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

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!

I do so love my Sweetie, but she has produced some … unique looking children. He has such a cute personality that sometimes you forget that he’s a mutant.

Mutant child.

A face only a mother could love.

Thank you for such wonderful children, Sweetie — even if they are a little strange looking.

As promised, here are the (lit) Jack-o-Lanterns for this years Punkin’ Carving.

Tuesday night was punkin’ carving night. We figured it was probably time, what with Halloween just around the corner. Most of the kids are old enough to do their own designs, and the three oldest can use the pumpkin carving tools one gets from the store without help. The younger kids get perhaps more help than they wanted with the design.

So without further ado, Carving Night:

(The final lit results will be in the later post.)

TheGiver decorating his Jack-o-lantern

Note the "Tongue of Concentration"

Bookworm working on her Jack-o-lantern

Cheezer (with lashes)

Gamer planning his Jack-o-lantern

Finishing Gamer

Not pictured: Tank and his Jack-o-lantern; he was finished very first and on his way to the tub before the camera even came out. Fast kid. … Maybe we should re-nickname him to Lightning or something.

Not pictured: Hobbit; he’s not quite into anything but playing in the punkin’ goo yet.

Not pictured: the wee one; he doesn’t even know what a pumpkin is yet.

Not pictured: Kraut; between wielding the camera and carving a pumpkin, no pictures managed to be taken of him (whew!).

I arranged a special Date Night for my Sweetie a while back [sheesh! almost a month ago now. -ed]. Wouldn’t tell her anything about it except the date, and that she should plan on leaving home early and getting home late. (Unfortunately, school for the kids started a week earlier than I’d thought, but everything worked out okay.)

I stole away from work early that day, zipped home, picked her up, bade the ankle- and knee-biters farewell (and threatened them with dire consequences, should the house be a smoldering cinder when we returned), and headed off to Salt Lake.

We stopped at MacCools Public House in Foothill Village for a nice Irish dinner. (Very tasty, by the way. Thanks for the recommendation, Sir Weston!) As it was early, we had the place mostly to ourselves — at least our corner of the restaurant, where the darts and shuffleboard are. Tuesday, incidentally, is “Appetizer Day” at MacCools so all your appetizers are half-priced. (Sah-weet!)

Then it was off to Red Butte Garden for the main event:

The “concert” (for lack of a better term) was quite enjoyable, even if we wound up sitting way in the back. (I’d never been before and didn’t know how quickly the place fills up. Word to the wise: when visiting RBG, come early and bring your dinner — or have it catered there; there’s plenty of time to eat.)

Garrison Keillor, who does the Prairie Home Companion radio show is quite a talented man. He sings (if not perfectly, at least better than I can); he quotes vast bits of poetry from memory; he improvises, playing to the audience as a good performer can; and he can spin a captivating story out of the most trivial and mundane things that happen (or may have happened) up in Lake Wobegon, his home town.

Pictures of the actual show (sorry for the poor quality, but that’s what you get with a cellphone camera in low light):

All in all, a very enjoyable evening. (One could wish for a slightly less expensive venue, but you get what you get. Tickets in Denver were half the price, and it would have been fun to do, but the gas cost would have been prohibitive. Oh well. We still had fun!)