Memorial weekend / Schools out!!

We decided to break out of Kimberly and visit Logan for Memorial weekend. We went down Thursday morning; when we got there we picked up some lunch and went to Nana's. The kids enjoyed playing around with Emma and visiting with Nana. Casey went over to help David on his house and I left Kendal to play with Emma at Nana's for the afternoon. Alice, Peter, and I went to Grandma and Grandpa's to play!
Friday the kids did school work (Alice got lots of tablet time from Grandpa during our visit). That night we put on a nice dinner for Grandma and Grandpa's Anniversary. We ended the night with pinacolada's, caramel popcorn, and watching black beards ghost. Saturday we met up with Nana, Sally, Billie and their families to go out to Clarkston, then the Logan Cemeteries. Despite the blustery day we had a good time. Billie has put together a bunch of family history stories to go along with our ancestors which was neat and fun to look up extra people we haven't sought out much before.

Also on Saturday Peter was wiggling his tooth (as usual) and my Dad bet him $20 to pull it out by the end of the day. Peter sat with me on the couch wiggling away so I swatted his hand and out popped the tooth! He was so surprised and I didn't believe him initially that it worked. We all had a good laugh at it, and poor Grandpa had to fork over his 20!

Sunday we had a nice morning at my parents doing home church and relaxing. After lunch we went back up to the Logan cemetery with David and Anica. We found more graves and afterwards the kids played at the house for a bit. After dinner we went out to Nana's house for a visit. The kids played games with Tate. (Mom and Dad on their future "resting spot". ; )

We had a very full memorial day. We met up with Sally, Billie (plus their families), Mom, Katheirne, Andy, Campbell, Hailey, Tony, and Lisa to go to baby animal days. We followed social distancing as well as possible and enjoyed going around the farm seeing the animals, and lots of treats from Tony and Andy. Alice was afraid of most of them, but was willing to pet the chicks, duck and turtles. Kendal wanted to hold anything and everything. Peter did hold a chick, and baby turtle, and pet a few other animals. He liked feeding hay to the cow, horse, and camels.

After lunch we went on a little four wheeling ride up green canyon, part of it was closed so we ended early. The kids got to go ride at the shop afterwards!

We ended the day with a hot dog roast with Sally, Billie, Tony, Lisa, and their families. The kids had a blast playing and running around. It was a great evening spent with family we don't get to see often.

Tuesday morning we did some school work and then did a short time at the shop riding four wheeler's. After lunch we headed out to take ice cream to the boys and visit Nana. Peter got to help Dad / David at the job site while the girls and I visited Nana. After dinner we said so long and headed home.

Kendal had her spring recital on Thursday! It's been quite the year with the first part being taught by Nancy Hyde and the second by Christina Talbot. Kendal will continue lessons into summer. We had a little over a month of online lessons during the height of the pandemic. Kendal has worked hard this year and progressed a lot. Her teacher did a virtual recital where she had just the kids there and she did a live video of the recital for families to tune in to watch. Kendal did a wonderful job on her piece, we're proud of her hard work!

The last two weeks we trudged our way through the end of school. Peter was a hard to motivate during this whole distance learning, but he still did his work, persevered, and accomplished a lot! Kendal did a great job with distance learning and only gave us grief with how much time she spent messaging friends. She's sad it's over, and we're all hopeful school resumes fairly normal schedule in the fall. I'm very happy school is out - this Mama needs a mental break from home school and all of this crazy. Casey finished up his year and was amazing for all that he did with the middle school kids and online learning! We are so thankful for all of the work that the kids' teachers put in this past semester. They are amazing and will be missed by the kids.
We celebrated the last day of school Friday with some church friends. I took the kids over to the Dansies and we had a water field day with the Dansies, Binghams, Youngs, Midells, Welches, and Birks. Each mom did a water activity that the kids rotated through. The kids had so much fun spending time with friends they haven't seen in a while. Alice happily played a few games and ran around with the other little's. It was such a fun way to end the school year! That night we took the kids to Kiwi Loco to celebrate and enjoy a treat!

We didn't do our typical Saturday outing this past weekend. We did a short neighborhood walk in the morning before it got hot. Then we spent the rest of the day cleaning / organizing and doing a couple of small projects around the house.

Today we took the kids to pick up their things from school. Peter didn't get to see his teacher  Mrs. Williams. (luckily she did a zoom last week to say goodbye.) Kendal said so long to Mr. Zunino and got a trophy from Mrs. Grover for getting fifth place in the school for total reading points!! It was interesting going in with masks on saying our handful of goodbyes not knowing what this fall will bring.

. . . and just for smiles - Alice

Adventure is out there!

Our weeks have been on repeat for awhile now. Kendal's work load is pretty simple - it's all online. She goes onto a program called Wonders for part of her work. It's a mix of vocab, language arts, writing, and grammar. She has a daily writing prompt that she journals and sends to her teacher. She does imagine math and supplements it with other math websites and Kahn academy. She also has to read for half an hour a day (but that's definitely never a hard task for her). She fills in the rest of her time with typing and school game websites. She also mixes in (too much) chatting with friends on email, and gets in a couple of video calls with them during the week. Peter's schedule is below. It's pretty strait forward, and when he wants to is easy to get through. The thing is he typically doesn't want to get through things / struggles; so his lessons drag on for quite a while most days. I've wished for a fast forward button through May because it's been a bit rough, however the end is in sight with only a couple of weeks to go.

We didn't do much on May the 4th, (Casey and I watched he making of the Mandalorian though). We happily ate yummy tacos on taco Tuesday / Cinco de Mayo though! Casey even made horchata!  Kiwi Loco gave $1 yogurts to kids for working hard in school so Casey took the kids last week to enjoy a fun treat!

Kendal finished the Harry Potter series last week. She read about 900 pages of the stories in under a week! So we had our final Harry Potter movie nights Friday and Saturday! Friday I made Harry Potter Pizza, with Elixir of Life milk, poly juice potion, dragon innards, and caramel popcorn. It was a fun way to end the series. Peter wants us to do it all again (fun treats, and movies) when he reads the series in a few years.
After turning black and coming off the finger, Casey had to cut off Alice's nail last week. We hope it grows back. : (

Last weekend we decided to have an easy adventure and we went out to Cauldron Lynn. We've always gone when the falls are roaring along in early spring, but the water level was way down so we got to go explore around the rocks more and just play around a bit.

It's no secret I love The Great British Baking Show and have a running list in my head of things I'd love to try to bake / make. I've wanted to make french macaroons for awhile. For mother's day Casey bought me almond flour so I could make some. So Saturday after Cauldron Lynn I made up a batch. It's a very temperamental recipe with lots that can go wrong. I am pretty proud of myself for making what I did. It wasn't a complete success, but definitely not a failure. Unfortunately I tried them and don't like them at all. I'm not a fan of meringue and was hoping it would lean more towards cookie than meringue, so I was pretty disappointed it didn't. I won't make them again, but at least I can check it off my list. (Everyone else liked them though.)

Cody and Max came up to Idaho so we decided to head out to Raft River. The kids begged to go Saturday night so we went out earlier to celebrate Mother's Day weekend with Kenny and Cheryl. We got to see Nicole, Jordan, and their trio Saturday night for a couple of hours. The kids had fun together after months apart! Casey and Cody were champs and made and cleaned up meals on Mother's day for everyone. We got to have church at home together, and a nice video meeting with Kenny and Cheryl's ward. It was nice seeing family that we've missed. We also got to skype my parents and Katherine and see their awesome faces!

Kendal got into trouble this past week. She asked to go out to play, however a while later I had no clue where she was. She had gone over to the school to play with a friend from the ward. She didn't have permission or tell me where she was so I was pretty upset. She got herself grounded for a week from friends, email, and video chats. (She may have been our easy so far, but I think we have some interesting years ahead of us.)
Peter's worked hard and read his biggest book yet - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He finished on Friday so we got to have a movie night! I put together Wonka bars and we had "fudge popscicles" also. I'm pretty proud of Peter for finishing! He may not say he likes reading, but I know with the right book he loves to read!

Yesterday we went to Craters of the Moon. We knew it was quite a trek to go there and back, but it was worth it! It was a perfect warm / overcast day. Even with parts of the park closed we still got to explore quite a bit, and had a wonderful day out. We did quite a few trails and even got to go into part of Buffalo cave. Alice was so dirty by the end of the day, but so happy with herself (especially when she got us to carry her on a few of the walks and play in rocks). We did half a dozen trails and ended up walking just under five miles for the day. We look forward to these "adventures". It's been a blessing to go out, be free from Apartment life, and letting our kids be free and loud! The kids all agreed that Craters of the Moon has been their favorite outing with the caves in Gooding as a close second. 

I've been waiting since the fourth to watch the last Star Wars. We got to watch it this weekend and it did not disappoint. Peter was talking us through the whole thing (since he saw it with Casey) and Kendal had a hundred questions. We love Star Wars and enjoyed finishing it together!
Plus some extra pictures for extra smiles.