Shrine Circus 2011

I originally started this post on July 4th, but Blogger has given me the hardest time with these pictures. So I've finally given up trying to entertain you all with our circus memories and just get this post done!!


The weather this year was FANTASTIC! A little warm at 3:30, but it felt great in the shade. I guess other people thought it was great weather, too. The stands were packed...the most we've ever seen at the circus. We've suffered through wind and/or rain most of the past years.

Here are the kids, waiting for the show to begin. It seems like there is always someone with a long-sleeved shirt on in this family!!


Here is what some of them looked like a little later...must have been good...or simply astonishing.


There were tigers this year. I've never seen tigers (we've been going for the past 4 or 5 years). The tigers jumped through hoops and over each other. It was pretty impressive (though not jaw-dropping).

There were aerial acrobats. Here is a stunt that they didn't end up needing the net for. ;)

There were also acts of juggling and several people hanging from ropes and spinning, etc.

There was a bear there. He could push a huge stroller and walk on this barrel.

This family was good at flips. They launched several members of their team up into the air. This guy is about to land in a padded chair about 10 feet up off the ground.

This guy is there every year. He stacks chairs and climbs. When the wind is really bad around here, he takes the safe road and doesn't stack the last one or two chairs. Really...where's the entertainment in that? (I'm kidding. I don't want my kids to need therapy because they saw a performer maimed or killed right in front of them.)

At intermission we got snow cones. The choices (all $4) were snow cones (which I can make at home for free), popcorn (which I can also make for free and will make everyone thirsty) or cotton candy (I'm not going to buy pure sugar on a stick...plus, they'll all be thirsty). I figured that at least with the snow cones, the kids wouldn't be thirsty! So for $16, we got 4 snow cones (I know...we were practically robbed)!

Sarah enjoyed hers. ;)

MMmmmm....Refreshing!

We know the circus is over when the elephants come out. In years past, they've had 3 elephants. I guess they traded an elephant for the tigers. It's impressive to me to see how these huge animals perform these tricks. They just do them a lot slower than other animals!

Good Bye! See you in 2012!

Of course, the show wasn't over just because we left the circus grounds. We had our own circus to perform. Who even knows why he is pouting...we rarely find out.

Thankfully, it was a two-ring circus (so we didn't get bored with just one act). I can't remember what her problem was, either.

Of course, we were the 4 o'clock performance, trying to leave at 6:30 - the same time the 7 o'clock performance was arriving. There was a traffic jam big enough to impress even a Thai taxi driver. (That's a REALLY big traffic jam, if you couldn't guess.)

The next day, we had a horrible (but I loved it) wind and thunderstorm. I was glad we missed that!!

Trauma on the road

I have six very different children.  We run the gamet (is that  how to spell it?) of emotions and each child is master of a certain one.  Nathan's emotion is pouting.  I guarantee you don't know anyone that pouts better than Nathan.

What's that?  Your friend's daughter's coach's great aunt on his father's side? No.  You're wrong...Nathan is worse.

But he doesn't just pout well.  He can cry for no (good) reason...endlessly.

Here he is in the back seat...crying because he's squished.  He cried the entire way to the store.  It was at least a 20 minute drive.  See how Sarah doesn't seem to notice?  She's used to our craziness.

Mystery Picture

What garden vegetable are these?

*Chad planted them...not me!  :)

FHE in the river bottoms

One Monday evening we decided to explore the river bottoms for our FHE activity. The river has been flooding here (though it's gone down significantly now) and we wanted to see what the situation was like.

We first walked by a stagnant pond that didn't smell so good, but we got a few rocks to skip on it!

Then we walked into the trees and hiked a bit.

I feel blessed to live in such a beautiful area. (I still miss the green of Washington, but this is beautiful, too.) It's nice to walk without actually walking to anywhere. Sarah was taking full advantage of the opportunity to explore. :)


This is a road, disguised as the Snake River. We've driven on this road before. Today we waded on it.

You can see the rapids way out in the flooded river. This is usually a shallow shore, but you can see that little tree out there has been taken by surprise. The kids enjoyed getting their feet wet in the water.

On the way home, we got a little silly.

Sarah never likes to be left out of something like that!

And she didn't...

...tire...

...easily.

If nothing else, they are able to have fun!

Grandpa's Summer visit

My dad comes for a visit about twice a year. We look forward to visiting with him and catching him up on all the new tricks we've learned. (We're pretty sure he loves watching our endless flips and somersaults and he always gives such good compliments on our drawings.) Grandpa always takes us to dinner which is something to really anticipate. He must like saying there are 9 of us when the hostess asks!

We take a picture (or as many as possible before the younger ones start running off) and start thinking forward to his next visit.

Thanks for making the trip up to see us, Grandpa!

(Yes, that is a ridiculously large bow in Sarah's hair. Sometimes you just use what you're given!)

Chad is THIRTY-EIGHT!

That seems a lot older than eleven.

Chad's cake was an experiment in creativity. I've learned that things rarely come out the way I envision them. Strangely enough, I keep trying anyway.
Can you tell what it is? Chad thought it looked like an armless Mongolian warrior. Admittedly, that never came to me. But I can see how he thought that. Instead, it is a king chess piece on a chess board. Nathan and I made the chess piece. I made the cake.

I tried to make the frosting red, but after I put enough red food dye in to give an elephant cancer, I decided hot pink would have to do. When I tried to frost the cake, the frosting was too runny (probably from all the food coloring) and I ended up scraping it off the cake to add more powdered sugar.

I had a chess board stencil I cut out on my Silhouette and sprinkled on the chocolate candies for the squares. (Getting the stencil back off the very wet frosting was another fun trial.) All in all, it ended up OK...I guess.

The kids had fun giving Chad his presents they'd scrounged up for him. Leah gave him her fold-up binoculars she's gotten from school. Then Sarah stole them.

Daniel gave him a collection of church magazines...all for the month of June...some of them several years old. Those went right back into the magazine basket. (Yes, that does need to be cleaned out.)

I gave him some gifts that I scrounged up around Walmart and we moved on to the cake.

On thing about turning 38...it's a lot of candles. When you add a foil-covered piece of cardboard, you have a significant heat/light source. We nearly roasted Sarah here!

But that foil backboard does help get the candles out in one breath. It was right about now that Chad realized how hot metal gets when exposed to 38 small flames!

Happy Birthday, Chad!

Daniel is ELEVEN!

I ordered an "1" shaped cake pan for Sarah's birthday last year that came 3 days too late. I've been waiting until Daniel's birthday this year to get a chance to use it. I baked one cake mix and cut it in half. No fancy decorating here. (I think I'm getting old and tired.)






We opened presents and apparently had a great time. I can't remember what all the laughter here was about.




In addition to his other birthday presents, Daniel got his new scout shirt and book. He is no longer a cub scout! His first 11-year-old scout meeting was a campout with his dad. I don't know if it gets much better than that!




Here's a pretty goofy smile. I'm not sure what that one was about, either. He might be dreaming about how delicious it's going to be (although he keeps saying that he doesn't really like cake).




Happy 11th Birthday, Daniel. We think you're a pretty neat kid!

Nathan's tooth saga

It seems like this kid does everything slowly. He wakes up slowly, he eats slowly, he pouts slowly (and endlessly), he grows slowly, he listens slowly, he works slowly and he loses teeth slowly.

At the end of May, we were dealing with Nathan's first loose top tooth. He is 9! The thing was taking an excruciatingly long time to loosen up. It tilted, then it tipped, it twisted and then started to wave at passersby. I could finally take no more and started pestering the child to get rid of that tooth. Eventually he agreed to put a piece of floss on it.

Nathan was enjoying the attention. We eventually got the floss high enough and tight enough that he HAD to get the tooth out to get the floss out.

It took him a few moments, but Nathan managed to get it out somehow and showed me his new smile. For some reason, he thought he should open his eyes really wide for the picture, too. And then after all that fighting over the darned thing, Nathan lost the tooth! Oh well, the tooth fairy was kind.

Several weeks later the other front tooth started showing signs of coming out. But it did the same lazy tricks, including doing a little dance right there in his mouth. I told him last night that today was the day; that tooth was COMING OUT!

We reminded Nathan of the experience Daniel had getting his tooth out on the 4th of July 3 years ago. It involved extreme measures. Read about it here. It must have made an impression on him because he came to me today and asked me to put some floss on it and pull it out. I almost fell over. I knew there was a good reason I liked this kid so much!

It took 3 tries, but the tooth is out. He flinched, but didn't cry. He did bleed and wipe in on my yellow hand towel - darned kid! ;) Now he looks much more respectable. He also looks 7. Slow teeth.

The whole flock

Back in May we made a 'small' investment and bought a flock of sheep. There was a ram, 8 ewes and 4 lambs. (We are hoping that these sheep will multiply enough to at least get our initial investment back.) Less than a week after we got them, we had a little surprise. A little ewe lamb was spied bouncing around in the pasture! That was one of those nice surprises.



They were quite wild when we got them and did not come close. We knew we had to get them sheared, so we started coaxing them in with grain. It started working, but not without some stubborn sheep leading us around the pasture in circle!

This is the more friendly lamb. She'll be the first one to come up and see what you're going to offer. But she'll run away pretty fast when you put a hand on her head. She got a little too close for a picture here!

We got over 70 pounds of wool off of the 9 sheep. It's still sitting in our shed as we try to figure out what to do with it. Apparently, we just missed the big wool-buying time around here. That figures.

Don't those sheep look so beautiful out there in the pasture? (Now the grass is so long that it's a little hard to spot them.)

Sadly, we lost a ewe last week to an infection. It's a very contagious disease that creates swelling and abscesses in the lymph nodes (sheep and goats are most affected by it). The flock must have already been infected when we bought them. (That is one of those bad surprises.) We've had a vet out and he's OK'd the rest of the sheep, but we're still waiting to see if there are any outbreaks. It's successfully treated with antibiotics, but a vaccination has not been created yet. I'm just glad it's not a death sentence for the whole family of sheep! (That would be a very expensive lesson for us!)

One of the lambs is a ram. We're trying to decided if we should sell him as a ram, or castrate him and keep him. We have him separated from the rest since his hormones seem to be affecting his behavior. We don't want any inbreeding (more than might be there already, that is)! He's got about another week of quarantine left before we feel better that he is not infected.

So that adds to our adventures of part-time ranchers; four calves and a small flock of sheep, in addition to our 15 hens and cats and dog and fish and birds.

Time to Feed the Cows

Does anyone remember that old Dunkin' Donuts commercial where the baker would wake up in the morning at some insane hour and say, "Time to make the donuts" in a really drowsy voice? Then he'd stumble through the process and we'd all be really grateful for his sacrifice and want to run out and buy at least a dozen. (Oh, was that only me?)

This picture of Nathan reminds me of that. We found him on the couch one morning like this. He'd gotten up on Monday (I know it's Monday because he's got church socks on) and fallen asleep in his coat. The boys were pretty good about getting up to feed the calves every morning. Daniel was more dedicated than Nathan, but Nathan was pretty good. Some feedings were very cold!


I made sure I got out to take pictures of the boys during one of the last feedings before the cows were weaned off milk. I had a great idea to compare the size of the calves from when we got them to when we weaned them.

Here's Daniel feeding his cow in April. The trees were still bare and the corral/pasture barely had any grass.

Here he is at the end of May. Same cow. Grass in the pasture. Daniel's even wearing the same sweatshirt. Can you see how much the calf has grown? I can't either. So much for my awesome comparison. I guess we'll have to wait until the end of summer for a really impressive "then and now". And honestly, when you have a cow approaching you with 6 inches of tongue hanging out for a bottle nipple, it's best to have him be as small as possible!

Right here is where I would post the video I have of this white calf coming to me for some milk (which I didn't have). I've been trying to get it to load all afternoon. Maybe soon. It's highly entertaining. cough, cough

Sleeping, crafting and celebrating

I've mostly overcome my funk from last month. And it's time to catch up on all the stuff that's been going on in our lives. Sadly, some of the best moments will be lost because those are the little things that we don't remember forever. I guess that's what happens when you hold a pity party. :(

Chad caught this moment one night in May as we got ready for bed. This is an interesting twist on sleeping under a laundry basket! I think everyone should get a "Joseph" in their family! He and Sarah are best friends. Who wouldn't be smitten with a someone willing to sleep under their crib in such a fashion?

I showed you the shirts I made for the kids' last day of school. The kids made the shirts even better. We have received (and still receive) some great comments over these tees. Joseph even wears his turtleneck in 80+ degree weather.

The end of the year was an exciting time. Rebekah participated in a Kindergarten program and then the elementary had an awards assembly. Both Leah and Rebekah earned the "Teacher's Award" which is given to one girl and one boy from each class...chosen by their teacher. (Bet you didn't already figure that out.) There were field trips and class parties. Daniel's end-of-year was marked by a maturation presentation. He barely lived through it. (When I was making their shirts, Daniel asked if I could make his say, "I survived 'The Talk'." I didn't go for that idea.)

I used my Silhouette machine to make the shirts, as well as this family name grouping. (I have no idea what to call it. Anyone?) I ironed some heavy-duty Heat 'n' Bond to the back of the fabric, cut each letter out on my cutter, then ironed them onto the canvases. I bought the canvases in a 10 pack at Michael's and painted them.

This was a fun project, but also a learning experience. I would do it a little differently if there was a "next time".

Also on my cutter, I cut out these ties and the letters to make a Father's Day bunting for Chad. This was a pretty easy craft.

The letters from the middle of the white were given to the kids who made Chad a card. Amazingly enough, their message was the same as mine!

When we got home from church, we found that the cat had played with the bunting and the string was in three parts. It was a little shorter after we tied it back together. Fatherhood is like that sometimes...you survive the turmoil and get back on track. (I think this is a much better analogy than the one I came up with when I found my Mother's Day plant covered in little white bugs!)

Mystery Picture

Here is a twist on the mystery pictures.  Can you guess what this ingredient list is for?

Cold service at Ruby Tuesday

Last night, I drove the 3 oldest kids to Pocatello for an ISU production of Annie. Chad bought us the tickets and the kids really enjoyed the performance. It was well done...they have some very talented little girls on that stage!

Anyway, we decided to stop for a late-night treat before driving the 40 minutes home. I do mean late. It was 10 PM when we arrived at the restaurant...Ruby Tuesday. I wasn't even sure they'd be open at that hour.

When we walked in, we were greeted by an older gentleman who I'm not sure even smiled at us. He started to collect some menus and so I said that were just interested in the dessert menu. So he reached to the side and grabbed one. I was tempted to ask for a disinfectant wipe! Someone needs to clean those things off. As I looked at the desserts, I realized that I was going to have to clarify that we wanted a table to go with our dessert menu.

He seated us, let us know who our server would be and left. Shortly afterward, he returned and said the server was hung up a bit and took our drink order. We always get water, and that's what I ordered for the 4 of us. He came back a couple of minutes later and as he was setting out the drinks, gravity interfered and my tall glass of ice water landed on the table - sideways. More gravity interference and I was SOAKED! My khakis were no match for the challenge and my garments were clearly visible on my leg.

He apologized and moved us to another table. As I stood next to the next table, waiting for the kids to slide in, I could feel water dripping from my pant leg onto my foot. My shirt was also pretty wet. Leah was a bit wet as well. He came back with replacement water and left.

Finally, the server arrived and said they were having a pretty good laugh about it in the back because that was their boss that had bathed me...the GENERAL MANAGER. She said it would be great if I teased him, too. Truthfully, teasing is not the verb I had in mind. No one ever offered me a towel or napkin or any other sort of aid.

I thought for sure our check would at least be reduced. Nope. The guy passed by at least one more time and asked how we were "enjoying everything". Really? We were charged full price for our experience. I guess the baptism was on the house. And I was still wet (damp, really) an hour later when we got home.

So I won't be returning to the Ruby Tuesday in Pocatello, Idaho. Ever. That was the worst service I've received in a long time. Anyone want me to throw water in their lap? You won't even have to buy a $5 dessert for the experience.

Nothing to do

It really bugs me that people think I don't do anything since I am home with the kids all day.

I keep getting "stood up" by folks who apparently think that it's no big deal if they don't show.

Well, guess what, people: there are certain things I can't get involved in or places I can't go if I'm expecting/waiting for you to call and say you are on your way!

Besides, it's just a matter of courtesy...no matter how busy you think I am.

__________

I know you are thinking - she doesn't post anything good on her blog in forever and when she finally does, it's to complain. It's kind of how it feels like things are going. I feel pretty grumpy about some stuff. I haven't felt like interacting with anyone virtually since I haven't really been interacting well in real life.

Anyone else feel like they've disappeared into their life? I miss being me (Arlyn, -not Mommy or wife or R.S. Sec.).

hello world

I know I haven't been around much. Not sure how to juggle what I've been dealt. I'm not having much luck fitting blogging in. Anyone have a bucket load of money?