Hiking the Y

Hiking the Y is a Provo "must do."  Of course, I haven't hiked it since I was in college, many moons ago.  But I wanted to hike up there again with some of the kids before we move away, which is rapidly approaching.  Scott was here this weekend so he and I, my mom and my two oldest kids hiked the Y on Saturday morning.  My dad watched the three younger ones.  I was all ready to let Grant come with us, but he opted out, possibly when he thought cartoon watching might be on the table.  Here are Matthew and Anna at the trailhead.  We got there early enough that we could park pretty close.

Heading up the trail.  This was at the beginning.

Stopping to enjoy the views of Provo (and all of Utah Valley) along the way.  There were benches at most of the switchback turns.

Part way up, Matthew and Anna felt they required some walking sticks.

I think they were also looking at a centipede type creature here.

We found some suitable walking sticks.

We started hiking around 9am and got to the top around 10 - its just under 1.5 miles (one way) according to my GPS watch.  We took a pretty leisurely pace with lots of rests.  We hung out on the Y for a while.  Matthew scooted all the way down it from top to bottom.  Which took a lot of time.  

Scott and I at the top.  Scott offered to carry the water, even though I had brought it in a pink backpack.  He's such a good guy.  :)  Always carrying water for me.

We walked down to the bottom of the Y and waited for Matthew to scoot his way down there.  I think he stopped to take pictures of people for them.

Anna on the Y

Provo in all its splendor.  And walking down took a little longer than I thought 'cause its steep with lots of loose gravel.  We had to take pretty small steps.  Anna and Matthew fell a few times but us adults stayed on our feet, despite a few slips on the gravel.   We got done before it got too hot and the trail wasn't too crowded while we were there, although it was starting to fill up as we left.  I'm glad we got a chance to hike the Y while in Utah.  Now Matthew says he wants to hike all the mountains with letters on them.  He's eyeing the G in Pleasant Grove next.  :)

We stumbled upon this article with a map showing the locations of different hillside letters in the western US.  And there is one in the next town over from our new place in CA...or at least, it was there at one time.  :)

I Spy Quilt

And here is one more quilt!  This is an I Spy Quilt.  I got most of these squares from an I Spy quilt square exchange I did in Colorado.  I selected all the more boyish squares and added some from my stash of leftover fabric.  Then I arranged them in a way I found aesthetically pleasing and sewed them up into a quilt top.  This was all while we lived in Colorado, over three years ago.  I bought the batting and backing and my mom assembled the quilt and finished it.  It looks nice and has nice fuzzy (fat) fleece on the bottom.

The kids had a fun time looking at all the squares and playing on it.  I still have a bunch of more girl themed squares packed away, so maybe someday I'll get around to sewing a quilt with those.

Grant, my rambunctious five year old, wanted to find the square of "beautiful landscape" over and over - that's what he called it.  That made me smile (extra points if you can spot a "beautiful landscape" - on the left side in top picture).  And lots of people were trying to count dinosaurs.

Grant snuggled up in the quilt after a head bonk.  See, the blanket is working already.

BONUS QUILT PHOTO!!

I was trying to tag all my quilt pictures on the blog and realized I never posted a finished picture of my Okinawa memory quilt on the blog.  At least if I did I can't find it.  I posted a picture on Facebook, but not the blog.  And it seems I don't even have a completed picture of the quilt!  Which is just a shame.  Here is the completed quilt top, finished September 2012.  The quilt is now completely finished, with a cream colored patterned fabric as the backing, but I don't have a picture of it finished and the quilt is still in storage.  So here is the lovely quilt top!  I made 20 copies of my square (surfboards on the seawall, third row down, second from right) to commemorate something about Okinawa (this was when I lived there, of course) and then exchanged with 20 other ladies.  I think only 18 ended up being exchanged at the end, so I made two other squares (upper left corner and lower right corner) with "Okinawa" and the year.  The squares everyone made look so nice!

See other pictures of my quilting escapades HERE and HERE.

Last Day of School

Well.  We did it.  We spent an entire school year here in Utah waiting for our house to be done.  We've actually been here a whole calendar year.  In the past week we found out our actual closing day on the house, which is about 4 weeks away now.  So we're excited about that...and now that school's out we'll be focusing on getting ready to move to California.  For reals this time.  The vast majority of our stuff is in storage in Illinois...as it has been for the past year.  So that part's easy.  And we'll just pack up what we have and have accumulated here in Utah.  Close on the house.  Move.  Then the unpacking begins.  But lets rewind a little...today was the last day of school!!  Here are Matthew and Anna just before heading to school on their last day.  Matthew finished 3rd grade and Anna finished 2nd grade.  Grant also finished preschool last week (read about it HERE).

The night before the last day there was a dance party at the school.  The big kids danced while the little kids played on the toys.  Matthew danced.  Grant played on the toys.  Anna went between playing and dancing.  It was a "glow" party so we all had glow necklaces.

Matthew loaded up on necklaces.

At one point the DJ told the kids to go get their parents and make them dance.  Matthew went and got me and we danced for about 20 seconds.  Then he left me to go talk with his friends.  :)  Dancing is usually funner and less embarrassing with other people.  But we had fun and stayed out too late.

Next morning ready for the last day.  It was only a 1 1/2 hour day so no lunch packing or anything.  I don't know why they bother having such a short day.  In Illinois they did a similar thing on the last day.

We had to take a picture of all our matchy shirts.

And fast forward to the end of the school day.  Which on this day was 10:45am.  Super short day.  Here's Anna running to meet me.

We found Matthew too!  They had some different goodies from school.

I made them pose for another picture after school.

Anna was sad about leaving her teacher.  She always gets pretty attached to her teachers.  She wasn't sure about this teacher at first, since he was male, but now she loves him and is sad to leave.

She made him this card.

From a "sincere student"

Matthew got the Tech Guru award at school.

He thought that was neat.

He taught a short section at school last week about how to write a program in Scratch, a visual computer language for kids.  I'm not sure what else he did to earn this distinction but it might have involved talking about computer games a lot.  

Anna, in her class, got the Awesome Friend award.  She was sad about saying goodbye to all her friends.

And we went for a post last day of school celebratory lunch at Freddy's, one of our favorite family eating out places.  We don't eat out that much.  We've eaten at Freddy's in Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois...and now Utah.  I don't think they have one by us in California.  But there are lots of other good eats there.  So the school year is over.  I love summer!  Hooray!  And hooray for our house being finished soon.  :)

John's Blanket

John's blanket is finally finished.  I really feel like I dropped the ball on this one.  I guess its just that having more kids means you are busy taking care of them more...and although I have free time I don't always want to spend the little I have working on a blanket.  But for whatever reason I have been way behind on making a blanket for John.  A blanket that was intended to be a baby blanket initially.  Here it is completed.  I bought these precut squares (charm packs of the patterned fabric and the cream fabric).  So I didn't even cut the squares (there were a few I cut).  I had the idea to make a maze blanket.  I thought that would be kind of fun.  Scott volunteered to help me make the actual design of the maze on excel.  So Scott designed it.  I laid out the squares, but my mom actually sewed the quilt top when she visited us in Illinois over a year ago.  When I bought and arranged the fabric John was already 2 1/2 years old.  So I started out way behind.  :)  I brought the quilt top with me thinking I would work on it while we were staying with my mom pending our house closing or whatever.  I didn't realize it would be over a year we were here.  At one point I went and bought the batting and backing for the blanket and then did nothing on the quilt for a long time.  My mom reminded me about it and then she ended up finishing the blanket.  It looks great.  The kids have had a great time with it - driving cars around the maze and its nice and fuzzy on the back.

Thanks Mom for bringing this blanket to fruition.  John is almost 4.  I really should have worked in it sooner.  Emma is 1 1/2 so I should probably get started on hers.  

There are little initials hidden throughout the quilt.

John was excited when he found the letters to spell his name.

So the blanket is a success, thanks to other people, mostly my mom, doing everything.  My mom has helped on all of these.  I think I did the most work on Grant's.  I have much to learn.  :)

See Matthew's baby blanket HERE,

Anna baby blanket HERE,

and Grant's baby blanket HERE.

Last Day of Preschool

Last week Grant had his last day of preschool.  I got to go into his classroom and see their little preschool program.  For Grant's part of the program a few of the kids had a race to see who could put the magnet numbers in order from 0 to 9 and Grant won the race.  He was pretty excited about that.

Here is Grant with his teachers.  A couple months ago, Grant's head  teacher (on the left), had a brain aneurysm.  It happened after school in the evening.  Luckily they got her into surgery very quickly and eventually she was on the road to recovery, but it was very scary.  And she was away from preschool, of course, for the rest of the year.  She was able to come into class an hour or so here or there after she was well enough, to visit and at the end of the year she was there to say goodbye.  Her assistant teacher took over along with a sub for the final couple months.  We're so glad she's ok now.  And these two wonderful ladies are both in our ward at church.  Only in Utah, right?  Whenever Grant sees his head teacher at church he runs up to give her a hug...and she usually has a treat for him in her purse.  :)

Here they are in their classroom singing a song.

Grant wanted me to take a picture of him eating.  It's been a crazy year, and now Grant is done with preschool!  On to kindergarten!! We've already got him enrolled as a new kindergartener at his new school in California.  New adventures ahead.

Park Adventures

Now that its getting warmer I've been trying to get the kids to the park more.  They don't have as many extracurricular activities going on now and I figure they need an hour of real physical activity each day...at least.  We've also been going to the pool more to get all that energy out - I don't have pictures of our pool trips.  Here is a park we went to in Saratoga Springs - this was about a 10 minutes drive from my parent's house.  They have a huge bungee pyramid to climb.  It reminded me of some parks in Japan (where climbing structures like this were common).  You can see Anna standing at the bottom there.  It was a big pyramid.

Matthew climbed to the top pretty quickly.

Anna took most of the hour and a half we were there to climb the structure.  She came down and did some other things in the middle.  But she made it to the top.  She was nervous but kept trying.

Meanwhile the three younger kids played on everything else.

A large view of the park (Neptune Park)

Here's a bungee climber by our old house in Okinawa.

At Wine's Park in Lehi.  We've been going there a lot to let the kids run.  Emma loves the slides.  She'll find one she likes and can manage and will go on it over and over.  She's pretty brave about big slides too.

Another day at Wine's Park.  I take the little guys while the older kids are at school.

Here is another park - Hunter's Park on the Lehi/American Fork border, a short drive from our house.

Emma worked hard to cross the wiggly bridge there.

There is also a big field (down a slope - so possibly good for sledding for younger kids).  We came back to this park another day with all five kids.  There are three of them running on the grass.

We went for a short exploratory hike in the creek bottom there.

And got worn out playing on the toys.  On school days the time I can take them to the park is usually when I would be making dinner, so I've been trying to get a little creative about getting dinner ready.  Lots of stuff done before hand.

I've been taking all the kids to Matthew's soccer games when I can too.  They don't have toys at the park he plays at, but lots of open grass to play on and some wild areas to explore.  On this day it was warm and the three middle kids wanted to hid under the blanket for part of the game.  I always bring a big bag of snacks and water bottles to the park, some balls and a blanket.  The bathroom has sometimes been a problem.  But we are learning to go before hand if at all possible, right kids?

Here we are (on a Scott weekend!!) at the playground of the kids school.  Just a block or so away.  Matthew and Anna and I practiced some soccer skills, while the other kids played on the toys or ran in the field with the other soccer balls.

On days when we get a good long play time at the park or swimming pool the kids are beat by the end of day.  And after a park trip, Grant and John will play quietly in the afternoon instead of harassing each other mercilessly.  They definitely sleep better when they've had a good exhausting park trip.  Mission accomplished.  Here's Emma ready for her nap time.  I think she broke these glasses soon after this.   But she looked cute.