice lumber for free and they got it started that afternoon.

While they were working, Brynn and I harvested all of our pumpkins from the greenhouse.  They had been ready for a while.  We put them all on our front porch for the duration of the fall.
 

Brynn's little best friend, our neighbor Corbin, had a bad accident and was in Primary Children's for a week.  We prayed for him every day.  He had to take it easy when he got home.  Brynn missed him so it was a sweet moment when he was able to come over and play again.  I was too slow getting out my camera, but you can see the two of them walking back to Corbin's house.

 

Ivy wanted to play outside a lot in September.  I don't blame her.  It was gorgeous weather all month long.  A lot of our activities involved me watching her do tricks on the trampoline.

Ivy's goal for the fall was to learn to ride her bike without training wheels.  We worked on it almost every day.  She was just so scared to try it without the training wheels and we were making no progress.  So I tried doing just one training wheel hoping that she would start to figure out balancing.  I don't know that it helped at all but we stuck with it.  Molly brought her long board out occasionally when she wasn't busy with something else.

I love living so close to my family.  We spend a lot of time together, especially in the summer.  Towards the end of September, I was starting to realize how long it had been since I'd seen them and so I texted my mom and sisters and said we needed a girls night and asked if they wanted to meet for a hike.  Ali found us a hike that we could do so we met up, hiked, and ended with dinner.  It was a beautiful night and just the girls night refresh I was needing!

Ali, Erin M., Mom, Erin W., me

Ali, me, Erin W., Mom, Erin M.

Justin decided to do a huge project this fall and get water out to the pasture and the greenhouse.  He spent hours on a tractor digging trenches and then even more time running pipe and electricity to various zones and then hooking everything up.  It was exhausting and stressful for him.  The kids, however, really enjoyed those trenches.  You can imagine all the war games Stockton made up for him and his sisters!

complete with American flag

Homemade salsa (made from our tomatoes!), cinnamon rolls, and raspberry rolls (made with my dad's raspberries) made for a delicious Sunday afternoon! 

 

Stockton and Molly had an outdoor percussion concert.  It was fun to hear them play what they had been learning.  After a bit of a rocky start, they are both enjoying their percussion class.