A Really Great Weekend

With Scott's return from Alaska, I was really feeling the need for some fun family time...and we got it! We had a great weekend.

Friday was the last day of swimming lessons for the kids. (I realize that most of my pictures are of Aaron. He was the only one without goggles on--Scott thinks goggles make our kids look "special"--and the other three always had their heads under water swimming or diving.)














They all did so great again this summer. Savannah, Josh, and Sara all are very comfortable with swimming and diving. Aaron finally figured out how to put his whole face in the water and somewhat swim.





Sara's favorite thing to do is dive for things, and she's really quite good at it. She's really quite a little fish swimming to the bottom of the pool to retrieve things.



Josh and Savannah started working on actual diving from the side of the pool. This is how their dives went for both of them--get in position, aim their hands toward the pool, then dive....and somehow they each ended up in an upright position when they entered the water. Oh well, something to work on next year.





Nate was somewhat patient as he watched from the sidelines.





And since it was the last day of lessons, and since we were the last lesson of the day, Michael told us we could stay and swim as a family as long as we wanted. What a fun way to end swimming lessons! Scott took a couple of hours off work and we had a great time swimming as a family. The kids especially loved the chance to show off for their dad everything they had learned.

Friday night we had fire pit for dinner. After we ate our fill of hot dogs, we decided to load up in the suburban and go get snow cones for dessert.

On Saturday we drove to Meridian to try out a new business that was opening. It's called Bounce and is just a big old warehouse room filled with inflatable jumpers and slides and such. The kids loved it. I loved that it's in one big open room, so Scott and I were able to just sit back and watch. The kids had free reign and could go from one thing to the other without us having to be right there. Even Nate had a great time. Since it was their grand opening weekend, they had a really good deal on a year family pass. So we bought an annual pass so we can go back and play anytime we want. We spent several hours there and totally wore out the kids. We came home and put a Redbox movie on upstairs for the kids and one on downstairs for Scott and me. All the kids were ready to go to sleep that night--it was a busy day.

These next three weeks are going to be busy ones. My parents are coming for Josh's birthday this weekend, then Scott and I get to sneak away on a little trip (I'll tell more about that later), and then we have our family vacation to Yellowstone. Before I know it, this summer is going to be over and the kids will be heading back to school. I'm sure the end of summer is going to come a lot sooner than any of us will be ready for. So for now, we have to take every chance to soak up the sun, enjoy the lack of scheduling or routines, the ability to play with friends all day long, late night bedtimes, sleeping in, digging in the sandbox for hours at a time, running through the sprinklers, and all the other joys that come with summer and kids.

The End of Scott's Alaska Trip

Sunday proved to be an adventure. We ended up missing most of Sacrament meeting because Sara cried for 30 minutes over what shoes she wanted to wear, and then I spent 15 minutes searching for my keys (which one of the kids conveniently put in our junk drawer). When it came time for nursery, Nate wouldn't let me leave. I spent the next two hours sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery with Nate on my lap. He wouldn't even get down and play. At the end of church, I rounded up all 5 kids and wondered why I had even bothered to come.

Monday was a bit better. We started our second week of swimming lessons. Then in the afternoon, Scott's parents came over and stayed with the kids for a few hours while I went and ran errands. I made a trip to Costco for diapers and wet wipes. It was the first time in a year and a half that I've had to buy diapers. A year and a half ago I stocked up on diapers at an amazing Albertsons sale, and have just been using those. I got Aaron through diapers and have had Nate in them the whole time, but I've finally run out of the larger sizes. I still have a bunch of little diapers that I'll be able to use on the new baby. It's been really nice not having to buy diapers, they are expensive.

After I got back from running errands and Scott's parents had gone, we had a very kid friendly dinner of pizza, then went to rent a Redbox movie. We were about half-way through the movie when we paused it for all the kids to get their jammies on. I headed downstairs and got Nate's jammies and warmed up a bottle for him. Right then Scott called to say he had landed at the airport in Boise (around 9:45 pm). I breathed a sigh of relief because we were finally on the very end stretch of his trip--he just had to drive home. Just then I heard Sara let out a blood curdling scream from upstairs. I told Scott I'd better go check out what had happened. As I neared the top of the stairs, I told Scott, "It's bad. I have to go." I hung up the phone, put Nate and the bottle down and rushed over to a bloodied Sara. Her nose was gushing blood. I got her into the bathroom and watched as the blood dripped through her fingers, down her legs, and pooled between her toes on the bathroom tile. I sent Savannah for a rag and wet wipes and tried to get the story of what had just happened. Josh was more than willing to report on the incident--Sara and Aaron were pulling on each end of one of Scott's exercise bands, and Aaron had let go, sending it snapping back (like a rubber band) right into Sara's nose. By then Savannah was back with the rag (which I gave to Sara and told her to hold tightly against her nose) and the wet wipes (which I used to clean the blood up off the tile floor. I examined Sara and decided she was going to need a bath (she was covered in blood), so I helped her undress and get into a warm bath. Then I went to work on my carpet. The incident had happened in the bonus room, and she had tracked blood from there, clear through the loft, and into the bathroom. I went downstairs and got my Bissell, brought it upstairs and started cleaning the path of blood up out of my carpet. In the meantime, Aaron had been sent to his bed. When I finished cleaning the carpet, I checked in on Sara in the bath. Her nose had stopped bleeding, so I told Josh to help her out of the bath when she was ready. Then I went in to Aaron, who was feeling really badly about what he had done. I told him I knew it was an accident, but that there was a reason we tell them all not to play with our stuff (I don't know how many times we've told them that Dad's exercise equipment is not a toy and to leave it alone). Then I gathered all the kids back up and we settled back down in the bonus room to finish watching our movie. I pulled Nate with his bottle and blanket up onto my lap and realized that I'd never called Scott back. Just then I heard the garage door open, so I waited a few more minutes till he came upstairs to give him the full report. Ahh, if only he had been home a half hour sooner and we could have avoided all of that!

All the kids were so happy to have their daddy back, and so was I. We all stayed up way too late looking at his fishing pictures, and the kids got to bed around midnight. After the kids were asleep, Scott took me out to help him unload his luggage. He had two big boxes of fish (halibut, cod, salmon, and rock fish)--about 100 pounds in all. We got it all transferred to the freezer, and it almost made me not care that he'd been gone for 6 days. Getting all that fish is the one redeeming thing about his Alaska travels.

Tuesday morning Scott took the kids to swimming lessons so he could see how they are progressing. Then he went in to work around lunch time. Of course after being gone, he as a ton of stuff to catch up on, so he's come home after 6:30 the last two evenings. Last night he had to go do an Eagle Board of Review that took 2 1/2 hours (seriously, that's a long board of review). So, even though he's been back for a few days, I don't feel like we've really had much time with him. I'm hoping this weekend we can get some fun things in all together as a family.

And here is a picture of our freezer, all stocked with fish. Another box of rock fish showed up today (it wasn't ready before Scott left to come home, so they had to ship it), so I'm guessing we have about 150 pounds of fish. A couple of years ago I wanted Halibut for Mother's Day dinner, and we had gone through all of ours from the previous summer, so Scott had to go buy some. It was $18 a pound! So, when I see this freezer, I just think of how much all that fish is worth, and about how many yummy dinners of fish I have in store for me. The top shelf is rock fish on the right and halibut on the left. Next shelf down is cod stuffed between bread and frozen pizzas. Next shelf down is a couple packs of salmon. And the shelf below that is more salmon on the right and more halibut on the left.

Miscelaneous Photos

These are the results of the glitter nail night with Aunt Kenna. Savannah's are blue and Sara's are pink. Cute girls!

Last night Nate did not want to go into his crib, so I sat down in the rocking chair next to his crib and rocked him for a bit. He pointed to the queen bed right next to us (his room doubles as the guest bedroom) and said, "Joshua Sleep!" I asked him if he wanted Josh to sleep with him tonight, and he nodded his head yes. So, I asked Josh if he wanted to sleep in that room with Nate, and he happily said yes. Josh crawled up on the bed and Nate squirmed off my lap and crawled up next to Josh and said "Sleep!". I decided to give it a try. It only took the two of them an hour, but they finally fell asleep together. It was Nate's first night not sleeping in a crib. He adores his older brother.

And speaking of Nate, he is really missing his Daddy. He walks around looking for a phone, then when he finds one, he picks it up and says into it, "Daddy Home!". This little kid is a total Momma's boy except when his dad is gone, and then all he wants is Daddy.


Scott started in on fishing last night and caught his first salmon not long after he started. Here he is proudly displaying his first fish.

We are almost through one more day and have two more to go. We can make it!

And The Good News Is....

The freezer works again! After giving it a few days to dry out, I plugged it in again and it didn't trip the outlet and is now working just like before. Now I have to transfer all the food back to where it belongs in there.

I was really quite productive today. Last night Marc and Kenna took all 5 kids to the park, so I was able to get quite a bit of cleaning done. Since the house started out clean today, I was able to tackle organizing of closet space. I started going through my girl stuff and getting ready to get rid of it (sniff sniff). While I was going through the many bins of clothes, I came across a whole bin of size 2T boy clothes that I never got out for Nate to wear. And by now they are all too small for him (he's a big kid--he'll turn two next month and already wears size 3T). So, I'll just save them for this next little boy.

Scott finished up with his meetings in Anchorage and flew to Kodiak this afternoon. He's going camping with his friend Sam tonight and fishing with him tonight and tomorrow (for Salmon). Then on Sunday he's going to head out on the ocean for some halibut fishing. Halibut is what I love--I'm hoping he catches his limit and brings me home a whole bunch to fill my once-again-working freezer.

Today was a long day. My feet are swollen, by back and neck ache, my hips hurt, and I'm just so tired. And I'm only halfway through Scott's trip. I'm hoping Monday night comes quickly. I'm finding myself wondering how on earth I am going to survive Scott's October Alaska trip. This trip is just under a week, and it's about to do me in. How am I going to survive a whole month when I'm 8-9 months pregnant? I guess I'll just tackle that when it gets here. Right now I just have to focus on staying sane till Monday.

When Things Go Wrong...

So, last night the girls got to go do their "girl night" with Aunt Kenna (and had a fabulous time). While they were gone, I let the boys play outside and I took on the project of defrosting my outside freezer (it's an old one and is not frost-free, so it builds up ice on the shelves and has to be defrosted about once a year). I wanted to get it cleaned up before Scott comes home with a bunch of halibut to put in it. I got it all done and put the food back in and then went on with other things. Then when I went to wash my face just before bed (about 11:30), I noticed that I didn't have instant hot water in my sink. Our house is big enough that it takes forever for the hot water to get from the hot water heater to the sinks (it takes about two minutes running the water before it starts to get warm). So, a few year ago we paid to have our water heater turned into a recirculating one so we would always have instant hot water. So, when I went to wash my face, I didn't have instant hot water. I remembered that one time when that happened, it was because the gfci outlet in the garage had been tripped and needed reset, causing the recirculating part of the water heater to not have power to work.

So, I headed outside to check if that was the case. Sure enough, the reset button on the outlet was popped out. So, I pushed it to reset it. It did a blue spark inside the outlet, then popped right back out. I tried it several more times and each time it did the same thing. At this point I started to panic. I thought of all the food that I had put back into a warm freezer that wasn't working because it was on the same outlet system. I called Scott (who had landed in Anchorage just a half hour before and was headed to a restaurant for dinner). He didn't answer. I called him two more times before he answered. I told him the situation and asked him what I should do. He couldn't figure out why the outlet wouldn't just reset. He suggested I run extension cords from the house out to the garage so I could plug in the freezer and the fridge.

So I went to work on that. I got the fridge plugged in just inside in the bathroom (which is also a gfci outlet), and the fridge started working. Next I did the freezer. When I plugged it in, the outlet in the bathroom tripped. MYSTERY SOLVED--the freezer was tripping the outlet. I went back out to the garage and tried to reset the outlet, and because the freezer was no longer plugged in, it reset just fine. So, I knew what the problem was (although I couldn't figure out why the freezer would be tripping the outlet--I've defrosted it many times before and it's always worked just fine), but now I had a new problem. I had a freezer full of food that wasn't working and it was too late at night to do anything about it. So, I went to work trying to find a place for all the food in our other two feezers (a side by side inside our house, which was already pretty full--and a little freezer/fridge combo in the garage that was full of Otter Pops). The Otter Pops got moved out of the freezer (they can be refrozen at any time) and every square inch of both freezers got filled with the meat and homemade bread that had filled the deep freeze. I found a place for most of it. I ended up having to throw away the frozen peppers from last year's garden (we'll have more peppers in another month anyway), but everything else is safely frozen. I finally got to bed at 1 am last night.

So now I find myself asking why a 20+ year old freezer would pick this week to quit working. Why do things go wrong when Scott's not around to help? Two years ago it was the element on our stove that went out the day Scott left for a big trip, and now it's the freezer! And when Scott gets home from this trip, he's going to have a whole bunch of frozen fish that will need to go into our non-working freezer. I guess we'll be doing some appliance shopping as soon as he gets home.

Things I Forgot

With all the reporting I had to do from this past weekend, I totally forgot to mention the fun we had leading up to the weekend. On Wednesday, the weather was nice and cool (mid 70's), so I loaded up all 5 kids and took them to the zoo (by myself). They were all surprisingly good and we had a very enjoyable time. The zoo wasn't very crowded, the weather wasn't too hot, and the kids listened to everything I told them--which makes for a wonderfully fun day.

Thursday afternoon was Scott's work summer party. It was in his boss' backyard and they had swimming and good food. The kids' favorite part was when they got to dive for money. His boss gets rolls of silver dollars (which are now gold) from the bank, then throws them in the pool and lets the kids dive for the coins. Our kids came out with $44 in coins--not bad. The kids swam and swam till we made them get out to come home (we were among the last to leave).

And then on Friday we left for Grandma's. So, the kids have had back to back days of fun, followed by a fun weekend, and now two weeks of swimming lessons. I'd say they are having a pretty good summer so far.

On the Road Again

I just sent Scott off on a 5 1/2 day trip to Alaska. This is the fun trip where he gets to sneak in some fishing. I'm hoping he comes back with lots of halibut. While he's gone, we are staying busy with swimming lessons every morning this week and next. The kids are doing great at learning to swim and are gaining confidence with each lesson. This is their third year taking lessons from Michael. We don't know what we'll do next year when Michael is gone on his mission. He teaches in his backyard swimming pool and lives just a mile away from us. While the kids are doing their half hour lesson, I take Nate in the stroller and we go for a walk up the road Michael lives on. It's a great country road that is lined with fun things to see--water (canal), horses, and a cow. Nate looks forward to our walking time as much as the others look forward to their swimming time.

Tonight Sara and Savannah get to go have some "girl time" with their Aunt Kenna. They are going to do glitter nails and maybe watch a girl movie together. The girls can't wait for 6:00 to come. Then tomorrow evening Aunt Kenna is going to take all of them to a park so I can get some cleaning done around here (it takes 5 times as long to clean when they are here). We appreciate Aunt Kenna taking time to help out while Scott is gone. Hopefully the time he is gone will pass quickly for us. And hopefully he has a great time on his trip.

4th of July Weekend

Warning: Photo Overload!

For this 4th of July, we decided to head to Eastern Idaho. It was the first time in our 11 years of marriage that we've spent the 4th of July with my parents (it was about time). Part of the reason we've never spent this holiday with them is because the big Griffin Family Reunion is always this weekend. I grew up going to this reunion, and I never really looked forward to it. They always held it at Heise Hot Springs. All of the cousins my age would go swimming, but my Dad always told us it was too expensive, so we would sit around and visit with the old people while all the young people swam. We were also the only ones who slept in a tent. Everyone would be sitting (and sleeping) comfortably in their motor homes while we had a tent. Also, this reunion had a very wide range of cousins. It's the descendants of my Great Grandma and Grandpa Griffin, so I didn't know most of the people there or know how I was related to them (2nd cousin twice removed--what is that?). And, lets just say that I didn't have a lot in common with a lot of the "cousins". We had plenty of teenage mothers, smokers, bikini clad girls, etc. I remember the year one of the cousins got pulled over for speeding, then hauled off to jail for possession of drugs. Sooooo...for years my mom has been telling me how much better this reunion is. That everyone has pulled their life together, the reunion is actually organized with real meals and games, etc. So after 11 years of marriage, I decided it was about time I showed up to this reunion with my family. It helped that this year my favorite great aunt was in charge of it and they held it at Indian Hot Springs, which is just a 1/2 hour from my parents' house (so if it was too boring, we could just drive back to Grandma's).

Well, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my mom was right--the reunion was great. We all had a wonderful time there. On Friday we drove to Blackfoot for a dinner and fireworks at my Grandma Sorensen's assisted living center. We all had a good laugh at the fireworks in the daylight (they couldn't wait for dark, because it would be past the old people's bedtime). It was good for my kids to see my grandma again (she's their last living great grandparent).

Saturday we all slept in, then headed to the reunion just after lunch. We sat around and visited for a while, then the fun began. All the kids joined in on races.




They had a race for each age group, then gave out medals to the winners. The medals were really cute--my aunt glued a gold dollar coin on the 1st place ribbons, a half dollar on the 2nd place ribbons, and a quarter on the 3rd place. My kids represented our family well. In the racing, all the kids took first place in their age group (except Sara, who took second place because she was in the same age group as Josh).






Scott and I even took medals in our races (the men's under 35 race and the pregnant women's race).


Hanging out between the races. Josh and Aaron both found sticks that were great for digging holes in the dirt.




Next was the baseball toss. Aaron and Josh took first place again, and Savannah and Nate took second (poor Sara was competing against a bunch of boys). By this time, Nate was getting really tired. He wasn't such a fan of his second medal.







Next came the whipped cream game. You get a glob of whipped cream on your wrist, then you are supposed to hit your arm with your other hand, making the cream fly up into the air, and then catch it in your mouth. The kids had a great time with this game. (Nate skipped the flipping it in the air, and just ate the cream right off his hand.)













And after filling up on whipped cream, the kids had fun climbing this old tree.





Around 5, I took Nate and Aaron and went back to Aberdeen with my parents so the boys could nap. Scott stayed with the older three kids and let them swim for a few hours. Then it was time for fireworks. My sister Linda came to watch them with us. The kids were all chilled from swimming, so they bundled up in blankets in my parents driveway and we watched while Scott put on a good little fireworks show for us.




Sunday we opted to sleep in with the kids while my parents went to their 9 o'clock church. The kids were so tired--Savannah slept in till a quarter to noon. After my parents got back from church, we got packed up and headed back to the family reunion again. Sara asked where we were going and when I told her we were going back to the reunion, she said, "Why? We already met those relatives!" We had another good afternoon there. They had a big family dinner, then we participated in the auction. People bring things they have made or bought, and they auction it off for money to pay for the next year's reunion. We came away with some delicious homemade caramels and chocolates made by my Aunt Wanda, and each kid got to bid on and win something they had their eye on (Aaron's was a little $3 plastic golf set from Walmart that we paid a ridiculous $23 for at the auction--but he had a great time bidding against another little boy). After the auction, the kids got to take turns hitting a pinata and got a handful of candy to take home in the car. Needless to say, the kids were pretty tired from the weekend of fun, and most of the car ride was quiet. (Till they woke up and decided they were all sick of being strapped in their seats and complained the last hour of the drive.)