Category: Our Family

We took the family to our very first scout expo this morning. We had no idea what to expect aside from we’d been told that there would be things there for the boys to pass off in their books. Honestly Ethan has quite a bit finished in his book so I wasn’t sure if there would be anything left for him to do at the expo that we would actually get to sign off in his book, but we went anyway!

The morning started out with getting into the car to go to the expo and we saw a red, white and blue hot air balloon in the air really close to our neighborhood. Then as we were watching it we saw another one. The kids were SO excited and declared that this was the best day ever and we hadn’t even done anything yet! But they watched the hot air balloons while we were on our way to the expo and I even got a picture of the cute one on it’s way back down to the ground:

So we got to the grounds where they were holding the expo and parked and got out and just started wandering around. Ethan saw a raingutter regatta set up, and the kids decided to go over there and practice racing some pre-made boats:

After all the kids had a turn blowing the boats to the end and back we moved on and they got to climb a rock wall:

Dinah, being my fearless child, went higher up the wall than any of my other kiddos:

Jeremy got all hooked up and went to the wall and then totally chickened out. And he was so quick to decide that it was too scary that I didn’t get a picture of him with the wall at all. Chloe also got to try it out. They got her all hooked up and she went to the wall climbed up a couple of rocks and freaked out. Then Kyle just picked her up and put her higher up on the wall and she really freaked out! Throughout the day Ethan ran off several times to get in line for another try at climbing the rock wall so I think he really liked it.

Then we moved on to the bottle rockets booth. I only let the three older kids do this one. Mostly because the people that ran the booth had provided all the supplies for the kids to make their own bottle rockets and I didn’t want our family using up all their supplies. So the older three made rockets and then the man helped them launch them. That was pretty cool!

There were also some huskies that pull sleds there to look at, and a booth on electricity. The kids got to spend some time jumping in a bounce house, which they really enjoyed. There was an art booth where the scouts could earn the art belt loop and work on some of the art electives in their books. They also got to play bean bag toss at one of the booths. There was a bubble booth, where the kids got to dip various items in a soapy solution and make bubbles of various sizes. There was also a knot booth where a lady showed the kids how to tie a few different knots. There was a booth where the scouts could work on the requirements for earning the wildlife conservation belt loop, and Ethan actually finished that one. They also had a pinewood derby track set up and a  few pinewood derby cars there that the kids could tape weights to and send rolling down the track. Our boys were entertained by that for quite a while, it was rather hard to get them to move on to the next booth. There were also a few horses so the kids could go for a short ride. They couldn’t actually do the requirements for earning the horseback riding belt loop though because one of those requirements is to ride for 20 minutes and that would have just taken too long for all the people that wanted a ride to spend that much time with the few horses that were there.

Dinah was THRILLED to get to ride the horse. And I was actually surprised that Chloe rode without freaking out!

So we had a good time. I did get to sign off a couple things in Ethan’s book and he did earn the one belt loop. Then we finished the day off by going into town to take the kids to see Cars2 and the discount movie theater. I was very impressed with how well the older three sat still to watch the movie. The younger kiddos sat still for awhile, but then it was just constant bouncing around and I was getting really frustrated. In the end it was a good day and the kids had a great time, and it was really nice to get to spend the day with the family just having fun. 🙂

The very first spring after we moved into our house, we planted several fruit trees. Over the years we have added fruit trees and we’ve also had to replace at least a couple dead fruit trees every year. But we do still have one fruit tree that we planted that very first spring, and this year it finally bore some fruit!

There were six peaches on the tree earlier this summer when I looked, but our gusty winds out here in Eagle Mountain blew three of them off while they were still very small and very green. Harvesting three peaches does seem rather pathetic, BUT it’s way better than zero peaches again. I’m SO excited to see it finally bearing fruit, and it gives me hope that next year there will be more. There are also some plums on the tree in the front yard, so we’ll just wait and see how many make it until they ripen. 🙂