Tales from Happy Land

I checked out Unbroken at the Safford Library. A few times now I've found different things in books from there that people used as bookmarks. One had a card from a Pokemon card game. Another had an Uno card. This one had a bookmark made by a girl in our ward. :) I took pictures and sent them to her mom.

Her mom happens to be the Ward Primary President. She told me yesterday that she's aware Jeremy and I will have been in nursery for a year in January, and that she's looking for a replacement for us. :( I'll really miss nursery. It's been so, so good. Those are our kiddos.

Court of Honor

I think Benji got Second and First Class.

Michael got some good stuff too.

Check out that first full paragraph. This is in Unbroken. I thought it was funny. :)

I found lots of black and blue photos. Some little helper was taking photos and videos of nothing.

Timmy made a bat hat. :)

Benji was supposed to be cutting veggies for stew. Uhhhhh...

Michael got new glasses.

One day the power suddenly went out. Joshua happened to be down the street at the college, and he said there was a broken power line and sparks flying everywhere. Cool! What happened was a guy in our ward was on his way home from work at the intersection of the highway and Stadium Avenue, and a car plowed into him going pretty fast. It rammed him into a power pole and broke off his rear axle, and also broke the pole. This all happened right as the sun was setting. We made scrambled eggs for dinner and ate by candlelight. The lights came back on before we were ready. XD

Benji wrote a poem to read at his drama class's Halloween thingy. I wasn't able to go to that. It was during his 7th hour on Halloween, and I had like 5 schedule conflicts.

Timmy made this cute pumpkin at school.

And he drew this too. :)

Timmy found his Cars Santa hat. He says it's his sleeping hat, and sometimes he even sleeps with it. It sure does a number on his hair. Ha ha!

Hyrum all dressed up for Fall Sing! Handsome fella! This is Dr. Bishop's last semester. Ought to be interesting having someone new in there. Dr. Lunt came and played bass fiddle with some of the Men's Chorus's pieces. That was neat.

Saw this hot air balloon one morning

Jeremy and I went to Fall Sing on Friday night. Hyrum was an usher again.

Nate Lyon and Hyrum after the show

It's not pictured here, but we met the girl Hyrum had been texting back and forth with that night. Nice girl from Pima. :) Her name is Moriah Guy.

Sleepy Sunday

Joshua is just plain amazing! He made this robot head with cardboard, hot glue, and sharpies. How he comes up with this stuff is beyond me. Just amazing.

Halloween! Michael made the robot body, and Joshua made the head and the tie. Jill is a female version of Robin Hood. (That one was from Grandma Burk too. She ended up changing to her black boots because the brown "boots" (shoe covers) didn't work. Timmy was the happiest banana you ever saw. Jeremy and Benji were late, and I didn't get pictures of them. :( Benji put on a plaid shirt and his overalls. He said he was Tim the Carpenter. (Not Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor. Ha ha!) He even carried a hammer and whatnot.

We used our Easter buckets because I thought we had Halloween ones, and it turned out we didn't. Bubby lost his Iron Man costume, and I looked everywhere. We later found it in the toy box. Sigh. But he had fun wearing this too-big lizard costume. :)

Hyrum wore his lab coat under the cloak. It was fun seeing some of them make up costumes this year. :)

Not sure why the tie and white shirt with the pirate costume. I think he just thought it was funny. :)

It's official. All our little boys have now worn this costume for Halloween. :) I may have to pass it down to the next generation. ;)

Cake walk

We've been so busy! I spent a lot of October working on things for Model Team Express. Katie Moulton Udall had been doing it here, but she got a job as a teacher, so she figured she couldn't do MTE anymore and offered it to me. I didn't want to see it go away since we don't have a Costco account. We never go to Tucson anyway. So I decided I'd give it a go. It turned out to be a lot of work, and not a lot of profit, but the lady who runs it is so nice and helpful, and it was fun to meet some new people around here. I really would like to widen my customer base, but I think my biggest problem is that I need to figure out how to explain what MTE is in a short description. How do you do that? Most people around here aren't familiar with it at all. So obviously, the people who did it before me probably had the same problem I did. Also, the lists I was given were mostly pretty old. A lot of the people on them had died or moved. I spent a lot of time trying to contact people on the lists. I ended up sending out letters to a bunch of them. Anyway, lots of work, not as many orders as I hoped. But lucky for me Jeremy might be able to help me with that, seeing as how he's gone to school for this kind of thing.

Benji's band concert. That's him near the middle behind the blonde-headed guy that's playing baritone.

Harry in Joshua's shoes

Bubby loves his Mickey Mouse. :)

Timmy wearing my sunglasses

We needed some now cast iron for our campout. :) Our other skillet broke, and we never did have a griddle before. My only beef with that griddle is the logo. It's engraved, so you can't cook anything there.

Here's Benji and the puppies at the vet. They got a checkup and their first parvo shots that day. We did the other two shots in the parvo series at home. (Not fun. Not.) They're old enough for rabies shots now, but the vet has to give those, so they'll cost more. Just gotta wait until we've got some extra dollars.

One of the thrift stores around here has $1 clothing day the first Friday of every month. I try to go whenever we need something, but they never have pants in the sizes the boys need. Darn! This particular day they had Halloween costumes, and I happened to have these two with me. They each found a costume. Unfortunately, though, the costumes weren't part of the $1 sale, and the one Bubby insisted on is much too small, and neither of them ended up wearing these costumes. Oh, well. They had fun.

We went camping! Arcadia was open again after the fire, so that's where we went. Here's our dinner - chicken and dumplings. The tops of the biscuits came off on the lid, but man! It was so good!

Timmy

Harry

I shared a sleeping bag with Henry. It was kind of a long night! I accidentally put our beds with our heads pointing downhill, and so for half the night I had such a hard time sleeping. And with Henry with me my neck was turned funny and I got a massive headache. It got so bad I was practically bawling. I dragged myself out of the tent and took some headache medicine from the car because I was afraid I'd throw up if I waited much longer. Then I turned Henry and me around so our heads weren't down the hill, and I slept much better after that. :)

Timmy often comes and snuggles with me when he gets up first thing in the morning.

Bubby

Puppies trying to get in the tent. They kept sneaking in in the morning and climbing all over sleepy Bubby.

Val

Check out Jill's hair! XD

Check out this handsome boy! They're all so good-lookin'!

Jeremy and I made bacon, eggs, pancakes, and cocoa.

It looks like Benji is wearing the tent. Ha!

Scout fell asleep on my foot.

Michael

Little stinker Marshmallow. He found his spot and wouldn't come out.

Ha ha! It's fun seeing Timmy's sense of humor developing.

There was lots of dirt in back of the truck, so Jeremy got a stick with lots of leaves to use for a broom. It didn't last. XD

We were late to church the next day, so we just listened in the Nursery. Joshua fell asleep.

I found this laying around. It's Timmy's camping checklist. He had to have one like me. Pillow, sleeping bag, tent, plate, cup, fire, and I think that's water.

Whenever I make anything these two hop up on the counter immediately. Sometimes they drive me crazy, messing with stuff and trying to eat all the dough, but I try to be patient, and I usually fail at that by the end. Ha ha! I hope they remember that they "helped" rather than that Mommy lost her patience. Ha!

One morning I went to wake up the boys in the garage, and I found Benji's mattress partially on top of Michael's bed. Apparently, in the middle of the night this piece broke out of the mattress support, right at a knot in the wood, and down Benji went on Michael's head. They tired to fix it a few times over the next week or two, but the mattress just kept falling down. Finally, Jeremy was able to help, and whatever they did seems to be working. They took a piece of plywood and cut it to fit under the mattress. (There were just slats before, and they weren't even screwed in. That's how it was when we bought it.)

Bubby drew all of us, even Val, and had me label them.

There's a lady in Pima who works at Taylor Freeze, and she orders food from Shamrock and sells it. I bought 80 lbs. of chicken breast. It was a good deal and it's been good chicken. The plan was that I would bottle half of it, and Mama even lent me her pressure canner for that. But I need to get the pressure meter calibrated, and I haven't done that yet. It's sitting in a big frozen chunk in the freezer. Sigh. I don't know when I'll get that done! Maybe soon.

Chicken!

Jill, Timmy, and Bubby were feeling excited for Halloween, so they made these Halloween sacks for it. I think Jill drew that pumpkin. Maybe Timmy. Bubby colored it.

Timmy drew this dog and bone, and Bubby colored it.

I don't know how it started, but these guys like to have "I'm Bubby" wars. I think it started as teasing Bubby because he'd get so mad when they told him that they were Bubby. He doesn't care now, though. These boys will sit there saying, "I'm Bubby. I'm Bubby. I'm Bubby." over and over as fast as they can say it. This particular evening Joshua, Benji, and Michael were sitting in a pile belting out the "I'm Bubby" chorus.

Jeremy got a bunch of these stones and some dirt and made a pretty little garden. He also got some goji berry bushes, and everyone planted something in the garden. But then the dogs dug it all up. Argh! We were sure the berry bushes were all dead, but Jeremy gathered them and put them in a pot with some soil in the house, and they've got leaves and little flowers now. We need to fence that garden before we plant again.

We had a party celebrating Mama and Daddy's 45 Anniversary, Daddy's retirement, and Mama's birthday. It was so fun putting that together. We had fun discussing all the details in texts. We had it at the Miami Ward building because that's kind of in the middle of most of us. We lost a lot of those balloons on the ceiling before we were done. Oh, well. :)

Funny that this was never Henry's nursery. We have good memories in this little room. It was fun to have Harry come and enjoy these rocking horses too.

I set up a photo booth, complete with Halloween costumes and photo props, hoping that we could do photos there of the individual families. We didn't do that, but we did end up having fun with these things anyway.

Emily

Leah

Bubby stole Rodney's tablet. Ha ha! I had to remind him that it's Rodney's.

One of the packages of photo props came with this as a backdrop, but it was smaller than I liked, so I put it on Michael like a cape, and he liked it. :)

Jill and Leah

This is what Timmy wore on Halloween too.

Leah and Emily

Benji

After we ate, we had minute to win it games that Kelly and Rick put together. Jeremy won this one. :)

Grandma?

This was going on at the fire station across the street. I'm not sure what it was, but they had two medical helicopters there too. We heard them starting to take off, and we all ran over there. I took a video of that. It was sooooooo windy! I had dirt in my teeth! (In case you wondered, rotor wash is intense.)

Joshua

Bubby, Timmy, Lynnette, Megan, and Thomas

Pretty much.

Tom, Megan, and James hiding out

Emily and Brooke hiding out too. ;)

I felt pretty nostalgic being back at this church for the day. I spent lots and lots of time rocking away in these chairs, nursing my babies. It's the changing room for girls' baptisms, right off the bathroom. They used to keep quilts behind the chairs. I always felt like I was in a closet.

I didn't get good pictures of all of us. Oh, well. Megan made that balloon arch.

Here's the book I made. I had everyone write their favorite things or just things about them in their lives right now. Nobody was sure just what I meant, even me, so they all came out different, and I liked how it came out as a result. I took photos because my file with all the favorites got lost. Some of the photos came out bad, and Robert never gave me his favorites, so I didn't bother taking a photo of his page. James and Megan wrote theirs in at the party, and somehow I didn't get a photo of Rodney's. I kind of wanted to make a book for myself. But since I took pictures, Kimberly can see how it came out. :)

I know I at least have Lynnette's favorites in my email somewhere. Just gotta dig it up. Maybe Mama can take me some better photos of the ones that came out bad. ;)

We stopped at Grandma Burk's house, and she gave some of the kiddos costumes that were leftover from her work at the Boys and Girls Club. She often has stuff like that. These were nice costumes! Michael got a pirate shirt, but Joshua wore it for Halloween. He also got that cool Agent P hat.