Lawn Gopher Do

Have you ever played Mad Gab? My parents got it forever ago and my sisters, my mom and I sat around for hours just going through the cards. "Lawn Gopher Do" had us stumped for quite a while!

Let's just say that I've been meaning to post for a long time. Actually, I've been meaning to get on the computer for a long time, but I just haven't.

We finished school on Monday, along with the public schools, and we have definitely been enjoying summer vacation. We've been driving with the windows down, which gets Alyssa very excited. As soon as the windows go down, she shouts, "Turn up the music!" and starts bustin' a move in the back seat. The kids have watched a ton of movies while I painted the family room. Green, by the way. The exact shade of green that we had at our old house. I really liked it.
Ethan just came home from an almost-day-long fishing trip with Brian's dad. He caught three fish, and I think his grandpa caught six. They called me about an hour or so after they left, and Ethan exclaimed, "I caught a fish!" He had a blast!

Since Ethan got a surprise this morning, we surprised Alyssa and Marcus by inviting over a couple of cousins, Callie and Cecily. They played princesses, Harry Potter, army, Star Wars, and who knows what else while I put the family room back together and cleaned the kitchen. Yes, it took me most of the day to clean the kitchen. Yesterday I went back to bed after I got home from my walk, then I let the kids help themselves to breakfast while I slept in for a bit. Believe me, the milk spilled across the table and dry oatmeal spread throughout the kitchen and dining room was well worth it. I went ahead and left the mess while I continued painting, then we had some Marie Calendar freezer meals, which usually go to work with Brian, for dinner last night. I finished painting just before dinner time yesterday, and that's when the kids started getting interested in what I was doing, so I sent everyone up to the school room and we had a picnic dinner while watching a movie on the laptop.

Last week we went up to Brian's parent's cabin with his dad so Brian could help fix a broken pipe, and so we could go mushrooming.

Brian found a lizard, He picked it up in a ziplock bag, because he didn't know if its skin was poisonous or not. Don't worry, we let it go after we looked at it for a few minutes.


Ethan found a couple of mushrooms. This was the first time we went that he was old enough to pay attention and know what to look for. Mostly, though, he just loves being outside!

Brian and Kimber love each other, very much.

And going with the love pictures theme, Alyssa found a heart stump and wanted her picture with it. I love how she finds things like that.
!
Brian's dad found a fawn, just laying out by itself in the middle of nowhere. He called us over with the walkie talkie. It was so sweet! We got about five or six feet away from it, and it just watched us, holding perfectly still. We watched it for a few moments, then left it alone. We're hoping that its parents were hiding somewhere nearby, because when we went back to look for it a little later, it was gone.


And last, but certainly not least, a couple of weeks ago Alyssa had her first ballet recital. She looked so beautiful! About a week before the recital she worked herself up to tears and sometimes hysterical crying, because she was so nervous about it. We kept telling her it was nothing to be worried about, and that she had watched her cousins in the same recital before and that they had had a wonderful time, but she wouldn't listen to us. Then one day she came up to me, laughing, and said that she remembered when we went to the BYU Fairy Tale ballet show, and they had all of the kids come up on the stage to dance during intermission (which was genius, by the way) and she said that she wasn't nervous at all then. Her conclusion was that if she could dance in front of "all those people!" at that ballet, then surely she wouldn't get nervous just dancing for everyone's families.

She was so excited to perform, and she did wonderful! As soon as I figure out how to get the video off of my phone, I'll put her performance up.

Wonderfully Wet

the new LDS chapel in the rain this morning

It has been uncommonly rainy for the Tri-Cities this Spring, and everything is green and beautiful. You can tell that we're still conditioned from our time in Oregon, because it hasn't stopped me from going on walks in the morning or the kids from playing outside or Brian from, um, going to work. The kids spent all of May wondering when it would be warm enough for me to let them play in the sprinklers, and now that it's June, it's still not warm enough for sprinklers, but they're getting wet playing outside just the same.

I Spoke Too Soon

We've named the quail Old G.Q., which is short for General Quail. I think he's the lookout for the quail family living in our neighbor's and our back yards. In truth, it's probably a bunch of quail taking turns, but we've happily glossed over that thought.

This last weekend was hard! The main thing I learned, which I'll share with all of you so you don't make the same mistake I did, is that if you ever have surgery for anything, no matter how small, give yourself a few days to recover. I tried to treat Saturday like a normal Saturday, and by the end of the day, I was done.

I woke up with the kids, thinking I was feeling better, and I cleaned the kitchen, put dinner together to pop in the oven later, packed clothes and coats and food to go mushrooming in the Blue Mountains, and took Alyssa to ballet. After ballet, we piled in the car, and I just crashed.

"I don't feel good," I told Brian, and he told me to lay back and get some rest. "No, I mean I really don't feel good." All day Friday, if I stood up, I felt nauseated, but if I lay back down, I felt fine again. On Saturday afternoon, I just felt sick, no matter what I did. It was that sick feeling you get when you're pregnant and you think, "If I just eat something, I'll feel better," but then eat something and you don't feel better, so you eat something else and you still don't feel better. And because of my horrible cold, I couldn't breathe through my nose again, and my throat was sore and nasty from the surgery. It was crazy!

So we got to the cabin and I slept on the couch while Brian and the kids ran around finding mushrooms. I felt well enough to stick dinner in the oven, but once we were done eating, we packed back up again and headed home, instead of staying through Monday like the original plan. I could tell Brian was sad that we wouldn't be able to do more mushrooming, but he was so nice to take me home.

I stayed home from church on Sunday and slept and slept and slept, and I even took a nap yesterday afternoon while Marcus was sleeping. It's been a strange recovery, and I still feel a little bit of that icky sick feeling, so I'm wondering if I came down with something that decided to show up at just the right- er, wrong- moment. And no, I'm not pregnant. Believe me, I did my fair share of wondering this weekend. We stopped at the dollar store while we were running errands yesterday and picked up a few tests, but also they had me take a test before my surgery on Friday, and I'm assuming they would have told me and probably canceled the surgery if the test had turned out positive.

I'm still glad I had the surgery, though. My voice is so much clearer; it's so much easier to talk. I've caught myself singing a couple of times, and I've had to stop myself to follow the quiet-for-two-weeks rule. I think I'm going to sing at church next week, maybe a little.