River Tubing

This year I took the Laurels (young women, 16 and up) that I work with at church on a tubing trip down the Maquoketa River in Iowa.  Another ward was planning the trip and invited our Priests and Laurels to go with them.  We had never done anything like this before, but knew it would be a lot of fun so we decided to go for it.

It was a three hour drive to the river and because of so little rainfall this year the river level was pretty low.  Fortunately, conditions were still good enough to tube and canoe but the low level made for a very slow moving river.  It took us 5 hours to float down the 8 mile section of river, about twice the usual time.  We were supposed to get home at 6pm but ended up dropping kids off around 10pm instead!

I think everyone had a pretty good time, even if we kept wondering when the end would come.  Thank goodness we rented some canoes.  They came in handy when we formed long trains with the canoes pulling the tubes in an effort to get things moving along.  By the time we got out of the water, everyone's feet were very pruney, we had been wet so long, but the setting was very naturesque.  We saw lots of birds, including eagles flying overhead.  The weather was also pretty nice, warm but overcast, so we were more protected from the direct sun.  I'd like to do it again with my own family sometime.

I also got to develop my rowing and balance skills as I used my super-talent to single-handedly save a canoe from capsizing after my rowing partner decided to jump off the side without any warning!  It happened to be the YM President from our ward doing this shenannigan.  You should have seen the faces of the kids when they saw the canoe going over with me still in it!  I don't think anyone could believe I saved it.  That was my big adventure for the day!

I'm in this picture, but I like to think I can get away
with looking like one of the kids ;)

Youth Conference

This year was my first every time going to youth conference.  Originally, I was just planning on going as a leader or extra set of helping hands, but in the end, Dave and I were asked to be "parents" which entailed something much different. 

Youth Conference is held every summer and is a two day program for kids 14 and up in our church.  This year's theme was Book of Mormon Heroes and all the participants were divided up into "families" or groups of 10 with two adult "parents" to chaperone them.  Having never been to a youth conference before I wasn't really sure what we were in for, but I am so glad we did it, because it was a great experience.  I am also very grateful to Dave who agreed to do it with me.  He gets sucked into a lot of Youth stuff because of me. 

Youth conference was basically two full days, early morning to late night for us.  Some parents actually hosted kids overnight in their homes, but we didn't have to do that, so we got a good night's sleep.  Fortunately, we also had the help of some good friends who helped us with our own kids (Ashley and Paige) while we were gone.

Anyways, the conference was great and we had SUPER family of young people.  It was great to get to know the kids and see what potential they have.  I've never been one for the "kid's nowadays..." complaints or the "things and people are so much worse than they used to be" stuff.  Every time has it's challenges and the young people living in them have to learn to navigate them, but they can do it,  especially with support from family and church.  These kids give me great hope and comfort (even as I think of the future for my own girls.)  They are good kids, trying to do good things, and they will be blessed for it.

Our Family of Smithites

We had lots of good stories from Youth Conference, but I'll share just one.  The funny one.  On day one we had did a number of team building-type games and activities.  One of which was some kind of ladder game.  Basically your team lines up into two rows facing each other.  Then each pair of people are given a short pole to hold onto, forming a rung of a ladder.  Sort of like this:

The rungs cannot touch the ground, this means that every team member has to be holding onto one of the poles in some way.  After you have your ladder formed, you then have to have another team member walk, climb or move across the ladder from one end to the other without touching the ground (or falling into the hot lava.)  Okay, so I'm up first, and the kids manage to get me across.  We then switch places and a few other people in our group make it across.  The whole time we are adjusting our grips and strategy for holding the rungs up.  Then someone gets the bright idea to have Dave try to go across.  Of course, the kids love the idea of the challenge, but I'm the realistic "mother" here and I'm terrified of this idea.   Seriously, me and 9 teenagers are supposed to hold Dave up off the ground and move him 8 feet?!  Some of these girsl barely weigh 100 pounds.  Let's just say we went for it.  Kudos for Dave for being willing.  And the result----our "Father" burned up in the hot lava!! 

Gotta love Youth Conference!

Father's Day

Seriously, Dave is the BEST DAD ever!  At least we think so and really that's what most important.  Dave is the kind of dad that get's excited about things---then we all get excited about things.  He is also the playful parent and has lots of creative games and storytimes with his girls.  And as much fun as our girls have playing with their dad, he is also someone they can talk to.  In fact, Paige often "confesses" stuff to Dave that she would never tell me. 
He really is the best and I'm so grateful to him.  I know that the kind of man, husband, and father he is will help to shape the kind of man, husband and father that our daughters will seek out in the future.  Those future husbands have a high standard to live up to! 

I'm also grateful for my dad and Dave's dad.  They are different in many ways, but both have had a big influence in our lives and we love them very much!
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At church, every year the Young Women make a video for the dads and serve cookies and milk.  The video has all the kids answering random and candid questions about their dads.  It's usually pretty funny to hear the kids' perceptions of their fathers.

Okay, for own family celebration, we were coming off Youth Conference, but with some pre-planning the girls and I were ready to go.

The restaurant this year was Pappie's Pancake House.  Breakfast food for the dad who loves breakfast!

For gifts, we got him a Liverpool Soccer Jersey and an animal book.  He and Paige have been reading non-fiction books every night.  They read a shark book, a survival book, and now they have a "Strangest Animal" book to read.

Again, I was little too busy and tired to take good pictures, but at least Ashley took this one for us!

Ashley, Math and Science

The second week of Summer, Ashley was off to a week long summer day camp.  The camp was part of the engineering program that she has been doing all year through Northern Illinois University.  The theme of this year's camp was renewable energy, focusing specifically on wind energy.  The campers spent all week learning about wind energy and taking field trips to wind farms, a wind mill, a solar powered home, and then ended the week at Motorola, the company who sponsors the program. 

Ashley had a good time and learned a lot.  I think she was really grateful to have one of her best friends also going to the camp, so they got to spend a lot of time together. 

Ashley is really excelling in math right now and Dave and I are very proud of her and want to encourage her to keep it up.  I don't think I mentioned it before but at the end of the school year, Ashley competed in our school district's Junior High Math Competition.  Entry is optional, but this year Ashley and some friends decided to join the team competition. 

The day of the competition was a little crazy because it was also the same night as Ashley's final game in the regional soccer tournament.  Because of rainy weather the game had been postponed and was reschedule the same day as the math competition.  This meant that we had to rush Ashley from the soccer game straight to the math competition.  She had to change in the car and skip dinner.  She missed the start of the competition but fortunately her "event" wasn't first.  She basically ran in, was handed a pencil and had to start taking a test.  Not exactly, the zen prep you would hope to have before a competition, but oh well.

After the tests were completed I met up with Ashley to wait for the results and award ceremony.  She pretty much told me not to expect anything, the test was really hard and she didn't feel like her team did well.  So it was a BIG surprise when her team was called for 1st place among the 7th graders!   She was shocked but also so excited (so excited that she tossed her phone somewhere, never to be seen again.)  In fact, her school pretty much dominated the awards, I think they took 1st in every category and took 2nd and 3rd place with the exception of two or three times.

Now we can say we have a "math winner" in our house!  Seriously, this might be a first on both sides of our family.  Way to overcome genetics Ashley!

Devon Trip

Devon = a street on the northside of Chicago, populated with shops and stores that serve a predominantly Indian community.  This means that if you need Indian clothing for your sister's upcoming wedding, Devon Street is where you have to go. 
As, my sister, Debby's wedding will be a mix of American and Indian traditions, we decided to have my girls wear traditional Indian lenghas to her wedding.  No problem, except the actual finding and purchasing of said clothes.  It's not like you can walk into Macy's and buy a couple lenghas off the rack.  Also, because of the possibility that the lenghas would need alterations, it wasn't something that we could put off until we got to California and Debby could help us. 

SOOO what I am to do:

1- Be thankful that you live in a big enough city that it has it's own "Little India"  At least there are shops I can go to in order to find the right clothing.

2- Call the parents of your kid's friends who are from India and ask them for help.  This is where I really got lucky.  A neighbor and friend of ours, who has a daughter Paige's age, agreed to help me.  Not only did she give me advice and tell me where to go, she also insisted that she come with me.  I should have known what I was in for when she told me, "you can't go to Devon Street by yourself, I need to go with you."

3- Plan a shopping trip to Chicago and in hindsight prepare for it to be an ALL day and evening affair!

Okay so here is a quick summary of our shopping excursion:

By some miracle, I was able to stick to my budget.  Let's just say that the tags on the dresses listed a price of $600.00 each!  Seriously, $600 for a child's dress??!!  Who would pay that?  Of course, the whole point is that no one would pay that.  That is why you have to haggle.  I admit right now I am not good at this.  Funny thing is my sister Debby, told me right before I went to always offer less than 1/2 of what the price tag says and she was right.  Time and again, the first offer from the shopkeeper was "a good deal" at $250.

Still $250 for a dress?  This is why I had my friend, whose name is Gunjan by the way, with me.  I pretty much just let her take over everything.  Thank goodness!  First off, she was able to tell me what was good quality and what wasn't.  She also gave me advice on what would be appropriate attire for a wedding and what wouldn't be.  Of course, we weren't shopping for a wedding, wink, wink.  We told the shopkeepers were shopping for a graduation party, because if you say "wedding" you are automatically going to pay double.  Good to know.

Anyways, after going to multiple shops and the girls trying on what seemed like 50 different lenghas we had the ones we wanted and they didn't even need alterations.  Now it was time to negotiate the price.  All I can say about this experience is that I was a silent bystander.  The negotiations were not in English.  There was much clikcing of tongues and shaking of heads.  At some point, I'm pretty sure that the sales ladies were MAD at us, but Gunjan did it.  I got both dresses for the price I wanted!

I will say that if it were up to me, I would have agreed to a much higher price.  I really was scared of those Indian ladies.  By the end, I was like, "give me the dresses, here's your money and let me out of here!"  

Honestly, I really can't see myself shopping on Devon Street too often, but it was definitely an experience to remember and of course we did get some yummy Indian food out of it.  We ate at a restaurant featuring Southern Indian, vegetarian cuisine.  We basically got these huge crepes, I mean huge crepes, that are filled with potatoes and onions and then you dip them in all these yummy sauces.

The crepes hanging off are plates are folded in half

And I hate to jump the gun posting pictures of the girls in their dresses before the wedding, but how can I not include pictures of the whole point of this post?  So here's a little preview:

Summer = Major League Baseball

Can't officially be summer until you have been to a Major League Baseball game.  Dave has been wanting to go for weeks now, so on a whim we hopped in the car and headed to Chicago to watch the White Sox take on the Toronto Blue Jays. 

The Sox happened to be in the middle of long winning streak, unfortunately it came to an end that very night, but we still had fun.

I also tasted some of the new food offerings at the park this year.  I had a corned beef cheesesteak.  Oh my was that good and so greasy!

School's Out!

Hurray!  Summer Vacation!

As time goes on and my kids get older, I love having them home for summer more and more.  Fortunately for me, my girls are easy and I don't have the pressure of trying to keep them busy, so basically summer is just a time that we can have fun when we want to and do what we feel like doing.

Also Paige has so many neighborhood friends that she is out playing for huge stretches all day.  Sometimes I hardly see her.  Even if her friends come over to our house, they just go off and play so it makes it pretty easy for me.

The last day of school for my girls was on June 4th which was a Monday.  I hate that!  After the weekend they had to go back to school on Monday for a lousy half day.  More of an incovenience than anything else.  Oh, well.  Paige also had two friends come over after school to celebrate "the last day of school" with us.

First, we all went out to lunch at McDonalds.  Then we grabbed our tennis rackets and went to the courts to play tennis.  Right next to the courts are a sand volleyball pit and playground.  So when the little girls got tired of tennis, they played on the equipment and then dug around in the sand.  Afterwards, we came home and turned on the sprinkler to clean off the sand and dirt

And of course, it wouldn't be a real celebration without some chocolate, so we had chocolate fondue for a treat:

Seriously, you should have seen the condition I sent Paige's friends home in--sandy/muddy, wet, sunburned with chocolate stains---can you say DIRTY.

Elementary School Visits

As school winded down for this year, I made lots of visits to the elementary school for all sorts of "year-end activities."

The second grade does an ABC countdown, so for the last 26 days of school they have a fun activity based on a letter of the alphabet each day.  Some of the activities are pretty simple but most are pretty involved.  Honestly, I felt some things were pretty brave of the teachers to do, such as tie-dye t-shirts with 5 classes of 2nd graders!  Anyways, everything turned out great and Paige had lots of fun.

One of my first visits to the school was for the Volunteer Appreciation Breakfast.  This is just a "thank you" breakfast for all the people who have volunteered throughout the school year.  Nice thing is we can bring our kids.  That morning the weather was so perfect that Paige and I decided to walk to school.  We also wanted to do a trial run, as next year the district is cutting back on bus service and my girls will no longer get to ride the bus.  It was a good idea to walk so I could burn off of few calories from my donut breakfast!  The breakfast happened to be on "rock and roll" day so Paige was in costume.  I suggested we put a bandana around her head and she go as Brett Michaels, but she was like, "who is that?"  So we went for more of an 80's punk look.

My next visit to the school was later in the week for the 2nd grade "Parent Picnic" as part of the ABC countdown.  This is a pretty big deal.  The kids plan and practice a class presentation for their parents and then we all go outside for a picnic lunch and to play games.

Parents are responsible for providing lunch and blankets and the kids make cute eating place mats.  Many of the parents go out and buy a lunch to bring as a special treat.  Of course, Paige is such a picky eater, I wasn't sure what to bring.  She wouldn't really appreciate a McDonald's meal.  So in the end, I bought her a fancy bagel with cream cheese and then I made a nice yogurt parfait with fruit and granola.  She was pretty happy with it.  It was windy that day but the air was warm.  Paige and I found a perfect shady place to eat under a tree.  After lunch, Paige and I kicked a soccer ball around and then we flew a kite with some of her friends.  Too bad I had to eventually go home and she back to class.

Paige and her teacher, Mrs. Caston

My last visit to the school was for Field Day.  Originally, I didn't sign up to help, because I was busy and they had enough other parents offer to help.  Fortunately for us, we have PE teachers who organize field day, they just need parents to help run games.  Of course, the scheduled day for Field Day was rained out and so an alternate day was scheduled and not every parent that orginally signed up could come on the alternate day.  So, I ended up volunteering for Field Day and it was fine.  I ran this game which involved throwing about 200 tennis balls into buckets--thats a lot of balls. 

The best part was that I got to watch the tug-of-war challenges between the classes.  It was pretty funny.  The teachers take this very seriously, okay not seriously, but they all want the bragging rights of winning.  Paige's teacher was so cute. 

She told the kids, "get your muscles ready!" 

"You have to win the tug-of-war if you want to go to 3rd grade!"

Then she led them in cheers of, "Team Caston!"

I'm sorry to report that Team Caston did not win, but fortunately they all get to go to 3rd grade anyway.

For the re-match, Mrs. Caston grabbed the end of the rope and
pulled but even that didn't help