Would you just hold still and smile?!

This evening we decided we would try to get some family pictures in our desert surrounding, so we grabbed our camera and tripod and headed for the foothills of the Catalina mountains. There is only a small window of time where you get great lighting during the morning and evening hours, and we were hoping to get enough shots during the evening hours to get something worthwhile.

We'll have to rethink that one. Bells and Erik decided not to listen to their parents' warnings to stay away from the cacti, and as a result, we all had a fairly miserable experience. Even if we had taken a photographer with us, we would have been lucky to get them both to smile at the same time. To add to the problems, I didn't use the remote, which meant that we never were positioned quite right. Oh well! At least with some photoshopping, blurring, and sepia-toning, the pictures are somewhat respectable. Now we just have to re-plan a trip to the foothills for another valiant effort--this time with a remote.



When the younger two would have no more of it, at least we were able to get Gabs to look at and smile for the camera.


And when the lighting was gone--which happened much too quickly, at least I could turn the camera on the desert sunset for a moment while Debs and Gabs herded the whining duo to the van!

Trick-or-Treat

I used to always love dressing up for Halloween and going trick-or-treating. Obviously my children feel the same way. This last week we went to a trunk-or-treat activity a few days before Halloween where a lot of people from our local church parked their cars so all the kids could go around and get candy. Bells and Gabs both dressed up as witches and Erik was a little lion this year.

When we tried Erik's costume on him earlier in the month, he wasn't very fond of it.

He seems to have adjusted over the last few weeks.


Scott Evans put his head on a platter and the kids had to grab the candy surrounding his head. The message was clear, "You better not take more than one or he might bite your fingers!"

One lady had a cannon that she used to shoot out the candy.

The kids would then rush to pick it up. There was just one hitch. The cannon kept shooting the candy into a low-lying mesquite tree, and anyone that has been around a mesquite tree knows that they have sharp thorns that can grow to be several inches long.


I couldn't help but laugh at the little kids that would rush over to the mesquite tree and while repeatedly saying, "Ow!" or "Ouch!" they reached and stretched to get the candy from out of the tree. Anyway, it was fun until the kids started to ask an innocent bystander to fetch the candy for them--I was the bystander. After my hands and arms got more scratches than I cared to count, I started to use my feet to pull the candy out, thinking my jeans would protect me from the thorns. Nope! I was pulling thorns out of my pants the rest of the evening.

So let me explain why the candy kept getting shot into the mesquite. The lady wasn't out to get the children, she just didn't have anywhere else to shoot the cannon without having it hit the surrounding cars. If she pumped just a little air into the cannon, the candy would fall on the ground right in front of the cannon and the kids would be bumping into it. Very rarely was she able to find the happy medium that would make the candy land just in front of the mesquite. Gabs' favorite moment was when the candy flew into the tree, scaring a black cat out like it was a horse breaking out of the gates at the Kentucky Derby.

On Halloween night, Debs and the kids made caramel apples, mummy dogs, and cheese-stick fingers. Although it's hard to remember just how much I enjoyed Halloween growing up, I think I enjoyed watching my kids more than going trick-or-treating myself. I'm looking forward to next year!

Daddy-Daughter Campout

This last Friday evening our church hosted a daddy-daughter campout at Camp Zion. The camp is a little higher than 7,000 feet above sea level, and considering the exceptionally warm weather in Tucson over the last few days, Gabs, Bells, and I welcomed the chance to get out of Tucson for a while. I especially looked forward to the trip, since it would allow me to leave all my work behind me for a little while and spend time with the girls.

We started the trip on the wrong foot, unable to find the campsite. Luckily we managed to get cell-phone reception and get some directions from Debs. When we finally arrived, we went straight to the lodge and decorated sugar cookies with frosting, candy corn, and licorice.

The weather was great, but Gabs and Bells, having spent the last three years of their lives in Tucson, were a little chilly. It proved to be a long night with potty trips to the nearest latrine and Bells getting cold on numerous occasions after getting outside of her sleeping bag, but morning finally came, and with it, a spectacular sunrise (unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me when it was at its best). This picture looks out over Tucson after most the color in the sky had already faded.


From the feel of things, I believe it must have warmed up some during the night. That comes as no surprise, however, since temperatures in Tucson for October 17, 2009 climbed up to 99 degrees, which broke the record high for the date by three degrees. If it had climbed one degree higher, it would have set a record in Tucson for reaching 100° at the latest time of the year in recorded history.

As Gabs and Bells went to play with some friends, I spent the next twenty to thirty minutes packing things up and taking the tent down. As I was folding up the tent I saw numerous crickets and bugs that had decided to bed down underneath us. The last critter I saw as I was brushing off the bottom of the tent made me a little more wary than the others. Since moving to Tucson, this small scorpion is the first I have seen in the wild. Apparently I don't get out enough, because I've only seen one tarantula too.


We I enjoyed the breakfast burritos and fruit that was provided for breakfast, and then we traipsed around the mountain playing tetherball and horseshoes. Gabs, who has seen a lot of pictures of my childhood, immediately recognized tetherball as the game I used to play when I was younger. Now when she is older, her kids will be able to say the same thing about her. It's too bad tetherball isn't more popular!

Before heading down the mountain, we hiked to Inspiration Rock and found a little tunnel in it that we could crawl through. As you can see from the girls' faces, it was quite the adventure!

The winding road down the mountain made Bells sick, so we made several stops to enjoy the scenery.
All in all, we had a great time and we're looking forward to our next grand adventure!

Valued Friends

A little over three years ago we moved to Arizona so I could attend graduate school at the University of Arizona. Previously, my wife and I had been attending Brigham Young University. During that time we met the Yancey family, and I even participated in the production of a play that Jason Yancey directed. He was a year ahead of me in school and ended up going to the University of Arizona a year ahead of me. So, for the last three years I have been the beneficiary of someone who figuratively took me under his wing, helping me prepare for deadlines and deal with the stresses of graduate school. Since he was a year ahead of me, I could always go to him if I had questions about classes I was taking, paperwork that I needed to turn in, or to learn about deadlines that were occasionally so "transparent" that you would never know about them unless someone told you about them. Now that Jason has graduated and the Yanceys have moved on, we are left wondering how we ever would have managed without them. Hopefully, we can be the same type of friend to others as they were to us. So, thanks, Jason and Aleece, for being such good friends. Thanks also to our many other friends. We hope you're all doing well!!!

Fairy Magic

Fawndear has enchanted our daughters with her fairy adventures. Things went into high gear when they watched Tinkerbell just before our trip to Disneyland back in May. They were delighted to meet Tinkerbell and Rosetta while at Disneyland, and since then they have made fairy traps, fairies, and tickets to fairy land--which they plan on redeeming as soon as Gabs loses a tooth. This is how it works: The tickets aren't any good unless they can get them to a fairy. So Gabs plans on putting them in an envelope with her soon-to-be lost tooth. The Tooth Fairy will then see them, read them, and then take them to visit the fairies.

During the last month or two, they have created fairies at pixiehollow.com, where they can choose the color of eyes, skin complexion, dress color, leg and arm position, etc., etc. etc. They have given their fairies names like Emerald Twinkletoes, Flora Flutterflower, Sunflower Prettyshimmer, Twilight Candleglow, and Windy Roseflower.

When they put up a fairy trap (a doll's bed and doll dinnerware) it took a fairy nearly a month to come sleep in the bed and leave behind pixie dust (glitter). The girls were so excited you would have thought it was Christmas.

In addition to all this, they are always drawing fairies or making wands of light like those in Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus. This last July Gabs had a fairy birthday party where she and her friends all got fairy wings, which they decorated with glitter and plastic jewels. It's great to see the girls' imagination at work!

Look out!

The last few weeks our son has begun to do a lot of new things. Perhaps his favorite thing to do is imitate others. After Gabs went around the house spraying everyone with a spray bottle, he found the bottle, and pointing it at us, he used his mouth to imitate the sound of the bottle when it sprays.

In a similar scenario, the girls like to throw me kisses after I put them to bed at night or when I'm about to leave to work and school. I act like they are throwing things at me and dodge out of the way. Erik was always "safe," so if I was holding him, their kisses wouldn't affect me. Well, now he has followed suit by throwing kisses of his own. Now I can't even turn to him for help; however, I'm not the only one that has to be careful with the kid. The girls have always loved to dress him up and continue to do so whenever they can.


And even though he doesn't have a whole lot of say in it still, I don't think it will be long before he can hold his own.

A Piece of History

This summer Debs and I read all nine of Laura Ingalls' Little House books to our kids. It was fascinating even for us as parents. I ended up going through my grandparents' picture book, their life history, and some license plates from the farm where my paternal grandpa grew up (I was also raised there).
Years ago, right before I went to what was then Ricks College, I went into an old wood shed behind our house (at one time the homestead used before the main farmhouse was built) and grabbed three license plates from a collection of about forty or fifty--two of which are pictured above. The third, and perhaps my favorite comes from 1928. Unfortunately, I don't have it with me. It's still packed away with my things at my parents' place in Idaho, but it looks like the following plate with numbers imprinted over a large potato--yep Idaho was even famous for potatoes back then.

So, where am I going with this? Well, I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Spain for two years shortly after that and somehow never thought to go back and grab the rest of the plates before the farm was sold. I thought each of my siblings might like to have an old, framed license plate from the farm where they grew up, so I resolved to contact the current owner to see if I could purchase some of them. However, when I talked with my mom about my idea, she indicated that they had been sold along with numerous other antiques, tools, and odds and ends; the proceeds of which were to be divided equally between my father and his siblings. Although I'm glad to have the three that I grabbed years ago, I'm disappointed that my brother and sisters won't enjoy the same fortune. I guess those things happen with inheritance.

If I'm not mistaken, the first plates issued in Idaho came out in 1913. I'll probably never know if there was one from that year in my grandpa's collection of plates. My grandpa, who passed away while I was serving my mission in Spain, turned eight years old right after the 1916 plate pictured here came out. In my grandpa's life history, he talks about his "eighth year" and of harrowing in the fields behind a pair of horses, while his father built their house (the house in which I grew up). I've since thought of all the other license plates and the stories from my grandpa's life history that are associated with the years they came out. While it is unfortunate that they will not stay in the family, there is a comical side to all this.

Last Sunday I showed the 1916 license plate to my kids and told them that it was almost 100 years old. Gabs, who just turned six this summer, querried, "From when you were little?" She seems bound and determined to make me out as being older than I really am.

Earlier in the summer, just after we had read Little House in the Big Woods we enjoyed a night together as a family discussing how journals and photo albums help us know our ancestors better. I showed Debs and the kids some pictures taken when my parents were younger with just two or three kids. One of the pictures shows a deer that my dad shot one year during hunting season. That of course led to an explanation about how I used to go hunting each year with my family during the deer hunt, which provided our family with meat for the following year. Gabs seemed to be quite fascinated with the concept, and, more as a comment than a question, she said, "Just like Laura's [Ingalls] dad from Little House in the Big Woods." Both Debra and I confirmed her statement, and with her eyes opening wide, she said, "Whoa! You lived a long time ago!"