Camping!

A few people have finally heard my pleas and voted in my preschool polls, but I would love more! I've been posting more fun craft ideas to lure you over there--Clever Sprouts Preschool
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Also, I'm in the mood for boy band music for some reason, so I changed to that--hope you enjoy (mom)!
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On to my online journal entries!
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I did Faith's piggies with these hot pink hair tutus for church the morning of July 5th and then she donned another outfit to match for the rest of the day. Cute!
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We played games at Tony's parents that evening. We love dominos!

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On the 8th we had Ann, Natalie & kids over for our 4th of July party. It didn't work out to have it the week before, so we just extended the celebration of our country's independence! We had fruit kabobs, Chinese chicken salad and pasta salad then monkey munch and Pop Rock "firework" cupcakes for dessert! A bit later, the homemade blackberry ice cream was finally ready. Tip: always pre-mash your blackberries, don't just throw them into the mix and turn on the ice cream maker. Ours still came out delicious, but it was more like vanilla with frozen blackberrry lumps!

The kids had a blast swimming and juming on the trampoline and then I had them make some flag inspired placemats. I laminated them when they were done and ours have really held up after using them almost a month. I love that Faith got creative with the star punch and folded her blue square to get it to punch stars in the middle. She ended up with 44 stars just by estimating! Christian did his completely on his own after I showed him which corner the blue went in. I thought it was funny that he glue stick-ed both sides of his red stripes, but unfortunately that doesn't really show now that the glue is dry. I also love his little line of blue stars!

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I had us moms tie ribbon wreaths, but they came out a little sparse. I was going for this look, but was too cheap to spend that much money on ribbon!
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The next morning, the kids and I left for an impromtu trip to the Uinta's to stay at Jordan's family cabin. On the way there, we were twice slowed down by giant flocks of sheep crossing Mirror Lake Highway! Faith got this great close-up picture out of her window. Christian kept saying, "Mom!! Me get out and pet dem?!"


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It was "F" week for Sierra, so right after we got there we had some fun with Faith in Jordan's old fort




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and found some flowers.


Next, we drove over super rocky unpaved roads (for what seemed like an hour to the kids who were bouncing all around in their car seats) to Lily Lake. We hiked around the lake for awhile before Jordan finally found what we were foraging for:





FROGS!





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Faith got brave and held one,





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and Christian couldn't get enough of them.


While he was holding his third frog, he all of a sudden lifted it up and kissed it! Faith's exclamation of "Yuck!" startled him and, by reflex, threw the little guy into the grass. Because we laughed a bit about it, the next frog he got to hold he promptly gave a big kiss and a fling!

We next drove to this stream and the kids could have spent all day throwing pepples into it. By the way, the reason that Christian has no pants on is that he overindulged on all the fruit at our party the day before (he probably ate two pints of blueberries and nearly a whole pint of blackberries that were meant for the ice cream in addition to the watermelon). After two blow outs, I decided that he could just rock the pull-ups and saved the last pair of shorts for the next day.

I love all the pretty flowers that grow up in the mountains!

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We then hiked a trail that went through an area destroyed by a forest fire in 2002. Faith was so excited to finally go hiking for the first time in her life!

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Christian is always doing something crazy :)

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . And yet another example:

Here is Joy's family (with the addition of my kids), I'll have to get my family pic from her that she took. It was an easy and interesting hike and we loved reading the informative markers along the trail.

We had chili cheese dogs for dinner and then roasted marshmallows and Starburst (two of their friends told them to try it--they were actually pretty good!). We spent the next several hours trying to get the kids to sleep while we watched episodes of Firefly. I'll have to do an entire post soon on how much I love that program and what an injustice it is that we only ever got one shortened season of it. Soldier on, browncoats!

The next morning we cleaned up after breakfast and then hiked down behind the cabin to this stream. Below is a video of Faith crossing on the log bridge (with Joy's help).

We then packed up to go. Isn't it a cute cabin? Jordan's family built it themselves!

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This video is of the cool moths that hang out on the front porch. I love their defense mechanism!

We stopped at Butterfly lake to eat a picnic lunch and then headed home. It was a super fun trip even though it was way too short! Luckily, we didn't have to miss the Uinta's for too long . . . stay tuned!