Our Summer in a Nutshell!

In my mind, summer is the greatest time of the year and as long as the kids are on summer break, I think I deserve to have a break as well. That means that even though a lot of things happened over the summer, I was “on break”, so I only wrote about a few of them. Unfortunately though, now that I’m going to try to do some catch up, it’s going to be nearly impossible to share everything that happened, so it will have to be in abbreviated form!

After only being out of school for a week, I had to leave the boys and go to Girls Camp for a week. That was an amazing experience all by itself, but I’ll save that story for another time. Since Rod still had to work and wasn’t going to be home to take care of the boys, they got to go spend that week with grandma and grandpa Carling in Logan, which they absolutely love to do, so they didn’t mind. Then I was only home from Girls Camp for one week and it was time to go to San Diego for our summer family vacation. Unlike most of our summer vacations, this vacation was different in that it didn’t include the trailer, the boat or the 4 wheelers, but it was amazing nonetheless!

At Girls Camp - all of the Stake YW leaders after our Ugly Duckling skit

Girls Camp with our new Stake

Our hotel in San Diego

Shamu times 2 at Seaworld

The Shamu car at Seaworld

The whole family at the Wild Animal Safari Park

At the ocean

After breakfast at our hotel

The boys favorite souvenirs were the smashed pennies

After we got home from San Diego at the first of July, we were finally all home for an extended period of time and our summer fun around here began! We sat up the pool for the first time on the 4^th of July because quite honestly, even if we would have been home at all during June, it probably wouldn’t have been warm enough to put up the pool anyway! Besides that, I hate trying to keep the pool water clean and swimmable so I didn’t see any sense in setting it up any earlier than necessary. Once we got it up though, we probably used it almost every day...and sometimes multiple times in a day!

Swimming/rafting in the pool, who cares as long they're in the pool?!

Besides swimming in the pool, we went to the movies, to see fireworks, to parades, to the park, to reunions, and to the splash pad. The boys also took swimming lessons, played baseball, and played with their friends. We all went boating with our brothers (and Brittney of course) and we also went to Lagoon, and did I mention, swimming in the pool? The boys were basically fish this entire summer and surprisingly, they didn’t even have much of a tan to speak of...and it’s not because I was good at putting sunscreen on them, because I wasn’t!

All the brothers, but where's Brittney?

Our new water tube

At the July cousins birthday party

Fireworks - our favorite part of July!

At the Lamb reunion in front of my mom's childhood home in Hyde Park

We went on a walking tour of Hyde Park at the reunion

As if the pool wasn't enough, the boys pulled out the waterslide

We got home from San Diego just in time for Hayden's Pinewood Derby

At the Splash Park with the Harrisons

The roller coaster at Lagoon was one of our favorite rides - it was also the ride where we lost Jared and Hayden - it was a scary couple of hours!

What do you think? Do they look ready to play?

Me and the boys at Lagoon - one of our other favorite summer traditions!

Baseball anyone?

Swimming lessons with the Rosenlunds

Hayden's scout troop at Day Camp

Can you say "moose"?

Before the summer was over, we finally got the chance to go 4 wheeling one more time and we went with our friends the Jacksons. It was only a day trip, but we went all the way to Logan to go up Temple Fork Canyon so we could see Old Ephraim’s grave. And for those of you who don’t know who Old Ephraim is, he was an infamous 9 foot tall grizzly bear that was a huge menace until he was killed sometime back in the 1920’s. The grave was pretty amazing and was built to be exactly as tall as Old Ephraim was...and he was obviously huge!

4 wheeling is a little dirty but it sure is fun!

Old Ephraim's Grave - notice how tall it is

After we saw the grave, we continued to ride up into the mountains despite the black clouds that were gathering in the distance. I was a little worried that we might get rained on and even get caught in the middle of a lightning storm, which wouldn’t have been a good thing being on top of the mountain, but luckily it never did catch up to us! Right in the middle of our travels, we came across this huge meadow of flowers…and there were butterflies everywhere! It was incredible to be surrounded by butterflies like that but I loved it! I have now lovingly renamed that meadow (as if it had a name to begin with) “butterfly meadows”. It was an amazing day…and a good way to bring our summer break to an end!

The butterflies and "butterfly meadows"