Busy week

This is the first week of summer vacation, though it seems like we are more busy than we were during school. Lori has been driving all over the valley. The kids are enrolled in swimming lessons, still doing gymnastics, and Sierra just started piano lessons this week. She likes playing the piano, but not the drudgery of practice, so I know she is definitely my daughter. The teacher (Lori's cousin Audrey) gave Sierra an assignment for practice, which pretty much constitutes the first 3 pages of her work book. But I think Sierra is getting bored with playing the same thing over and over again, because she keeps wanting to move on beyond those pages. She's getting better at playing the assigned passages, but I hope, for her sanity and mine, that Audrey will let her move on next week.


The other exciting news (aside from all that and buying a piano too) is that Sierra began riding her bike without training wheels this week. She had been begging to get them off her bike, ever since her friend Gage had his removed last week. So, Monday evening, I ran out of excuses (I really wasn't looking forward to chasing her bike up and down the street while holding the seat to keep it steady), and removed the training wheels. The first pass up and down the street, she did pretty good, though she kept leaning to one side. She denied she was doing it until I let go of the seat briefly to prove my point. After the second pass though, she had it down! All in all, I think it took about 10 minutes for her to be able to ride without the training wheels, though it took a few practice turns for her to be able to make a turn without putting a foot down to save herself a fall. She's been zipping all over the neighborhood since. We've gone on a few small rides together, and perhaps this weekend, we'll go down to the parks along the river and ride for a bit. She's a little nervous about that, because of all the people that walk/ride along the bike path, but I think with a little more practice, she can handle it.

Camping 'n stuff

My friend Erin over at flarinerin has been giving me a hard time about posting, so that's a clear sign that it's time.

It's been a busy few weeks. Over the Memorial Day weekend, we went camping with our church congregation. Lori and I were not all that thrilled about going when the day came, but the kids were already pumped about going camping, so away we went. Our church maintains a campground in the Cascades near White Pass. It's a beautiful area set on a small reservoir. Once we got there, we had a great time. The kids were instantly interested in going boating, but since we had gotten to the campsite so late, we promised them an outing Saturday morning. There were skits and dutch oven cooking that night. The kids enjoyed the campfire most of all though. Sierra was a marshmallow roasting machine. I think she was more interested in making smores than eating them. The other attraction was throwing pine cones from the huge pile of them near each fire pit. Eventually, we did get them to settle down and go to sleep. The next morning, the kids were impatient to get on the lake. Unfortunately, the boats were locked up so we waited until after breakfast (also provided by the church). When we finished, the boats were still locked, so Lori hunted down the caretaker for the camp and got him to come unlock them. There was one row boat, and 5 canoes. We never really considered the canoes, there was no way that we would be able to keep the kids from standing up in the boat, and we really had no desire to end up swimming. We rowed around the lake for some 10 - 15 minutes, dodging trees and fishermen. But eventually we had to take the boat back. Hailey could have spent the entire day in that boat, and she protested at the top of her lungs! Once back on land, we cleaned up camp, and returned home. Later that afternoon, we headed over to Evans house to celebrate the birthday of Daniel, Evan's stepson.

Sunday was pretty crazy. Lori and the girls went to church with Evan and his family, while I rehersed our church choir and conducted then during church. I then ran over to Evan's church to be there as Daniel received the priesthood, and then ran back to church to substitute leading the music in primary in my church. I had a few other things planned that night, but was able to get out of them so that we could spend the rest of the evening with Evan's family.

Monday, I attended a memorial program for the veterans in the Tri-cities. The stake choir has sung at this event for the past 2 years, and it's something that I've really looked forward to. The program is always very touching, and it reminds me of my grandfather, who served in World War 2. This year, I took my camera and took several pictures during and after the program. I'll have to post them sometime.

This last weekend, our church engaged in a service project for several single older ladies. The week before, I had been asked to lead the activities for one of the projects, so Friday night, I and another member went to Home Depot and spent about $70 on flowers and other supplies. The plan was to do as much for these ladies as we could in just 2 hours. I don't know how the other projects went, but ours went great. A couple of young men spent most of the time planting flowers, and they did a great job. I replaced a couple of electrical outlets for her, and checked out the fire alarms. The toughest part of the whole project for me, was crawling into the crawl space below her trailer to pull a dryer hose from the dryer to the vent exit on the side. I hate spiders. I don't mind getting close enough to kill them, but the idea of crawling under that trailer, especially after opening the door and seeing all the spider webs. There was quite a bit of debris, and I just knew there were spiders in every corner. It took me a few minutes to work up my nerve to belly crawl to the hole in the floor where the dryer hose came through. Ten minutes later, I had the hose pulled through and hooked up, and you couldn't have gotten me back under there for anything. We finished by fixing a cabinet door, which required that I run home to get a drill to modify the mounting hardware. The project was a great success.

Wow, I didn't mean for this to be such a novel, but I guess when you post once a month, lots happens between posts. I have a few posts I'm working on that aren't travel logs. Hopefully I'll get one of those out here for your enjoyment.