I guess summer is all gone.
My kids begin their new school year this week.

How do you fit a whole summer into three weeks? This is our documented attempt.

No July is complete without a visit to America's Freedom Festival. We rise and shine with hot air balloons. We got to see my cousin Kelly and her family. No-Photos regret.

The kids enjoyed the parade. Cam always "surprises" us with a dozen doughnuts and 9 AM ice cream sandwiches for the parade. Dane is very proud of devouring six doughnuts. 

My dad joined us for the last half of the parade and for some time in the park. Again No-Photos regret (of course, he did say no more photos until he got some hair back)

  

 Dryers gave away free ice cream for the lucky hundreds that found their stand. Who can complain about free ice cream? (my kids actually: "No Vanilla?")

 That night we headed up to Ogden to stay in an amazing suite. We watched Ogden city's amazing fireworks from our room right before bed.
Life is so much sweeter when you can shut a door on your kids' sleeping quarters. What a great night's sleep...
The next morning we went to the Bear River Bird Refuge. We inherited the enjoyment of birding from Cameron's parents. Cam can identify so many birds by name, especially water fowl. It was really fun to come here with him as our guide.

After enjoying the birds, we drove all over northern Utah, to Paradise for fresh berries and then to Logan to get ice cream from the Utah State campus creamery.

Friday night, we went to the Thanksgiving Point/Utah Symphony patriotic concert. It was excellent and a great way to build our kids' live music performance appreciation.

The final song of the night was Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" and right at the end the fireworks EXPLODED! Hooray for America!

But that was just one long weekend...

What has really filled our three weeks of summer was swimming lessons three times a week and a newer tradition that I began with my friend Angie last summer. We do a craft and or an activity twice a week. This year we decorated sugar cookies, make Pearler Bead self-portraits, these adorable fairy/goblin houses, leaf-molded/shaped treasure dishes from oven-baked clay and had a water play day.

All of this definitely fills three weeks wonderfully. Makes me feel like I deserve to have the kids begin school. It truly has been a great summer! (will post Pioneer Day pics soon!)

We started our month long holiday celebrations by attending Ella's 1st grade Christmas program. It was adorable. Each class put a lot of work into their part and Ella sang with all her heart. She just blossoms with her girlfriends.

You may notice something missing about Ella. She donated 10 inches of her beautiful hair to Locks of Love in October of this year. She doesn't miss it. I miss it half the time and Cameron misses it most of all.

I planned a lot of fun stuff to do with the kids in the three weeks they had off before Christmas. 

First, we had to tackle the beast of a tree we have. I let everyone help this year.

It was a lot of fun, but it took us the entire day!

Here she is, all done.

Top:

Middle:

Bottom:

We did a few kid friendly crafts we found on pinterest.com. Some failed spectacularly and some were adorable. We also made this gingerbread house. We were all pleased with how it turned out. The kids did a good job of designing it. I would definitely do a Wilton kit again.

We went to the Dickens Festival on their free admittance morning.

There was a lot of fun things to see. The kids were glad they brought their own money. Although it felt like a glorified boutique, it was definitely charming to have everyone dressed in costume. Father Christmas was a highlight for Bryce. No one else dared approach him.

a wooden toy booth

Scrooge (on the right) with the ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Yet to Come.

The boys with a Beefeater (official title:  Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign's Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary)

I made three different attempts at a family photo.

Here's some out-takes.

After attending Cameron's work's holiday party, we went to visit downtown Salt Lake City.

This is the tree in the center of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

Looking at the window at the Deseret Book store. They had a gingerbread man machine and handed out free cookies.

Crazy kids and fountains in the cold.

The Salt Lake Temple

Ah...Christmas morning. The kids were ready to start at 6 AM. Lucky for them, so was Mommy.

Church wasn't til 11:30 and somehow the kids let us have a two-hour nap while they played without disturbing us. It was a little surreal.

Cameron and I sang in a quartet on Sunday, part of a whole wonderful Sacrament meeting program.

After that we headed down to Cam's parents for the crepes and more Christmasing.

We ended the day with this chaos at my mom's house. One of my nieces had been throwing up all day and left early with her mom and Zealand was a dripping, unhappy baby most of the time. Poor kids! The rest of us had a lot of fun and haven't been sick (except Dane who was just getting past an ear infection before Christmas). We even fit in a game of Apples to Apples.

Favorite toys were a Pokemon White DS game (Dane), a baby doll (Ella) and a homemade crocheted octopus (Bryce). 

Since Christmas, the kids and I have been lying low.  We've done puzzles, cleaning, Perler beads, Legos, movies, Tinker Toys, Xbox and Wii. 

Dane's birthday is just around the corner. I just love this time of year!

Ella doesn't miss much.
She could have stated Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's famous quote "God is in the details" herself. I mean, the girl actually saw her name written in the clouds. Out of courtesy, I looked to where she indicated in the sky and her name was there! A small e, an upper case L followed by a lower case l and an upper case A. Did you know that clouds formed triangles with holes in the middle? Ella did. I only wish I hadn't been driving or I would have snapped a picture. Did I mention that this happened on her first day of kindergarten and she was quite nervous? These are tender mercies given to a 5 then/6 now little girl.
One day she noticed the magic of a small rainbow on our wall or ceiling, I forget which and we had to search for it's source and I got to teach her how to be even more perceptive.

Ella wants to be an artist right now and I think she's found the right vocation.

Anyway, rainbows...

Because Ella was so excited about the rainbows I started to look for prisms. Can you even read that word without thinking of the scene from Pollyanna and trying to make sick old Agnes Moorehead happy with them?So I have been looking for prisms and I was out with just Ella two saturdays ago and we found a prism candle holder. I plan on taking it apart and harvesting the prisms so that the house can be filled with rainbows. In the meantime, I just stuck it in the window. About this same time the sun began shifting a bit to the south and has turned the glass shelves in my garden windows to large prisms.

Rainbows have really brightened up our house!

Vanilla rainbow yogurt anyone?

I hope your day is filled with rainbows and sunshine and the ability to get through it all.

Hey Howdy Hey!
It's a Stringham Easter Pictorial

Lining up...someone shout GO already! We have Easter egg hunting at my aunt Jone's each year.

Lots of fun!

And Zealand made it to town (just the night before. This all happened before my previous post) and he brought my sister with him!

Confession time.

I have never, ever colored eggs with my children.

Thanks Mom!

My wonderful nephew

My sweet niece More painting. Bryce loved it!
More Pokemon cards? Seriously?

A truly wonderful weekend! We loved conference and crepes for breakfast on Sunday cannot be beat. We spent Sunday evening with Cam's parents and his sister's family.

Kelly, I'd still like a copy of that pic of us! Thanks!