The Quiver

From a chance encounter at the Pleasant Grove Promenade (think “farmer’s market”) a couple of months ago, Soap Queen and her little soapy business got written up in the Herald Extra, a local paper.  She got lots of good comments from the newspaper article and friends, and even got a little extra business out of it. (Score! ) )

Then about two weeks ago, another local paper, the Deseret News, called to ask if they too could interview her and do a write up on her and her business.  They came and did the interview and took photos while I was off in England for work, so I’d kinda forgotten about it.  Apparently the article came out this morning because the phone has been ringing off the hook!  (There was also a teaser article (with my favorite of the photos included below), which takes you to MormonTimes.com for the longer article (virtually identical to the Deseret News one above.)

Congrats, my Love!

Concentration

Each year, SoapQueen requests that we spend the day at Temple Square and there abouts for her birthday. We walk the grounds a Temple Square, visit the Visitor Centers, go see whatever movie is playing at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and generally just make a day of it.

A Beautiful Day on Temple Square

While walking the grounds, the kids always look for acorns and chestnuts. This time they found eleven-hundred and three ‘nuts — and collected them all. Well, that’s how many they collected; they claimed there were even more, and that they left “lots” (maybe three) for others.

A Small Sample

As usual, we all wore tie-dye shirts — it’s much easier to keep track of a small army if they stand out from the crowd. And as usual, we got lots of comments and questions about the shirts. In the north Visitors Center we had a nice long chat with a couple of the Sister missionaries.

Tie-dye at the Reflecting Pool

There’s just something cool about all that water, glassy smooth, that just makes you want to walk the border.

"A Dingo's Lunch"

We zipped over to the Lion House for a spot of late lunch. Nothing exotic, but certainly fine eats. salmon for me, House Chicken for SoapQueen, glazed ham for the older, more ravenous kids, and chicken finger thingys for the rest of the Wild Bunch.

We went over to the Beehive House for a quick tour while waiting for the next movie to start at the JSMB. It’s always amazing what the pioneers managed to make and do with such simple supplies and just pine. They even recycled their wagons to make use of the hardwood, since there was none native here.

The Joseph Smith Story was just as good the third (fourth?) time as it was the first. It’s amazing what they had to go through, standing by their convictions, living their religion. I’m so thankful that they were willing to stand for truth, to the benefit of all of us.
To round the day out, we all wandered over to the Gateway. The kids were under the impression that we were trying to recreate the trek of the pioneers, I think. Really though, is it that far to walk?

Oh wait, how can I forget the stop at JCS’s for shakes and fries on the way home? No day out is complete without ice cream and fried food!

Now I just gotta figure out what to do with twenty-leven thousand horse chestnuts.

The boys competed in their first chess tournament this weekend. The city puts on various recreation programs, and the two older boys wanted to do chess.

Terribly excited to be competing

They both have improved a lot. SoapQueen can’t beat The Gamer any more, and The Etymologist gives her a good run for her money.

Waiting for the official results

Second Place!

The Entomologist took second place in his (smaller) group; The Gamer didn’t do quite well enough to win a trophy, but the competition was much thicker there, too. They’re already excited to start the next session in the Fall.

The Summer 2009 Chess Class

T-Rex attack!

We went to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point (Lehi, UT) today. Cheezer/Butterfly had a birthday recently, and it has become a tradition that the one celebrating the birthday gets to choose a family activity. Occasionally they are encouraged to find something a little less pricey, or to find something that all the family can enjoy, but usually they come up with something fun and reasonably priced.

A couple of the things that were beyond the normal monitory pain threshold were museum-type exhibits. There is an aquarium up in Sandy, and the dinosaur museum at Thanksgiving Point that come to mind. (It ain’t cheap to get in to these kinds of places with seven kids, lemme tell yeh.) We decided that it was worth the education to buy year memberships and then milk ‘em for all they were worth!

Finding dinosaurs

Anyway, Cheezer picked the dinosaur museum right from the get-go and wouldn’t be enticed in any other direction. No great surprise, really; she’s had a fascination for dinosaurs since she was tiny. She used to take several of the large, hard, plastic dinos to bed with her. Some kids have soft, cuddly teddy bears; she had plastic dinosaurs. With spikes. And claws. We’d find her curled up on top of them nearly every night. I don’t know how she could sleep on those hard, pokey things, but she did. Her favorite movie when she was about four was Jurassic Park. She would watch it for hours on end—fascinated, never scared.

The kids were out of school today, so I took the day off and we all trooped through the dinosaur museum as Cheezer’s birthday family activity. Fun was had by all.

For some of the little ones, this was their first experience and we had fun as they rounded some of the corners.

Pre-historic Jaws

(Can you tell which were a little nervous posing for this picture.)

And finally, a gallery with a sampling of the 188 photos(!) I took on our outing today. Hope you enjoy, ’cause we sure did!

Kraut’s Aunt Claire started a tradition when he was a young child. She always gave her nieces and nephews pajamas for Christmas. It was something we would always need because we’d either out-grown our old ones, or worn ‘em out. Since my parents knew that we would be getting pajamas, we used that as our Christmas Eve gift.

Like many, we were allowed to open gift the night before Christmas, and since we knew we had new pajamas waiting for us, it wasn’t as much of a surprised what we were getting, …

Waiting, waiting, waiting...

… but we didn’t know what kind of pajamas we would be getting, and wearing brand new pajamas to bed, waiting for Santa, pretending to sleep so we could listen for sleigh-bells or hooves on the roof …

High excitement...

… well, you get the idea. New pajamas for Christmas was always fun and exciting because it meant Christmas was so close you could taste it.

Everyone in their new PJs

Well, it’s the New Year already, but we’ve had lots of folks ask to see our new hardwood floor, so I thought this would be a nice picture to use.

Getting ready for Christmas.

Everything is pretty much back to normal; we still have a few finishing touches to put on, but we have the piano, couch, and chairs back in, and pictures and cross-stitches back on the walls. The lights are on the tree and now it’s time for the kids to put on ornaments, as is our family tradition:  Mom hands out ornaments, kids cluster the ornaments on the tree, and Dad takes pictures.

We’re in the home stretch of remodeling our living room and putting in a new floor — and painting, apparently. For my birthday, I got a little air compressor and brad gun combo, great for reattaching those baseboards after the floor (and walls) are finished. My two year old came down and started babbling on about the Nu Nu, and saying something about his eyes.

The Nu Nu from Teletubbies

It took us a second or two but we realized he was talking about my new compressor, and the eyes were the pressure gauges on the top. Not bad for a two year old who hasn’t even seen Teletubbies for months.

My new air compressor. I will not be calling it a "nu nu."

I guess there are similarities. But I’m still not going to call it anything other than “my air compressor.”