Betteridge Heber Reunion

First off, we all just love this boy. He's so good at eating and will eat ANYTHING. He loves to much on onions, pickles, celery, green onions, apples, watermelon, pizza, cucumbers etc. Mostly he loves breads and crackers.

Our Betteridge reunion happened to be in the house next door to the one we rented for the Archibald reunion the previous month. Kinda funny. It had 8 bedrooms, a huge game room with ping pong and pool tables and a theater room, and a playground, firepit and flat grassy area outback.  It was just about perfect for our size of group (some of the things were falling apart in the house...like the sink, hottub, grill ... but the home still had an open luxurious feel to it). Again we lucked out with the pick of the rooms and were given the master suite. I felt pretty guilty about it at first but then got over it. I think because we have the youngest baby and the recovering cancer patient people were being extra nice to us.

Our first day we celebrated the Birthdays: Gwen, Dyln and Lynae with cake and ice cream and just explored the place.

 

We also held our first official meeting and talked about the schedule and activities for the reunion. It was kind of a Survival/Emergency Preparedness theme reunion. My sister and brother organized this weeklong game of performing or learning about survival skills and getting points for each thing you do. Then the points can be redeemed for prizes. It was supposed to just be a filler activity that you take a few minutes to do in between meals or down time or whatever, but the kids were so motivated for the prizes that they were like survival nutjobs for the whole second day, running from adult to adult asking them to help them learn/do then cross off some skill. It was kind of exhausting but also pretty interesting. I learned how to do lots of knots, find North and South using shadows, use a HAM radio, make a tepee, identify edible plants, update our family's emergency plan, build a fire, make a bow and arrow, find animal tracks etc...

 We also had one of my sister's friends come up to Heber to take family pictures. Its fun to document the kids and family at various ages. I always love having a recent family picture.  The kids were pretty good champs about it all and lasted longer than they should've been expected to.  Grandma and Grandpa were prepared with "encouragement" in the form of fruit snacks and tic tacs. :)

All the grandsons: (we tried getting a picture of the granddaughters, but we had some young, strong-willed sweeties that had been asked to smile and hold still for too long...understandably so!)

All the grandkids:

We can never have too many pictures of our Frederick. 

The kids really enjoyed the wild area above the hill in the backyard. They built their own forts and tepees and had lots of unsupervised cousin time - which is good for them.

The adult fun began when the kids went to bed, strictly by 8:00. We had lots of tournaments: pingpong, pool, washer-toss, ladder ball, and spike ball. We also spent a portion of each evening taking turns sharing about some spiritual insight or lesson we had this past year. I really enjoyed doing that and connecting with my amazing siblings and parents in such meaningful ways. Chris and I were in charge of the evening activities and had MSU tshirts for tournament prizes. We also played lots of games and watched a few movies. We stayed up pretty late many nights just enjoying being together. 

One morning we went on a 'hike' that got downgraded to a walk around the neighborhood. Euhh... you can't win them all. We practiced making some survival knots on this big long rope thinking it would help the kids be safe as we crossed roads etc... but after only 100 feet or so, we realized all the kids had let go of the rope and were running up ahead while all the adults held onto the looped rope. Ha!

Other activities included an all-inclusive game of missionary tag before bed and a day trip to swim at a cool Rec Center pool with water slides and lazy river. Chris did a magic show for all the kids (all the adults watched too) Sunday afternoon. It turned out pretty good and his orange trick with the ripped card was very impressive. 

Monday morning was check out and clean up. We did a paper airplane throwing game to give out the last of the survival prizes.  The meals were all really simple but yummy and we rotated on a schedule for cooking and clean-up. It is always nice to gather as an ENTIRE family even if its a little crazy with so many kids. We love our Betteridge family so much and feel blessed to know all of them. Seriously, every sibling and spouse is really nice and fun to be around we all just enjoy being together. Can't wait for next year. 

Gwen's 4th birthday party

About a week after we moved in and the day before we drove off on another long trip, we decided to throw Gwen a little birthday party. We invited some kids over for a costume party and served an easy Mac n' cheese lunch with cake and ice cream. It was fun to have people over to see our new house and itwas fun to celebrate Gweny's 4th birthday. 

I had gotten some toys out for the kids to play with but they just made up their own game of girls verses boys with bases on opposite ends of the house. I asked Gwen later that night what her favorite part of the day was (thinking it would be opening presents or eating yummy cake or something or wearing her batgirl costume) but she said it was playing the game where the boys chased the girls. Ha! I think we're going to have our hands full when she's a beautiful teenager. :) Good thing she has her protective Daddy and two older brothers to keep an eye on her. 

Her actual birthday was in Utah. Grandma Dixie helped make it special with fresh, pink-frosted cinnamon rolls for the birthday breakfast in bed and some presents.

Fourth kid and I'm still figuring it out.

I guess Frederick was tired, not hungry as he fell asleep inbetween bites.

Home again and moving in!

After the Archibald fun in Utah, we stayed a day or two more to have some Betteridge time. My nephew, Tyler was getting baptized and my parents were flying in town for it. Now my dad could meet Frederick! The baptism went really well and even though my parents had to leave right after, we had enjoyed some talk time the night before and watched a movie. By Monday morning, we were ready to head back home and drove a different way home, first North, then East, crossing Wyoming and Nebraska (On the way there we went across Oklahoma, up through Kansas then West to Colorado and down south near Moab).

Pulling in we saw fireflys in our back yard! Although was way hot and muggy it helped life our spirits to see such a fun surprise. As we walked into our rental campus house, it was sort of depressing getting back to normal life in a dirty old house. But we had talked a lot on our drive and decided to just move into the house we just bought, despite the plans for renovations. Things were going a lot slower than we had hoped and it felt good to move forward with what we could control and not rush finding a contractor. 

So we started moving boxes over and gave our notice to the campus housing people that by the end of the month, we would be gone! We basically used our van to move things over in small loads. I would try and be packing all day and when Chris came home from work we'd take the seats out of our van and take a load over. On the weekends we would try to get a couple of loads in. This slow, piece-meal process was nice in that we could move ourselves by ourselves and unpack as we go...making our home we moved into not very chaotic/messy. But what I didn't expect was for this process to result in MASSIVE chaos on the moving out end. I hate living like that but across the 2-3 weeks it took we still needed SOME food and dishes in the cupboards and SOME clothes in our closets and SOME toys for the kids to play with and SOME towels and cleaning supplies, etc. We did borrow our realtor's company moving truck for the big stuff and asked a few guys from the branch to help. Then we finished up and cleaned the old house on our own. It was a LONG LONG process. I know it sounds prideful and stubborn to not want help moving, but after all the help we needed from this little branch to get us through the past 10 months of chemo, transplant, childcare, meals, cleaning, new baby, more meals, gifts, another hospital stay, etc... I just wanted to be independent and take care of my own stuff all by myself. 

A cute moment of Charlie pulling Alec on this trike......

...it reminds me of when Charlie got this trike for his birthday 3 years ago and how he pulled Alec on the back of it then, outside around our EV apartment:

My how time flies and how far we've come since then.

Frederick got placed in the willing hands of his siblings for most of the crazy packing/cleaning times. Poor guy. He's so loved. Charlie fell asleep holding him on a bunched up memory foam topper, but Frederick wiggled away and was screaming by the time I came up to find out what was happening. 

Our first dinner in our house on the first night sleeping there. Mcdonald's on the floor. :)

I caught Chris in a moment of contemplation out in our yard. I've seen him like this often and I find myself doing the same thing. Just walking around all the beautiful trees and space thinking and dreaming about all the potential.

The kids finally finished saving up for their big prize. Alec, in particular has been saving and earning smiley faces (the family currency) since last August. Gwen and Charlie have been working hard too and Alec decided to let them in his plan when he found out that if everyone pooled their smiley faces, they would only be a few hundred short. Also, once summer hit, we started awarding lots of smiley faces for finished chapter books. They wanted to get one of those cool looking plastic PowerWheels that looks like a real car, but Chris helped convince them to go for this Razor brand dune buggy since it could hold more weight and go much faster -- almost 10 mph -- on real rubber wheels.  I wish I weighed about 35 lbs less so I could ride on it too! 

Homemade Hot air balloon?

For as long as I've known Chris, I've heard about this mythical home-made hot air balloon that he made with his school class in Switzerland. Apparently it was very memorable and Chris has every so often expressed a wish to make it sometime. I pictured some small lantern-y thing and once I saw Tangled, I assumed it was a lot like those floating lanterns that Rapunzel was fixated on. 

We found ourselves with a spare couple of hours after we returned from the Heber Archibald Reunion and before heading over to my side of the family for a few days. It was the perfect time to try it! Chris was got all the supplies together and set to work at the table with the kids, some glue and tissue paper.

First you glue sheets together in pairs. I don't remember how many we did. A lot. Maybe 8 or so pairs.  

Then he glued some triangles on either ends and glued the pairs together.

Then he glued the bottom triangles all together and glued the edge of that to some foil and with wire hung a little tin (a cute burrito tin left over from the wedding).

Then he glued the top triangle pieces together and we taped all the corner seams so it would be as air tight as possible.

Then he poured rubbing alcohol over some cotton pads in the tin.

And lastly...light the alcohol soaked pads on fire!!

Oops. The tin was hung a little too low so the flames were licking the bottom edges of our tissue paper...

Instead of a hot air balloon we had a pyrotechnics show and watched the ashes float into the sky. It went REALLY fast. In seconds, our hours of work was gone. 

I can totally understand why Chris' memory is so awesome and I'm excited to try to make it again sometime. It was really fun.  Not to disappoint our aerial dreams, Edward prepared some rockets to launch. I guess Kayla has never seen him launch them before.  Wha?

Oh, and Frederick is still the Cutiest of Pies.