Back to School

Back to school! We managed to cross off quite a few on our Super Summer list. Sweetie started 4th grade ALL with Mrs. Moore, Mister 6th grade with Mr. Hawvermale, and H his 2nd year of preschool at Miss Nicki's Mighty Montessori. 

Little Zelly was not too happy about the back to school business until we started making the back-to-school cakes.

Yellowstone!

For our family vacation this year, we decided to introduce the kids to Yellowstone, a place I grew up doing, summer and winter. In preparation for the trip, we learned about bears, about Yellowstone's geological background, and about geysers. Here are the kids doing one of the geyser experiments:

We'd heard good things about Bear World, so we headed there on our way up, and we're glad we did because we didn't end up seeing any bears in Yellowstone. We paid a little extra to feed the bears from the truck.

The baby bears

 

  

  

 

 Yellowstone! We stayed the first night with Grandma S, the 2nd night in a cabin at Canyon, the third night in a cabin at Lake (our favorite by far), and the 4th night in a cabin in Jackson Hole.

  

  

  

  

 We did a cruise on Yellowstone Lake (which was fun for the first 10 minutes!)

 We saw lots of bison, a handful of elk, and a couple of coyotes.

  We stopped by the Tetons and Jenny Lake on our way to Jackson Hole.

  We took a boat ride across Jenny Lake to hike to this waterfall.

Our cabin in Jackson Hole had a pool! And we went to the Bar J Wranglers chuckwagon dinner and show that night. The kids liked it--H danced in the aisles--and so did I. But J wasn't impressed and it was hard to go to a chuckwagon dinner with 2 kids who needed help getting their food and who didn't want to sit still during the show. The bottom pic with Little Zelly shows what she did the entire evening.

Winter is Here

For me, there is no exclamation mark after that statement. But the kids think otherwise. At the first sign of snow this morning, they donned their gear and headed out. Little Zelly only lasted 2 minutes (because of the bitter cold wind) but the others played for well over an hour, which gave me a much-needed break from the Sunday squabbles that have been plaguing our house for the last month.

(1) The sacrament, (2) the Spirit, (3) a week of family and food to look forward to