September Chronicles

We were so happy Todd and Tana (and Aunt Nini and cousin Maya) came to visit us over Labor Day. They graciously came a day early so Aaron and I could get away on an overnight adventure.
And that is where the month full of defeated plans began...

Let me summarize in a series of short, factual, phrases and you can put together the story.

Weekend #1: Hiking the Hopi Salt Trail to the Little Colorado River
Late start. Middle of nowhere. Flat tire. 30+miles on dirt roads to go. HOT. "more of a route than a trail" as the pamphlet from the information center put it. Boulder hop for two hours...with a pack...exhausted...HOT...realize we lost the 'route'. Aaron stumbles and falls in a cactus. Losing morale. Fight hysteria. Pick our way down YET ANOTHER scree slope. Just want to sit in the cool river. Quit having conversation 2 hrs. ago. Hiking 100ft. apart now. Both admit to moments of moans and weeping. 2600 vertical feet in 2 miles, one way. Jean cries the last hour. Not stopping because we are so close...it seems. Finally in the canyon bottom 6hrs later. Can't get to river through the d*@! tamarisk. No beach. More hiking to find sand bar. Tent set up, baby fed, finally sit in river. Lightning storm starts. Out of river. Move tent. Rain never falls. Muggy, sweltering heat all night. Up at 6am to beat the heat of the day. Covered in bug bites. SO SORE. Jean cries for the first hour. It pours rain for the first 3 hours. At least we found the correct 'route' out. (this would have saved us so much time and effort on the way in!) 2 rattlesnakes. Jean cries up the final steep ascent...but we're so close! We stop anyway because we can't breathe. Finally out and make it home on the spare tire.
On our way out the door Aaron's mom asked us why we couldn't just go to Sedona for a night like normal people. We replied, 'because we like this kind of thing better.' When we got home she asked how it was. Our reply, "we should have gone to Sedona."

Weekend #2: Wood Gathering Family Campout
Yearly fall tradition. Rent a U-Haul. Sharpen the chainsaw. Pack extra blankets and hot chocolate. Our first campout with Jean! We're out to get aspen this year, it burns cleaner than pine. Word of mouth instructions from the guys at work say 'just past the no-name town there's a big mud puddle, just past that is a pull-out, just past that is a dirt road...' amazingly we find it just as they say. Except the 1/2mile on the dirt road was a tight squeeze around and through trees. Teamwork, reverse, and heads hanging out the window get us through. Work gloves on everyone. Mom and kids start to set up tent. The plan is to load the trailer and Aaron will run a load back in to town that night and we'll wake up and do another load together in the morning. An unnatural pounding bass is vibrating through the forest. Some kind of Friday night party further on up the dirt road? We won't let that discourage us from our family bonding in nature. Aaron, please don't drop the trees so close to the kids. 10ft. IS a little too close, especially when they explode when they hit the ground. Kids work diligently to load sticks in the trailer. Gun shots!?!!!!! Close! Maybe we'll camp further out. It might be hard to maneuver back in here alone in the dark anyway. Stuff the unrolled tent in the car. Keep working on hauling logs to the trailer. Wow! We're almost done. Check on Jean in the car. What's that smell? Addie has diarrhea. Um......scramble to help clean up. Jean decides she's hungry. It's dark. Feeding Jean. Addie gets another urge! Aaron smashes his fingers. The kids are cold. Decide roughing it might not be the best idea tonight. Maneuver back through the trees with a full trailer now. Make it safely to the pavement and home. Drop kids in bed and watch a movie on the couch. The next day we get a stroke of luck. We decide aspen isn't all it's cracked up to be and go for the easy pine already felled and limbed in the slash piles around the forest. Aaron gets one easy load in the morning without ever having to turn on the chainsaw! We go back out for the second load of the day. The kids are cheerful and helpful. We're ahead of schedule. We're going to make our goal of 4 loads for the weekend! Have lunch and head out for the last load. The earlier trip went so well we are all along for the ride again. The sky looks a little ominous. Pull off at the exit and it is a torrential down-pour. Turn right back around and call it a day. We build a fire in the backyard on Monday night and Aaron sleeps on the trampoline with the kids for FHE to make up for our canceled campout.

Weekend #3: Biking...with no mishaps!

We hire a babysitter and make another attempt at getting out on an adventure together. We coax our good friends the Rockows to come with us. We spend all morning biking the Schultz Pass trail. Good times and no disasters.

2009 Report from the Coconino County Fair:
Addie enters a knitted hat and melted bead zebra creation
Quinn enters her scrapbook and a picture collage of Jean
There were no ribbons on any entries. I immediately approached supervisors about this because in the Open Youth category all entries are judged on their own merit and receive a ribbon. My kids had too many hopes built up on getting a ribbon. (you can see the uncertainty and disappointment on Quinn's face in the picture). The sting of no ribbon is all too real for me from last year too. She pathetically claims 'they' didn't send enough ribbons and they ran out (even though we all turned in entry forms 3 weeks earlier and they knew exactly what would show up). The mother bear in me points this out and reminds her of the rules stated in the fair book. I ask her to take our name and address and mail them to my kids just as soon as she can. And then, aha!-just a minute- she returns from her car with bright green 'special merit' ribbons she just happened to dig up. how convenient. My kids are pacified.
I was somewhat consoled this year too after my second attempt at entering bread brought home a 3rd place and my chocolate scones a 2nd.
Even Aaron made progress: He came this year!

And one last public celebration for Quinn. Who taped her fingers, kept a chart and ate a sucker for breakfast 20 consecutive days to break her finger-sucking habit. She did it without one bad day and earned her very own Baby Alive Doll. Which she still can't quite decide if it really is alive or not. She looks at it with amazement and confusion before feeling overcome with her maternal affection and leans over to kiss it gently on the head for lack of knowing what else to think of it. Her name is Rosie, short for Rosabelle.

And did I mention Jean STARTED sucking her thumb?

(by way of entertaining explanation: this explains the picture with stickers all over Quinn and Jean's faces. Quinn informs me she is playing Princess School with Jean and runs to the other room. I'm busy and only half listen. I hear some crying. Then I hear Quinn yelling "Princesses don't cry!" over and over with more sternness. Then I walk in the room and find this.)

Special Edition: Soccer!

Addie played in The Sunflower Girls
Quinn played for The Blue Fairies

Aaron and I decided our family policy on playing team sports in the future is that you can only join if you'd still want to play if there were no half-time and after-game snacks.

August Chronicles

First off: Addie started First Grade! School started too early in the year for us. We didn't quite have our summer vacation out of us enough to feel really excited. I'll miss her help from the summer including: organizing any drawer or closet I point her to, putting Enoch down for naps, and thinking up creative games to play. But the coolest thing about her teacher is a classroom money system with a bank and a store! The least cool thing is being "boy trapped" at her desk. Max on one side, who I saw roll his eyes and shrug at Jack on the other side on the first day of school as Addie timidly tried to squeeze in to her desk. Her best friend Sarah is only 3 seats away on the same row, but alas, is boy trapped too.

We were so happy to have a visit from my mom, dad and McKay before they hopped on the river for a 6 day Grand Canyon trip. Quinn bawled her eyes out when she had to say goodbye the night before they left. We thought she was just overdramatic from being over tired, but she woke up the next morning and the first thing out of her mouth was a sobbing howl. She decided this kind of drama works for her and frequently enacts a similar scene in the morning when Addie leaves for school.

Quinn has had some deep thoughts on life lately. Here is a brief musing I overheard while driving them home one night:
"Imagine you are a grown up. What would it be like?
You would eat all your food,
you would not make messes and
you would be a really good rock climber.
I mean, we know how to rock climb, but if you were a grown up you would be really good!"

August was a month of bike adventures for Enoch. He discovered the freedom of the open road on his red tricycle. Unfortunately he took that freedom all the way down to the busy road at the end of the street. After some desperate holding on by his sisters, a rescue by the neighbor and some stern talking to, I think we've curbed the urge. Oh yea, and he lost his bike for a day. That was probably the big motivator. Now he just speeds right up to the gutter, throws down his feet (shoed or not, his toes are raw) and comes to a skidding stop BEFORE the road, leans all the way over the handle bars and waves at the passing traffic. I think it has given more than one driver heart failure. It takes an extra 5 minutes of negotiating to get him to ride in the stroller now. He wants to ride his tricycle everywhere. When we have ample time I let him ride it over to the school to pick her up. The high school kids waiting in their cars at the crosswalk always get a kick out of him scooting across the crosswalk with his red cowboy boots and shiny red trycicle with leather tassles hanging off the handle bars.
There is a sidewalk over by the school that has an incline which he scoots to the top of then tucks his feet under and coasts down. But he can truly coast in style. Picture head thrown back, eyes shut, feeling the wind in his face, throwing his weight side to side as he carves a giant 'S' down the slope.....and then he throws a little too much weight into it at just the wrong angle between his front and back tire and rolls clear over leaving him in a tearful heap on the cement.....but after a few sobs, a hug from mom and a distainful look at the bike who would do that to him, he's dragging it back up the sidewalk for another, more guarded, run.
McKay helped him spray paint the girls old 12" princess bike so it was at least blue and grey. It still doesn't look very manly, but I have no doubt he will compensate by riding it 'manly.' He hasn't quite converted over to it yet.

My month was filled with planning. I organized the curriculum for our preschool co-op. Which I love doing and I'll share the info with anyone interested in running a similar preschool. And I have also been having a blast organizing my Let's Play Music classes. I had no idea I would have so much fun with this. Here's my plug: this is the most fun and comprehensive music fundamentals class I have ever seen, let alone could imagine. I started teaching because I wanted it for my kids and there were no teachers in Flagstaff.
Check out the website: www.letsplaymusicsite.com

Aaron had a busy month with church assignments. He spent a weekend at a 5 stake youth conference that our stake hosted! Another weekend at a stake dance in Winslow, AZ. And another weekend on a deacon's quorum campout. Of course, he helped them with rock climbing and took them canyoneering. He felt like it was a success: 6 of the 11 boys cried and they are all bragging about the hike now. (little did Aaron know, retribution was coming. But that is a story for next month's Chronicles). The kids and I hiked in to meet them at the rock climbing Friday night. I had the pleasant realization that this was the first time I'd taken all of them hiking in a while and all 4 did great. They stayed out of the poison ivy and stayed cheerful up the steep trail. I didn't even have to break out any 'happy suckers.'

Special Edition: portrait of a 2-yr Old

July Chronicles

Jean smiles a lot but tough to get to laugh. She likes to be with the kids, but not touched by them! She frequently has a 'deer-in-headlights' look that says something between "who sent me here?" and "are you people for real?!"

Enoch figured out how to climb out of the crib...trouble. Over the 4th Nate earned eternal bonus points with Enoch for inducting him into the Boys Sandbox Club. He loves chocolate popsicles(pronounced: clock-clet). His prayers sound like this:

"Dear Happy Father. Family...Jesus...family...where's Jesus? (looks around the room for a picture and whispers very loudly:) Right there!..family...Jesus...in the name of Jesus Christ, Oh Man!"

Quinn really likes eating the beans and peas from the garden. She scored two goals at one of her soccer games. It changed her whole game when we told her it was okay to take the ball away from the other team. She's still mostly in it for the half-time and post-game snacks. Every Sunday morning she makes a card for her Sunbeam teacher: Cox (not Sister Cox, just Cox).

Addie lost her first tooth! Her dad actually couldn't take it anymore and yanked it out. She made a lot of progress swimming this month and can swim in the big pool without a life jacket and dive to the bottom for toys.

Aaron bought himself a mill after 10 years of dreaming. Now if he could only remember some of those things he planned to make, "if he only had a mill!"