Family Blog 2: T-Ball, Lagoon, Camp K #2, POAP, Ensign Peak, Tracy Aviary, Parade

Wow I have been keeping busy and haven't had too much time to update the blog. Here's our happenings of the last 10 days mostly with pictures. Some friends invited us to tag along on their family's Lagoon work day last Saturday. It was so much fun. The kids really love going there and with us tagging along on the work day tickets weren't too expensive which was awesome. Thanks for inviting us Einzingers!! Of course, Noah couldn't pass up a car ride. Matthew, who is a kid at heart, offered to ride with him even if it was hard to get all of his legs inside the ride because he is getting so tall.

Sarah had fun riding with Beth on the car ride:

The Boat ride and Noah's riding with his buddy Emma. They both fought over who got to ring the bell during the whole ride. It was funny to watch.

Waiting in line for Bombora which is a roller coaster:

The last ride of the day was Dracula's Castle and as you can see Sarah was NOT a fan. She was quite upset waiting in the line for it. However, she did go on it even if she kept her eyes covered the whole time. It wasn't too scary of a ride, but she didn't want to take any chances and kept her eyes closed and covered very tightly through the whole thing.

Of course we had to get our Old Western family picture done. We did a serious faced one:

And a happy faced one. Luckily Daniel didn't put the gun up to his head like he did in last year's picture.

It was a long, but fun day. We got there at 10:30 am and didn't leave until 8:30 pm. We had no problems getting the kids to bed that night!

Matthew was scheduled to attend Camp Kostopolos, a residential camp for special needs kids like Matthew, the next week, too. Since he'd been there the previous week all the counselors remembered him and greeted him when we were checking in. He was so excited to be there another week that when it was time for me to leave he didn't even look back to say goodbye. He was ready to get the fun started!

Since we had dropped off Matthew and we were already half way to Trafalga in Lehi I decided to take the rest of the gang to play the day away minus Aaron since he had to work. For Christmas the kids got their Pass of All Passes extended through this year, too. As soon as we got there Josh and Daniel demanded to do Laser Tag. The place was not that busy so we got right in only after waiting 5 minutes, but they goofed off the whole 5 minutes though.

We were on team Yellow. Sarah and Noah stayed with me while Josh and Daniel went out to play some guerrilla warfare. Sarah, Noah and myself were pretty much a liability for our team because we were slow and stuck together, but it was still fun. The vests barely fit Sarah and Noah, too, but that didn't stop them.

Next we did the Boats. Sarah and Noah were too little to drive a boat by themselves so they had to ride with me. That was bad luck for them because Josh and Daniel decided to gang up on Mom and see how wet they could make me. Unfortunately, Sarah and Noah got caught in the crossfire as well.

Josh's boat:

Daniel's boat:

All of us got soaked and it took the rest of the day to dry off. Being wet didn't stop the kids from wanting to ride a few of the rides, though:

We even did a round of mini golf. It was pretty much a free for all, but it was fun. Like I said good thing the place wasn't very busy! We were all soaking wet, too thanks from the boat ride! I can't complain too much because it kept us all pretty cool throughout the day.

However, Noah ran into some difficulty. Now most of Noah's clothes are hand me downs from his older brothers and some of them aren't in the best of shape by the time they reach Noah. These shorts are a prime example. The elastic waistband wasn't very good when I put them on that morning, but I thought they'd be ok throughout the day. I was wrong. After getting soaked by the boats Noah couldn't keep his shorts up. If he let go of holding on to the waist they would fall straight down to his ankles-poor kid. During mini golf he just couldn't stand it anymore because every time he tried to putt the ball his pants would fall down. I finally took him over to the front desk and asked them if they have some rubber bands. They looked at me like I was a nut and even more so after I told them why I needed them--I guess they don't get asked that question very often--haha. Anyway, after a few minutes they were able to find a few rubber bands for me and I doctored up Noah's shorts for him. He looked silly, but desperate times call for desperate measures :). He was just glad he could putt the ball without his pants falling down and so was I.

The next day we decided to use our Pass Of All Passes and go to Seven Peaks Water Park in Salt Lake. We had so much fun all day. I even ran into an old friend from high school who was there with all five of her kids, too. It was really fun. Josh, Daniel and Aaron went on all the scary slides they wanted to. Aaron and I ran out of gas before the kids did. When we were leaving the kids weren't very happy about it, but what can you do?! We had already been there for 6 hours!! We had to leave then because Daniel had another appointment with the allergist to increase his milk dose. Daniel is doing really well with his milk treatment, however, his seasonal allergies are still not quite under control yet. I guess the daily inhaler and Zyrtec just wasn't covering everything because Daniel's nostrils were still inflamed when the doctor examined him. We now get to start him on a daily nasal spray now. Lucky him. Hopefully that will calm his nose down because I don't know what else we can be giving him after that and I really don't want to find out either! He is currently up to 6 milliliters of milk twice a day. Wahoo! We know it's doing something because he had a Twinkie the other day (which has milk in it) and didn't react at all. Awesome!! I am getting impatient for October and the end of his milk treatment to come because I want him to be able to eat pizza.....I am so excited!

Daniel finished up T-Ball last week. Thankfully since Matthew was away at Camp K I was able to attend one of his games which isn't easy to do with Matthew tagging along.

Here's Daniel with his cute coach (Aaron). Daniel is player #5 on his way out to outfield.

When Daniel wasn't playing I happened to notice that Noah was taking a bunch of selfies on my phone. Awesome. I had quite a few pictures that needed to be deleted after the game. It kept him quiet and busy so I can't complain too much, though.

We also got their T-Ball pictures back too.

Daniel is on the second row standing next to Aaron.

At the last game one of the players gave Aaron some Salt Water Taffy with a sweet note that said, "You are a good coach. You taut me a lot. From Nate." It was a sweet thing to do no pun intended :).

One morning I was trying to get everyone ready when it was a little too quiet. I found the kids playing in Sarah's room. This is what Noah was trying to do in Sarah's doll house:

What can he say.....being a little brother seems to come so natural to him.

We had to pick up Matthew from Camp K Friday morning. Since we were down in Salt Lake we decided to check out Ensign Peak. It was a short hike, almost a mile, but really steep. It was not Matthew's favorite, but he hung in there and made it to the top. He even helped Sarah a bit along the steep way with holding her hand:

Ensign Peak was where Brigham Young got revelation of where to put the Salt Lake Temple and how to map out the city back when the pioneers first came into the Salt Lake Valley. You could see so much from the top. It was really pretty--the pictures don't even do it justice!

Here we are by the stone marker to prove that all of us made it to the top in flip flops no less :).

Here's the fam by the drop off. It was really pretty. However, we couldn't stay up there for too long because it started raining along with lightening after a few minutes.

Here's my attempt at a panorama of the view:

The next morning, Saturday, was Syracuse City's parade that we like to attend every year. Of course we picked up our free snow cones by the Instacare on our way to our parade watching spot. I figure we have had so many Instacare visits that we paid for those snow cones many times over--haha. The kids were excited because they got to work the syrup station by themselves. I think Daniel's snow cone didn't even have any ice in it because he put so much syrup in it. Oh well they were happy which made us happy. Good thing I had brought along a water bottle to wash off the post snow cone stickiness because it was pretty bad!

That night I went to check on Noah before I went to bed. I found him asleep right next to his baby that he had lovingly tucked in, too. It times like this that make me melt and forget about how much of a stinker he can be at times.

This morning was pretty hectic. Josh and Matthew both had orthodontic appointments at 8 am which meant I had to have everyone up and dressed and breakfasted by 7:30am. Needless to say we were a few minutes late to the appointment.....Anyway, after that we dropped Matthew off at his summer day autism program and I took everyone else down to the Tracy Aviary to check out the birds. We didn't worry about taking Aaron since he had to work and he HATES birds so just me and the other four kids that went. We were able to use our Pass of All Passes which get us in for free after a $1 per person conservation fee. Anyway, the kids had fun seeing all the stuff there. They even had a sculpture you could spin and have the metal birds fly around at the top.

We went on a tour with a guide and learned about the wetlands. We saw quite a few wetland birds along our tour.

The kids got to feel an unhatched crane egg, too, which they thought was interesting.

My favorite was seeing all the pink flamingos.

Noah of course wasn't too impressed with anything until he found the only fountain in the whole place and got himself all wet by playing with it.

They had bird watching stations throughout the aviary that you could use binoculars to see the different birds.

Of course we couldn't pass up a photo opportunity:

They had a place you could measure your arm span against different birds' wingspans. All of our arms pans came up quite short as you can see (and if you closely you can see how wet Noah got his shirt by playing in the water fountain, the stinker!):