September 2, 2014

We went to Visalia in July this year so we could spend our annual week with Grandma Zonda.  We had a great time.  We did the usual stuff like we went in the hot tub, fed the turtles a lot, swam at the neighbors, went to the park. We also went bowling and went to Hanford to Superior Dairy.

We left Danny in Visalia to have a week by himself with Grandma and Grandpa.  Grandma is going to host each kid like that when they turn 12.  Danny had a great time.  He did jobs for Grandma and her friends because he was trying to earn money to buy a phone.  They also went shopping for clothes, played basketball with anyone Grandma could set it up with, and went fishing with Grandpa.

My mom brought Danny back at the end of his trip and watched all the kids for 2 days while Bob and I went to St George for a late Anniversary trip.  We stayed at Inn on the Cliff because our friends' parents own it.  We saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor dreamcoat at Tuachann.  It was so good.  And we went on a hike in the morning and went to the temple and did some shopping.  It was really nice.

 We had another fabulous vacation to Lake Tahoe this year.  The Smiths are always such wonderful hosts. We were a little worried because there was rain forecast all week, but it turned out great and only rained a couple times.  Amanda had a great matrix set up for us.  We went on a hike, to the bmx track, had a fun day of jet skis and kayaks at Sand Harbour, had a carnival, had a picnic and played at Donnor beach, and Amanda borrowed bikes for the adults and Danny and Rachel babysat while the adults went mountain biking. The Clarks went home on Sunday and we stayed 2 more days.  We went to the bmx track again and went to Sand Harbour again with just our family and rented a stand up paddle board and did lots more crawdad fishing and Amanda took our family pictures at a great spot she knows. 

Our family pictures worked out so well.  We were nervous because it was raining as we got ready and drove to the spot.  But it was our last night there, so we just really hoped it would work out.  It stopped raining about 5-10 minutes after we got to the spot and the sun came out and the light was beautiful.  Amanda did a great job getting us into poses and looking at the camera.  Ruby was not super excited about smiling at the camera and liked to make crazy faces. But we got a great pictures to choose from with the 700+ she took! It worked out great because in our final family picture Aaron and Seth weren't looking at the camera so I photoshopped them over from another picture and I took out the towel we were sitting on because the ground was so wet.

We came home from Tahoe and had about a week and a half until school started.  We were lazy a lot and did some school shopping.  We did our second annual "buy dry ice and throw it in the pool" end of summer party.  

The kids all had a great start to school.  They were excited and a little nervous.  Rachel was really excited about middle school.  Seth was pretty excited about kindergarten.  He's not super in love with it yet, but hopefully he'll get used to it.