Zippin' Through Zion

We spent one of our days in Zion National Park and had  a great time. My mom and Mike gave us cool Zion's t-shirts for Christmas last year, so our family sported them for the day.

You aren't allowed to drive into the park very far any more, but they have a handy shuttle bus that takes you anywhere you need to go... and luckily wasn't that crowded. Lindsey and her boys got there the same time we did, so we got to spend the morning with them.

We hiked to the Emerald Pools and had a great time! Sophia did NOT want to keep her hat on her head (but she DID want to keep her finger in her nose). Ryan had Soph in the pack for our hikes and she did pretty well. I was trying to help Lindsey with her boys a little bit... they were great, but were wanting to hop and run ahead, so I was trying to keep track of Jonah (four years old) since Lindsey was with Jaxton.  Lindsey overheard a woman telling her hiking companions what a horrible parent I was for bringing such a young boy on a trail like this.  She said something to the effect of "Now that's just bad parenting right there!" Lovely. If I had seen her again I would have given her a list of all the ways that I am a bad parent, but certainly hiking on a fairly easy trail with plenty of water and sunscreen isn't one of them.

We finally found a way to keep Sophia's hat on her head... she just needed to fall asleep!

After the Emerald Pools hike we met up with the rest of the group near the lodge for a picnic lunch.

Sophia stayed asleep for a few minutes like this!

After she woke up from her nap, Soph was in a funny, funny mood.

She kept picking the grass and throwing it on Grandpa.  Ryan got the cutest video of her (notice, no hat!):



After our lunch and a little break we loaded onto the shuttle bus again and hiked to Weeping Rock. It is such a short hike with a fun ending... the kids loved the dripping water and the cool shadow of the overhang.

We loved being at Zion with our family!

Mammoth Cave

The next day we tried to go on a hike, but were informed that most of the trailheads required a four-wheel drive vehicle to get to. We drove along a windy road for a long, long time and still couldn't find the trail we were looking for, so we finally gave up and headed back to the house, where we met up with a couple of my sisters and their families who were going to go to Mammoth Cave. It looked like a relatively short drive and an exciting thing, so we decided to go along.

It turned out to be about an hour and half away! So much for a quick trip. With a name like Mammoth Cave, we figured it would be gigantic and huge... and it was really a hole in the ground that went on for a long, long time. It was pretty cool though.

There were a few entrances and several different passage ways. We took flashlights and head lamps with us because it got dark really, really fast.

Aren't we cute? (my sister Erin and me)

The ceiling got lower and lower... there were some spots that I had to crawl on all fours, but it was the perfect height for Sophia! She cruised right along. In the photo above are Andrew, Nathan, Coleman, Josh, Tayden, Olivia, Emma, and Sophia.

The Loutzenhiser boys

Erin and Tayden

Overall, it was fun... just a lot of driving to get there! (We were glad it was free!)

Bryce Canyon and a Birthday

At the end of June we headed out on an adventurous reunion for the Cole/Stover family reunion. We met up with part of the group at Bryce Canyon on our way to Zion.

Megan with Coleman and Liv...

Our little family at one of the many lookouts...

Liv, Emma, Soph, Katty, me, David Joseph, David, and Megan...

Olivia!

Coleman!

Bryce is beautiful, no?

I loved this view of Ryan and Coleman looking at the beautiful scenery.

Heather, my mom, me, David, Lauren, and Claire

Ryan and the kiddos at "one more lookout" before we got back in the car to drive to Zion.

My mom and Mike arranged for us to stay in a couple of great houses and cabins at Zion Ponderosa Ranch, which is just outside of Zion National Park. The first night we had a little pow-wow to establish some rules and guidelines (and of course sign the liability release form!).  Mike put together some fun bags for each of the grandkids with some snacks and a water bottle and some little prizes. They thought that was SO neat!

Our "camp directors"

That day happened to be my 37th birthday and my sisters brought cake! It was fun to spend my birthday with so many people from my family... out of 12 kids, 11 were there... from Idaho, Nevada, California, Utah, and Georgia. We greatly missed Matt and his family who weren't able to come at the last minute. We had close to 50 people there! Our family has grown up in a lot of ways. It was so fun to spend time together and see some beautiful sites.

Twelve Years!

 Yesterday we celebrated being married for twelve years!

We spent a lovely evening at the Salt Lake Temple doing sealings and then ate some yummy dinner together.

A few weeks ago Olivia summed it all up for us. She looked at us both and said, "Mom, I'm so glad Dad married you!"

I was feeling pretty good that she recognized what a blessing I was to Ryan... and I started to agree when she spoke again after a brief pause....

"If he hadn't you would be sad and weeping somewhere because you'd be all alone."

Thanks, Ry, for preventing me from being sad and weepy all by myself. I love being married to you! We make a great team.

Dad Stays Home Part Two

Wednesday
We started off Wednesday by forgetting Activity Days for Olivia! We were making cupcakes for Lisa to take up to camp the next day for a birthday and totally forgot. We were lucky that one of her friends called to ask her to walk. After finishing the cupcakes we did dishes... again... they really never end, do they?!

I did have a chance to teach a life lesson to Coleman today. While we were putting clothes away Coleman was helping out in the closet. He was putting shoes away and made the remark "Mom should give away some of her shoes." We talked about how there are some things you don't say to women :).

We finished up the morning by playing Settlers of Catan, a favorite of Coleman's, and he won. When Sophia woke up from her nap (which gave me a minute to write the previous blog entry) we took off for Airborne Trampoline Arena in Sandy. Earlier this week, Living Social had a deal, and it sounded like fun! They had a good time.

Sophia got to jump around in the kiddie area, and she loved it. I love her jump!

They also had a really cool foam pit with a trampoline at the bottom that the kids could jump into.





I will admit, sometimes I wanted to throttle the other kids in the kiddie area. As you can see there are six large trampolines. One of the kids (who I'm sure loved being around Sophia) would jump right next to Sophia (which would knock her down). All of the other trampolines were completely unused, yet she continued jumping next to Sophia.

They also had trampolines on the walls.

Sophia finally found a little Sesame Street coin-operated truck to sit in, and let's be honest, it was probably her favorite thing (even without the coins).

They also had an awesome dodgeball arena setup that would be a lot of fun. After an hour of jumping they were exhausted. Coleman was dripping with sweat. Both kiddos got a great workout--one hour was totally enough time.

When we got home we made Spicy Chicken Pasta for Dinner. We do substitute half and half for the heavy cream and it's still awesome.

Surprisingly, Sophia liked the spicy chicken and the red/green peppers!


Thursday

We had a very full Thursday. I had a lot I wanted to get done on this last day. First we enjoyed the weekly summer movie at the Cinemark, Madagascar 2. The kids apparently have a tradition of making "trail mix" for the movie. The ingredient list changes with whatever we have in the pantry that Lisa allows them to use. That day, their trail mix consisted of marshmallows, pretzels, cereal, graham cracker pieces, and my all time favorite... croutons. That's right, nice buttery, crunchy, salty croutons. Of course I didn't see them add the croutons to their mixes, it was when I was in the dark theater eating from my prepared bag of trail mix (and sharing with Sophia) that I was treated to a nice crunchy, buttery delight.

After our movie we went to Radio Shack to pickup some materials for our next activity. Ever since I watched this TED talk about Squishy Circuits I've been excited to try this with the kids. The video is only four minutes long. Watch it.

If you didn't watch it, the basic idea is you get a battery pack and a couple of LED's (about $10 at Radio Shack), mix up two different types of play dough using two different recipes. One is conductive play dough and the other works as your insulating dough. We were able to talk about electrical circuits, and what a short is, how electricity travels, and showing the differences between a serial and parallel circuit. 

Oddly enough our insulating dough didn't turn out quite right, I didn't follow the directions very well :D. We did end up with something workable near the end though (f it's too sticky... keep adding flour).

Recipes for the dough and helpful documents found here

We invited some friends up to try it out with us (their mom was also at Girls' Camp). Here they are showing our first contraption using the conductive play dough (that we colored purple) and the insulating play dough which we left white. 

Coleman was experimenting with what happens if the circuit is in a loop

And this was our final creation. I really have no idea what it was. They started wanting to make a giraffe, but merged into some stunted neck spider with an awesome looking tail.

We finished up the day with 6 holes of disc golf at the course in American Fork, 2 hours of soccer practice, and kids meals at Applebee's. We had planned on a simple Pasta-Roni meal of White Shells and Cheddar (Coleman's favorite), but he indulged us and let us use Olivia's free meal cert and our $10 off coupon. I just didn't feel like making dinner.

I had a lot of fun over those few days, and fully realize that there's no way I could keep up that pace every day of every week! I had a lot I wanted to do in those short 2 1/2 days and kiddos that pitched in when necessary to get things done made it so that we could have some good play time. I really couldn't have had it any better. At least I have another year to plan for next Girls' Camp :).

**What's the funniest thing you've had in "trail mix"?
**Want to play with some play dough?
**Are you going to try Spicy Chicken Pasta?

Hijacked

Greetings all you blog visitors, Lisa is away at Girls' Camp this week. Since I am taking over the responsibilities for our house this week, it is only fair that I also take over the blogging duties!

I feel like she eased me into this, perhaps lulling me in nice and easy. Monday I just picked up the duties after work. Tuesday I took over at lunch. Today we're all in, and for the most part it's been great!

Saturday

With Lisa's assistance I planned meals for the week. I wasn't about to do that all on my own, otherwise I'm sure the kids would have starved. After getting a good idea about what they'd eat we put together the shopping list and off we went shopping. Olivia was kind enough to help and after a trip to Costco and Walmart (2 hrs) proclaimed that it's fun to go shopping with dad. I suspect the only reason she thought that is because she got to pick out a cereal for the week (Honey Bunches of Oats) and some ice cream (orange/berry sherbet).

Monday

When I got home we had to get started right away with making dinner. Coleman made it clear that he didn't want to help make dinner since it's something he doesn't like. We had a brief lesson about how you still need to learn to cook, even if it's something you don't like. He wasn't sure he agreed, but in his infinite wisdom decided he would help like dad wanted :)

Our meal for Monday night was Creole Franks (affectionately known in the Harper home as Hot Dog Creole. This was something that I grew up liking quite a bit and was at the top of my list for things to make for dinner. Lisa will tolerate this meal occasionally, but it doesn't get made too often unless I make it.

I've always liked cooking, and have made it one of my goals to have them help with all the cooking this week. I think it's a great practical way to teach mathematics (fractions and measurements) and following directions (and testing patience -- mostly mine). They've been awesome helpers and it's been fun.

We had a short Family Home Evening lesson about tithing (even though Coleman thought we didn't have to have FHE since mom wasn't home) and then we went on a walk/bike ride. This was probably Sophia's favorite activity of the evening.

About half way through the walk it started to sprinkle on us, but we made it home without too much excitement.

We had our ice cream for desert, Coleman had his favorite (mint chocolate chip), and Olivia her sherbet, and Sophia some of both. Sophia ate both of the two small scoops I got for her, and then got down from the table and walked around to each table spot and opened her mouth until someone gave her some more ice cream.

After finishing the evening with a little Dr. Who (BBC version on Netflix), it was time to call it a day and everyone was off to bed.

Tuesday

Tuesday certainly proved to be a bit more challenging of a day. I took half of the day off from work only to come home and find out that we have some weird issue with water and the carpet in the basement. When we had our basement finished the closet for the water heater/furnace might have been made too small since the edge of the carpet comes really close to the drain. For whatever reason a good area of carpet pad and carpet are quite wet. I pulled up the edges of both to try to get them to dry out, but I'm still not sure what to do long term.

Another thing I wanted to do this week is to include some activities that would challenge their brains. For Tuesday I came up with the idea that I wanted to teach them the basics of computer programming. I remembered doing stuff with Logo (turtle draw) when I was younger, and thought that might be a good start.

For those unfamiliar with Logo, you create drawings by writing a program of how you want the turtle to move (when it moves, it draws). The simple commands consist of telling it to move forward, turn, and change colors. We talked about angles, and how many degrees in a circle, and went through a couple of brief examples. I found "Logo Draw" for the iPad and they took turns trying to draw something.

Coleman first thought he wanted to do a lightning bolt, but I encouraged him to try doing a square with different colors on each side and here is his final result.

Olivia started out on a rather ambitious task of writing out Family Matters, but after getting stuck on the A thought this was good:

Our activity got interrupted by quite a downpour! Olivia and Sophia went outside to play in the rain (and got soaked).

I had to cancel soccer (again) because of the thunder. I think this is the third or fourth time this summer where we've had thunder right around when we were supposed to practice. Each time it seems the weather totally blows over 30-45 mins later and we could have practiced anyway, but I certainly wouldn't want to be out on a soccer field if lightning does come through the area!

Dinner tonight consisted of chicken quesadillas for Liv and I, and regular quesadillas for Coleman and Sophia. My favorite way to do chicken for these is to cut it into pieces and cook it in a little olive oil and crushed red pepper. Once browned add about a cup of salsa to let it simmer in until the tortillas are ready.

It's also customary for us to have frozen raspberry lemonades with this meal. I use half a can of pink lemonade, 2 cups of ice, a few scoops of vanilla ice cream (3-4), 10-12 frozen raspberries, and water for consistency. Tasty summer drink!

We all worked on dishes together, got ready for bed, and enjoyed 101 ways to leave a game show before calling it a night.

Since Sophia just woke up from her nap, I'll have to continue with Wednesday's activities another time.

Do any of you know what Logo is?

Have you found fun ways to teach your kids during the summer?

Do you want a frozen raspberry lemonade as much as I do right now? :)

The Harpers and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days

Hello, blog friends. How I have missed you. Are you still there?

I have much catching up to do with our summer adventures and so forth, but we have had a couple of days from you know where. Before posting fun photos and cute stories, I had to take a few minutes to document the fact that we have survived these last few days, without totally clearing out our emergency savings fund.

Sunday started out well enough. We woke up and ate a lovely breakfast of toast (with various toppings--Nutella for me, jam for Olivia, cinnamon and sugar with butter for Coleman, bites of all kinds for Sophia) and rushed off to our Sunday meetings.  Sophia has been a bit under the weather (just some conjunctivitis, bulging gums where two molars are coming in, and oh, double ear infections that her mama failed to recognize until her well child check a few days ago) but has been on antibiotics and Tylenol for long enough that she is neither contagious nor totally miserable. We got to church though, and she was totally miserable. And loud.  So I took her out. I realized we had not given her medicine to her, so we ran home to get it. She was still loud.  Did I mention she was loud? Particularly during the lovely group musical number that I was supposed to sing in... we made it back just in time. It was cute as she clapped out loud and yelled "Mommy!" at the top of her lungs. Sort of. We survived church, since that is what you mostly do when you have a busy, tired, 15 month old. We spent the rest of the afternoon tag teaming because of other meetings and appointments.

In the late afternoon, I started complaining about being hot. I am usually hot or cold, but rarely just right. Probably because my comfortable temperature range is 68 to 72. Ryan's comfort zone is whatever is cheapest.  But I digress.  I really felt hot, and sweaty, and sticky. And Ryan did too. And our thermostat clearly indicated that there was a problem with our air conditioner. Ryan walked outside to check it, and the air conditioner indicated that there was a problem too. It wasn't running. Ugh.

We called the repair place and left a message. Olivia took it upon herself to spray us all with her water bottle (or dump it on Coleman if she felt the need) and we ran all the ceiling fans to try to keep cool.  First thing Monday morning the glorious repair person called and arrived within the hour! We had tried to mentally prepare ourselves for the worst... after all, the AC unit is probably as old as our house, which means it has lived a good life and has functioned well for a lot of years. Estimates online showed that a new unit was anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000!  Imagine our relief and giddiness when he came to the door with a small, bulging part that he said had overheated. Only $179.32 to fix!!! I quickly told him to hook up the new one, shut the door, and did a happy dance. My kids laughed at me and thought I was weird. He came back so I could pay and they told him that I did the happy dance. Then he thought I was weird too, but it didn't matter, because it only cost $179.32 to fix! Hooray! We didn't have to move to the pool or our neighbor's house for the day, because our house was cool.

We also had our van in the shop yesterday. The check engine light kept coming on and then going off but always coming on again. Some gasket or other was broken and there was a leak in the oil pan.  Repairs there were under $500. Another hooray!

I secretly thought to myself (but did not dare say out loud for fear of jinxing myself) that something else was bound to happen, because don't all bad things supposedly come in threes?  Anyway, we ended the day believing all was well in our household again.

This morning we awoke to find a large puddle of water in front of the fridge... and water gushing from underneath the fridge.  We went downstairs to discover that water was coming out of the vents in the bathroom and office, out of the light in the hall, and out of one of the smoke detectors.  Ryan figured out the problem and shut off the water to the fridge, which stopped the gushing and slowed the leaking. Meanwhile, he wanted a sponge to soak up the water in the drip pan, but I don't believe in sponges. They are bacteria magnets and are really just gross. So we didn't have a single sponge in the house. Just after Ryan left to purchase some bacteria magnets, our smoke detectors began beeping and loudly saying, "Fire, fire!" You know how those work, too, right? When one goes off, they all go off? Apparently water in a smoke detector indicates that something is wrong. So, I went through the house pulling them all down and unplugging them.

Ry got home and soaked up all the water and determined that our problem was our water filter. Apparently, when the store that you bought your fridge from sends you a friendly reminder every six months to replace your water filter, it's not just a ploy to get your money. If you ignore those reminders for several years because you don't want to spend $44.36 on a new water filter, you just might end up with a whole lot of unfiltered water in a whole lot of places you don't want it. Good news is that Ryan fixed it all and we can mostly laugh about it. Mostly. Everything seems to be drying out nicely. Phew.

We both agreed that tomorrow HAS to be better.