City Slickers

My dad is a fourth generation, true blue, wears the hat, boots & Wranglers everyday (except some Sundays) cowboy. By all rights I should be a cowgirl. At the very least I should like animals. But alas, somehow I didn't get those genes. 

 I have lots of great memories on the farm. I spent most of my time working in a tractor,but I occasionally would go along on some cattle drives and I even took horse 4-H.  None of it changed the fact that I am horse challenged. Horses scare me, ok? I have my reasons & they are all very good.

Now that we live so far away, it is even more important to me that my boys get to spend time hanging out with Grandpa on the farm or at the very least enjoying the wide open spaces. Zack is usually the most eager to experience farm life. He likes the tractors and riding horses. This trip he tagged along with Grandpa while he doctored the calves. Zack rode Jazz by himself & especially liked it when Jazz "went fast to chase the cows."  It was really cold and so his wimpy mom didn't take any pictures. We'll have to settle for this artist's rendition of the event.

It's a rare occasion when we can join them for the some of the more cowboy-ier things like branding and cattle drives. The cattle drives are big family events involving uncles and cousins and long days up on "the mountain." Sometime I would love for the boys to have that experience.  Instead we somehow always manage to see my dad when there is a cattle auction taking place on RFD. What is RFD? It's my dad's favorite channel--programming lineups include Hee Haw, horse dancing competitions, a dutch oven cooking show they sometimes make fun of on the Soup and cattle auctions. While we were there, some of Dad's cows were up for auction. According to a disgruntled Zack, "Grandpa came in and literally woke us up with the auction." Thanks to my dad's little obsession with recording and watching auctions, my kids can all do impressions of an auctioneer.

Normally the boys pass the time in Idaho playing video games, basketball, jumping on the trampoline or 4-wheeler rides. This year, our visit coincided with a massive mouse infestation. Not good for me. Awesome entertainment for the boys.  They went on a mouse killing rampage. I am really surprised that my boys willingly coaxed mice from their hiding spots, chased them around the yard and shot them with blow darts, air soft guns and stabbed them with sticks until they died. Noah has pictures of some on his phone. Gross. I will not post them here, but I do say a dead mouse is never a bad thing so while I didn't exactly encourage their behavior I didn't make them stop either. They were having fun, enjoying a little bit of farm life. 

Like Old Times

For the first leg of our spring break vacation there was no question that we'd be stopping in Utah. It's kind of a long story, but we ended up staying at the Best Western in Lehi. I was a little grossed out, but the boys thought it was awesome. Ben thinks it's great for families or for a honeymoon. 

Even though I really like living in Vegas it still feels like a crazy dream sometimes. So it was really great to go to a Zumba class with Jilynn, catch up with some good friends and hang out on Winter Wheat Way again.  I dropped Noah off at the park and didn't see him for hours. Ben quickly hooked up with Brant, Carter and Teegan and Zack reunited with Lance & Gavin and later Meggie, Mya & Landon. The boys were in heaven seeing their friends again. I love that Lynne was willing to give up her Saturday so I would have somewhere to go.

We all loved spending a Saturday with some of our favorite people. Except that the kids are getting bigger, it was just like old times.

Our Favorite Alabamians

I don't know if I can even explain how excited we were that the Benhams stopped to see us on their way to Disneyland. Do you know the Benhams? They are awesome.  We have especially missed Gavin and his visits. He used to walk in our front door just to hang out. He didn't really care if the boys were there, sometimes he would come to play with Matt.  That doesn't happen here. 

While the adults talked, the kids had some adventures.  I found a bunch of pictures on the computer. It seems they took a quick trip to the Paris.

Practiced swordplay on the beach (love the floating head Gavin)

hiked in Yosemite

and did some deep sea diving. 

They even got in some roller coaster ride practice. 

Not bad for a Sunday afternoon. 

Cub Scouting It Up

Matt & I are the Wolf den leaders in our ward. For the most part it's fun. The boys are a little wacky but I am used to crazies so it's usually good.  I am not new to a scouting calling, I served briefly as a Bear den leader when Noah was a Bear. I got to go with him to Cub Scout day camp. Now I can say the same for Ben. Here day camp is actually DAYS camp-like 4 days of Cub Scouts. It took me the rest of April to recover. We had a good sized group so I only managed to take a few pictures.

Here is Ben in a few moments of reflection.

Ben building a tool box.

Ben and his shield.

When you go for 4 (!) days, you do A LOT of stuff. Ben also crafted a sword, acted the part of a king in a play, played checkers on a life sized board, learned about marbles from a real-life former high school marble champion (he was way too into marbles!), shot a bow, shot a BB gun, raced a boat in a rain gutter regatta, spent his life savings on beef jerky sticks and candy at the "store" and did some relay races. WHEW! I guess maybe Noah got ripped off.

7 Facts about the 7 Year-old

Once again I am failing to post this in a timely manner. Maybe if I start Ben's 10 year old post now, I'll have it ready by his birthday in Septemeber!  Without further ado.... here are 7 little bits of information about Zack, Zacky, or the Zackster.

1. Zack likes art. If he gets in a mood and has a lot of paper, he can occupy himself for hours. He is always asking and then rejecting ideas for art. For awhile he was convinced that he had drawn everything. Then he got "How to Draw Anything" book for his birthday and realized he hasn't. 

 Drawing is his main thing, but he also likes to get crafty. He wanted me to blog this little message he made from random parts to a desk I was building.

2. Zack can save money. He has a decent chunk of cash socked away and has no desire to spend it. He also won't loan money.This drives his spending prone brothers crazy.  If we are in the store and he sees something he wants all I have to do is ask him if he wants to buy it with his own money and immediately the need disappears.

3. Zack likes to write and lyrics are his specialty. One song he wrote starts like this:

"Oh, I'm right here. Can you see me. I'm looking at the good days yah, I'm looking at the good days."

Then things take a tragic turn:

"Oh, I'm stuck in jail yah, I'm thinken how to get out of this deserted place. I could clime out the window but, there's bars. I could try to knock down the walls but, the walls are too hard. how am I supost to break out of jail. Mmmmm mm mm mm. I might be stuck in here forever. I remmember the good days. yah, i remmember the good days. mm mm o oh oh yah oh yah. i'm stuck in jail." (By the way, this is typed exactly as he wrote it).

I made the mistake of asking him about the lyrics and why he was writing about jail. He didn't approve of my line of questioning. Instead of an answer, I got an eye roll and a dirty look before he left the room. I wish I was home earlier that day when he asked Matt to play guitar for him so he could sing that song. Now he won't even consider it.

4. Zack loves school and homework. Every week he gets a homework packet. He finishes it all on Monday. Sometimes he leaves little kiss up notes to his teacher about how much he loves homework. He really does. He was out of school for a week and was thrilled when Ben showed up with all the papers he missed while he was sick. I swear there were more than 50 pages which he finished that afternoon. He was ecstatic.

5. Zack loves his stuffed animals. Until I had a genius revelation to pick one animal a night to cuddle, this is how Zack would go to sleep.

Last week we had a stuffed animal hospital so we could repair a few holes and trim up some fur so they could see.

6. Zack likes the Olive Garden. Matt took the older boys to see Harry Potter and Zack didn't want to go. Instead he got to pick a place to eat out with me. I thought for sure we'd be dining at McDonald's but he was set on Olive Garden even though he just orders the pizza.  He was on his best manners because we were at a "fancy" place. You can tell because he arranged his crust in a circle on the plate rather than leaving it strewn across the table.

 7. Zack likes to make movies on the computer. So far, his file contains 114 movies. He especially likes to use the special effects. His movies are pretty funny because he likes to make  faces like this:

and this: 

Sometimes he sings, sometimes he dances. He can be a goofy kid.

There are lots and lots of things I could write about Zack. Seven is hardly enough. I started a list of ideas and left it by the computer.  Later in the day, Zack brought me this:

The Meaning of Inception

The following story is 100% true and possibly the creepiest thing to ever happen to me. Intrigued?

I watched the movie Inception when it came out in theaters and loved it. The best part of seeing it in the theater was the audience reaction to the end--is it a dream or not? Gasp! Literally, there were gasps. The movie was on my mind for the next few days so I decided that I was going to believe in a happy ending. Then I read an article where Christopher Nolan (the director) said that there really is an ending-it's not just up for the viewer to decide. And so when it arrived via Netflix I was determined to watch carefully so that I could hopefully prove that it wasn't a dream.

I am not a deep thinker so I really had to make myself focus and concentrate when we finally got around to watching it. The first night, I fell asleep mid-way through. I hate having Netflix movies for too long (such a waste of money!) so I was determined to finish it the next night even though that meant starting it at midnight.  Short of actually taking notes, I was really concentrating on all the different dream levels, the token, any sign that might indicate the intended meaning. Finally, at about 1:00 am it was over. And still the meaning wasn't clear to me. Gasp!

Matt was half awake and while I was in the bathroom I told him that I decided that I don't want it to be a dream and so that's what the ending is about even if it might not be.

Here's where things get freaky. I was walking by the dresser to get back into bed when Noah's old cell phone all of a sudden lit up. Matt can't sleep with any light on (he covers the tiny blue light on the satellite receiver in our room) so he got up to turn it off. This is what was on the screen*:

FOR REAL! Either Matt is the greatest prankster in the world or that was some kind of crazy, crazy coincidence.  He swears that he didn't do it and I think I believe him. Still it will take more than a creepy, demon phone to change my interpretation of Inception.

 *You may have noticed the time on the phone in the photo doesn't jive with the time line of the story. I took a picture of the screen the next day

The Talk

Zack was assigned the talk for Primary yesterday. His topic was the Lord speaks to us through his prophets. We had a little conversation about what that meant and then he went upstairs and wrote this talk:

  He read us the first draft and decided that he wanted to add more.

He didn't want to be rustling papers around and didn't like the cross outs and "bad writing" so he had me type up the final draft. We made a few changes but this talk was 100% written by Zack.

During Primary he got up, read it himself, got his sticker and walked back to his seat trying not to act too cool.