making memories

Monday pictures:

Amanda and Pace and I went to visit one of our sisters, Lisa Foust.  She wasn't home, but we had a good time sitting on her front porch and visiting!  Amanda has been a member of the church one year next month and she is amazing.  She is also my secretary in Young Women:

I try to tell the kids not to give Pace attention when he is pouting....:

When we play games outside, Isabelle says that we are "making memories".  Here we are playing soccer at the park beside our house for the FHE activity:

One of my Young Women, Julianne Jones happened to come by with her dog and join us for awhile, which is why Pace has a dog below:

Tuesday is violin lessons day for Isabelle.  We drive to LaGrande after school so that she can learn from the best! (my sister Ivy of course).  I took some pictures of the hills while they are green for Caden:

During lessons the kids usually have a lot to show me.  Marji wanted me to take this picture of her after I put a flower from their snowball bush into her hair:

We made it back home in time for me to hurry to a Relief Society activity; yoga.  It was pretty fun.  The night was beautiful afterwards, so Shawn and I went on a walk around town - one of our favorite things to do in the evenings after the little kids are in bed and the older kids are doing homework.  I got this picture while we were paused for Shawn to take a call from the bishop:

Wednesday:

Isabelle is obsessed with cell phones.  She knows which kind of cell phone anyone has, and wants an iphone 6 REALLY bad.  I'm sure she'd want an even cooler one than that, but has decided that model would be the most realistic for her to actually get.  She asked last week if there was ANY possibility that we would ever actually get her one?  I replied that maybe if she could show that she was responsible enough to get all of her responsibilities taken care of without me nagging her every step of the way we would consider it!  She has been really hard to PUSH lately. 

She took my reply very seriously and has had a perfect record of getting everything done.  She reads her scriptures and cleans her room every morning.  This clean room was unheard of before!!:

She gets home from school and gets right into practicing violin and then piano and then doing all of her homework.  She can't believe that she always has free time from 4:30 on now!  Before she was still dragging along at 9:30.  I told Shawn that we really may need to consider the phone since it could be a really positive motivator for her.  Of course, she would have to keep this up for a LONG time and then continue to do it after she got one...

I made some free time this week (which means that I let part of the house remain messy) and did a review on how to make all sorts of flowers out of buttercream frosting.  I took a wedding cake decorating class when Caden was 1 and haven't used my skills much since then.  Suddenly I am interested in getting good again.  This was a start:

Friday:
Mom called on Thursday and said that all the boys and dads in the family were going to father/sons outing and invited us to a mother/daughter outing.  We had so much fun!  We made a craft where you put a plant inside of some moss - I didn't get a picture, but there's two of them hanging from the shelf behind mom and kelly:

We played "he said/ she said per the youngest girls request, about three times.  Then the teenaged girls showed us what the cool dances are these days and we showed them what they were when we were in high school🤣

I recently realized that I don't have any pictures with my mom so I fixed that!:

The next morning, Maddie and I and Katie, Emmie and Gracie and Eli - who missed Father/sons for a date - went on a hike to Vernon Stewarts cabin. I had 10,000 steps in before we even headed for home before lunch! This was a picture I took heading back down the mountain:

Shawn got our climbing rope hung up this week and Abram and Nolan have been climbing it nonstop.  They are the only ones that can shimmy all the way up.  Nolan is even getting fancy and learning to climb entirely with his arms and not using his legs at all.  He can't yet make it all the way up that way though:

They climb two stories and it makes me dizzy to watch them from above:

Nolan had the famous "Human Growth and Development" talk at school recently.  They must have done a really good job presenting it because Nolan came home SO excited to go through puberty🤣 He keeps asking when I think it will happen?!?? He can't wait to shave, have his voice change, and GET BIGGER MUSCLES!!!  He is really motivated to be doing what he can in the muscle-making department, and works hard at growing muscles every day.  He does a certain amount of chin ups on our chin-up bar, then makes sure to climb the rope at least 8 times! He also went running with Shawn and Maddie when they went this week.

Isabelle got enough people pulled outside this afternoon to "make memories" playing Four Square.  I think the memory that was made was of Abram losing the ball and having to chase it half a mile down the road before he could catch it, we live on such a steep hill:D