So I took Aylish to Murray park tonight to take her 11-year old pictures. Boy, was I missing Aunt Joslyn’s new fancy camera! Mine just seemed to be taking forever to focus and if Aylish moved at all the photo was blurry. Guess it is time to look at getting a new camera sometime in the near future. Even with all that, I was able to get some nice pictures of Aylish. I just can not believe how grown up she is already! So here they are!
Thanks to Aunt Joslyn, we got the kids annual pictures take during our last visit to Idaho. With the beautiful backdrop of Grandma Cindy’s yard and both Joslyn and I snapping pictures like crazy, we got some wonderful pictures of my kids. Now at first look it make unbalanced in the number of pictures per kid. First there are no pictures of Aylish with good reason. The day before our trip, she slipped and knocked part of her front tooth out, nothing too serious, just the bottom of the tooth. We decided to wait until she had a visit to the dentist and then we will take her pictures with her beautiful smile restored. Second, you will see only a few pictures of Liam. You see Liam does not like the camera, just look a last years pictures for the proof. So after some bribing from Dad (the I-pad is great for all kinds of things, including bribery!), Liam came outside and for 10 minutes gave me some great smiles and cute looks. That is all I needed. As for Maeve and Rhoswyn, they love the camera and so we took lots of pictures of them. Now the hard part is choosing my favorite ones to go on the living room wall!
I swear that yesterday it was just May and we were just getting back from our family vacation and now it is the end of August! Where oh, where has the summer gone. I have a list a mile long in my head of projects that I had planned on doing this summer but did not get to do yet. Ok, deep breaths and let it go
Instead of thinking of what I did not do, let me think back and see what we did do. The summer started with a family vacation that started out awesome. We decide to go and visit where my mom grew up – Northern California! Aylish was already visiting her Aunty Beks in Los Angeles so they drove north and met us in Monterey to see the Aquarium. Although we were tired from our drive that day, we all loved the Aquarium. They had lots of hands on activities and touch pools. Rhosy loved the penguins and Bekah loved the sea otters. Rhosy has a cute baby penguin that she calls Pengy.
The next week we spent in the San Francisco area with a short trip up to Roseville to visit my Aunt and my cousin and her new baby girl. My vacation strategy was two fold – 1. get a hotel room that was a suite with two bedrooms and a kitchen/living room and 2. we bought a membership to our local children’s museum which is part of a bigger group of science and children’s museums. So I looked up all the museums in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I picked the ones that I thought the kids would enjoy the most. Luckily, our kids have similar interests and are close enough in age to enjoy most things together. So in my next few post I will give reviews of the great places and just some ok places we visited.
Since my strawberries have been producing tons this season, I had enough strawberries to make strawberry jam. I have found that by using Clear Jel instead of pectin, I can reduce the amount of sugar in my jam preserving the fresh taste of the berries. So far we have made 17 quarts of jam! Yes, we made it by the quart since once open Strawberry jam does not last long in this house. One might think that it is the children who eat it so quickly but not really. It is Grady and my mom who love strawberry jam the most!
Summer has finally arrived this year after a very wet and cold spring. With all the sunshine we enjoy being outside (at least until is gets too hot). My parents decided to have a backyard camping trip with the kids a few weekends ago. The older kids spent the night in the tents with them. They had a cookout and smores.
As the raspberries get ripe, Rhosy loves to wander through them looking for the red ones.
At our last Pioneer Heritage Company meeting, the men practiced military mustering. Grandpa then helped Liam practice too!
Just a little over two years ago, we blessed our fourth baby and gave her the name of Rhoswyn Dianna Kelly. In our religion, most babies are blessed at the chapel on the first Sunday of the month. However, we have always chosen to bless our babies at home with just family and close friends to make it a more intimate occasion. On this day, it was just Grady and I, Aylish, Maeve, Liam, my parents, and my sister Dianna and her husband, Adam. Her dress, worn by all her sisters and brother and made by my mother, fit perfectly. We made sure to get pictures with her namesake, my sister Dianna. Grady gave her a beautiful blessing with many wonderful promises for her journey in life.
. . . I am back blogging! Yes I am still here. Life has just be so exciting the last two years. With lots of things share from this time, I hope to share at lease one old memory and one new adventure from our Rainbow Valley.
Wow, the last five weeks have gone by very quickly. We took Rhoswyn in on Saturday for her one month pictures. She is in three different outfits – her blessing dressed made by her Nonnie (my mom), a green and flower dress given to her by her Grandma Cindy and a yellow outfit that both Aylish and Maeve wore in their one month pictures. We were lucky to get some great shots especially because she got really fussy right in the middle of her session. We had to take a break and nurse and then we were able to finish. So her she is in all her glory!
As I was getting the kids in their swimsuits so they could run through the sprinklers, I told Liam that we needed to put sunscreen on so he would not get sunburned. He raised his pointer finger and said ,”I have sunscreen in my finger.” Then he pointed his finger at his chest and made a spraying sound – “sssspppprrrr”. Then he says so proudly, “Now I have sunscreen. My finger has superpowers and magic.” Grady and I just started laughing and laughing. Other superpowers he has revealed lately in addition to his sunscreen finger are – blowing hugs (hugs himself and then flings his arms at you to “blow” you a hug), a flick of his finger makes his sister stop crying, flying to get a diaper for Rhoswyn, his magic remote that turns people off(he did this to Grady and I and we could not talk 
. The list changes daily and just helps me see the magic of a two-year old!
I just read this blog post that just hit home with me – http://www.soulemama.com/soulemama/2009/05/handwritten.html
As I was helping Aylish clear her room out (she is moving back in with Maeve and Liam for awhile), I must have found dozens of little notes and pictures authored by Aylish that she could not throw in the trash. At first I was just annoyed that we needed to find a place to store all these precious treasures that she had created but then I remembered this post. I paused and suggested that for now she just put them in her desk drawer. I opened one of the folded papers before she put them away to find a drawing she had done of the Salt Lake Temple. Yes, these are treasures indeed. One of these days I will actually miss those little notes cluttering up the house.
