Painting Life Red: Mckenna

Wow, seven months is a long time. I am woefully behind in my "journaling," a.k.a. blogging. (Actually, I am woefully behind in most everything!) I am going to attempt to catch up on some of the significant things from the last 7 months. My goal for 2012 is to take more pictures and blog at least once a month.

I am also going to attempt to do Becky Higgin's Project Life this year. I say attempt because then if I don't pull it off at least I don't feel like a total loser. Maybe that's my problem: I just don't commit. I haven't scrapbooked for years, and this approach seems like it's do-able for me. I had been digital scrapbooking, but lost everything when my computer crashed. I don't know why I didn't back things up. I didn't have too many pages that were ready to print, but I lost all the digital papers and elements I had purchased, so I am going back to tangible products. Thankfully I posted some of my pages of our Alaska trip on this blog, so they are not lost forever.

June and July were pretty much consisted of hanging out at home. Mckenna Borla came to visit for a week, which is always fun. She and Brooke have been friends since they were little (when we lived in Vegas). She has been to visit us every year since we moved to Utah in 2006.

Tie dyeing bonanza

Okay, so these two are a little goofy...

Or maybe a LOT goofy!

Oh that Mckenna...!

Shopping trip to the new Harmon's. Mckenna purchased a dragon fruit.

Their future's so bright, they gotta wear shades...or goggles.

We found out that Mckenna can read! Who knew?

Megan mostly played with her friends Anna Francis and Kassidy Webb. We bought her a season pass to Cherry Hill, and she went 28 times! (What a gonga...that comes to $2.85 a visit! Woo hoo!)

We continued with Apron Strings for the 3rd summer. This is a group of 4 girls Megan's age--Lindsee Fuhriman, Maddie Oyler, and Olivia Griffin. We were all in the same ward at one point, and we (the moms) take turns to teach/do something with the girls each week during the summer. In the past we have taught them cooking, sewing, and doing crafts. This year we did field trips. They played tennis, hiked Adam's Canyon, took a babysitting class, went to the water slides in Riverdale, went to Cherry Hill, to name a few. For one of my turns I took the girls to downtown Salt Lake. We did a scavenger hunt called "Itty Bitty Mormon City" around Temple Square. The girls had pictures of details from the sites which they had to find. It was a lot of fun, and they learned some things about the history of early Salt Lake.

First stop: The Church History Museum. Here are Megan, Maddie and Lindsee (Olivia couldn't come that day) in a replica of a ship's hull that immigrants slept in when they crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

In the children's area--Mexican dancing.

Cooling off at the fountain on Temple Square

In front of the reflecting pool in the Plaza.

Behind the Church Office Building. Coincidentally, that day we got to see the Peregrine Falcon babies (that nest on the Joseph Smith building) flying for the first time! Pretty cool--lots of people were watching.

One of the beehive doorknobs at the Beehive House.

Lindsee on the steps Brigham Young used to get into his carriage.

We also went to Cherry Hill once with Zach and Abbie. Good times with cousins!

Kim and Cynjyn Goon (more old friends from Vegas) came to visit us for a week too. Kim had dropped her boys off at BYU for volleyball camp and needed a place to hang out until they could pick up the boys and go to Oregon. Kim was a saint and helped me blacken and polish all the stamped copper discs I needed for the bracelets I was making for Girls Camp (more on that later).

We took the girls to Cherry Hill one day

The girls entertained themselves for almost a day with slime that they made.

Kim bought them kazoos at the music store, so they got really good at kazooing :)

One slight mishap was that Trixie helped herself to the brownies Kim bought at BYU to take to her family in Oregon. What a little stinker! Anyway, the brownies were wasted (such a shame--they are the best brownies!), and Trixie got introduced to a hydrogen peroxide chaser that assisted her in vomiting up the contents of her stomach. (I know, that is gross...but chocolate is toxic to dogs and we had to do something.)

Brooke spent a week at EFY in Provo the same week Kim was here. It was her first time going, and she was really excited to be rooming with Savannah Griffin in Helaman Halls. She had a great time, and came home on that spiritual high you want your kids to experience at EFY.

Not the most flattering picture of them, but it's all I've got!

The rest of the summer was pretty much taken up by installing sprinklers, preparing the yard for grass, and Girls Camp. I was the Stake Camp director, and my summer was filled with planning, preparing, and holding meetings for camp. But that's another blog post!

While McKenna was here, the girls made some "fairy houses." They used to make them outside when they were little. They would use natural things like leaves, bark, sticks, rocks to make little houses for the fairies to "visit." One day we were at a craft store and saw a cute display of some fairy houses that were made out of boxes and craft supplies. The girls seemed bored, so I suggested they each make one while McKenna was here. We rummaged through my craft supplies, and I let them go to town. They actually ended up spending about 2 days making them, and the results were adorable! I was surprised how much they got into it--they kept adding details, and made little fairy dolls to put in their houses. Each of the girls made a "room," so the fairies had a full-blown house!