And a picture of Steadman's

I found a picture that shows more of what Steadman's looks like. It really is beautiful out there. It looks very peaceful ~ until the George clan arrives!

Summer Rewind: George Family Reunion

Samantha, Aleise,Emily, Brinley and Jessica

The last weekend in July we hosted the First Annual (hopefully) George Family Reunion. Not everyone was able to be there but those of us who were sure had a blast! I got to take the girls to see Emily and Aleise perform at the International Dance Festival on Friday night. These girls are such great friends and I am so thankful that we have such an awesome family that supports one another and are good examples for each other.

Brinley and Aleise

There was lots of visiting, laughing, running and eating during the weekend. Lots and lots of eating. We took walks along the river, danced with the Wii, played on the slip n' slides and just hung out together. And did I mention eating? Each family was in charge of a meal and we ate really well. I wish I had taken more pictures of the ordinary stuff but here are the highlights. We played a game, compliments of the Waites, that had us all in stitches. The premise of the game is that each person takes a nylon stocking with a tennis ball in the end of it and pulls it all the way over their heads. Like so...

Then the object of the game is to get your stocking twirling around by swinging your head, and pull off your opponent's stocking by looping yours around theirs and pulling until it pops off their head. As you can imagine, the game can be a little dangerous so we had to have an adult round and a kids' round. We also had relay races and played human slingshot, another game that had Gramps a little nervous about safety.

We ended the night by watching a movie on the projector outside. We set up our big tent and all the kids slept out there. (A great part of the reunion was that we didn't have renters in our basement so there was plenty of room for everyone.)

Saturday was more of just having fun being together. That afternoon we went out to Steadman's. It is a beautiful farm on a hill in the middle of nowhere in Raft River. There are just golden fields of wheat as far as the idea can see to the foot of the mountains. The Steadmans built some awesome slides in their yard on the hill for their family and then opened it up to the public to make reservations. The sight now includes two giant slides, a sunken trampoline, campsites, a sandbox, a huge 500 foot zipline, candy cannons, swingsets, fire pits, and even paintball/airsoft. It is hard to capture the whole slide on the camera but one is 700 feet long and the other is 500.

Brayden, Aaron, Diana and Paul make a train

Aleise and Jessie run down the hill Little House on the Prarie style

Porter contemplates the zipline

Kevin and Aleise, who is not sure about this!

Parker, Sammy, Noah and Kevin

Soon tubes were abandoned as they were too much trouble to haul back up the hill.

Gramps was on safety patrol. I think the whole thing made him a little nervous. He was happy to sit and watch while holding a sleeping Oliver.

Emily, Jessie, Brayden and Parker pile up at the bottom of the slide

Grandma and Gramps

We have a great family, and it all began with these two. I am looking forward to many more summer reunions!

Keep on Jiggin'

Here is my newest little Irish dancer. Aleise started Irish dance this summer and she couldn't be more thrilled! She loves it and thinks that she is so beautiful when she is dressed in costume, especially when she 'has her hair on'. And she is pretty dang cute.

The girls got to perform at the King Fine Arts Center for the International Dance Festival in July. It was a great opportunity to perform on such a big stage to a large audience. They did great!

Confessions of a homeschool mom

I have been homeschooling my children for nine years now. Every July finds me giddy with excitement as our school supplies arrive for the coming academic year. On the first day, I usher my 'students' into a clean and organized schoolroom with big plans. Bulletin boards, field trips, activities to help my children excel, all tied together with a rigourous and exacting schedule planned down to the minute.

Until this year. This year the school supplies sat in a back room for weeks, unopened. The first day of school was postponed for three days due to canning and basic lack of interest on my part. Now here it is the end of October and it hasn't gotten much better. I just don't want to do it this year. Maybe I am burned out. Maybe I have too much on my plate. After all, we are in the middle of a big remodel project, I have an eight month old baby, and I am trying to lose weight, get in shape, and become a runner. 'You don't want to do math today? Okay, neither do I so how about we don't.' Each school day, no matter how well planned and sucessfully begun, seems to get derailed by orthodonist appointments, building projects, beautiful weather, or a tired baby. Whatever the case, I just don't want to do it anymore. I want to sew. I want to craft. I want to do family history. Heck, I want to mop my floors and wash my windows and cook dinner. All things I never seem to find time to do when I am schooling.

Unfortunately, to my children the idea of going to public school is something akin to being thrown into a den of lions. And maybe that analogy isn't far off the mark for a shy middle schooler who has never been to a brick and mortar school before. They are not the least bit interested in giving it a try. In fact, they are adamantly opposed to the idea. And my views of what the ideal schooling situation for my children looks like hasn't really changed either. I still feel blessed that I have the knowledge, training and financial means to teach my children. I am just lacking the motivation to go after it.

This year I am teaching a K/first grader, a second grader, a fifth grader and an eighth/ninth grader. It is (thankfully) the only year that I will have four different kids being taught at home. Next year Porter will go to high school and by the time Oliver is old enough for school, Emily will be in high school. Time passes all too quickly and soon they will be gone. (Somedays I look at that fact as a promise and an opportunity.) I know that it would be unfair to enroll my kids in a school they don't want to go to just because I decided I didn't want to do it anymore; because I decided that I no longer wanted to carry out the decision I made years ago to teach them at home. I guess I just need to pick myself up by my proverbial boot straps and find some inspiration and motivation.

On the bright side, the school year is 2/3 of the way over. I can do this. But who will clean my house?

Still Here

So my 100 days of summer turned into, like, 10 which is about how fast I felt the summer went. I have a bunch of pictures waiting to be edited and posted but meanwhile, life is racing on and, let's face it, I may never get them done. We have been busy with lots of stuff around here. Along with starting another year of homeschooling and all the canning that comes with this time of year, we are remodeling our basement and renting it out again. Add to that dance for two girls, football, a scheduled week-long vacation and an unscheduled St. George Marathon (not for me obviously, but for Kevin) and life around here is pretty hectic. I have lots of fun adventures to tell you about soon. Stay tuned!

100 Days of Summer -- June 25 - July 1

Saturday, June 25 -- As soon as Oliver was born, we began remarking how much he looked like Gramps George. He still does. The same face shape, the same chin, the same hairdo...Two peas in a pod.

Sunday, June 26 -- Sunday dinner at Grandma and Grandpa George's. My mother-in-law is a fabulous cook and food at her house is always yummy. Today was the usual Sunday fare, pot roast. And usually when we eat at the George's a whole bunch of family is over, which is lots of fun, but today it was nice to just spend time with Grandma and Gramps. Oh, and Gramps made their kitchen table back in the day when they had a passle of kids of their own to sit around it. Pretty cool.

Monday, June 27 -- Okay, this is technically another picture from Sunday. But it was late on Sunday. On the way home we took a detour to see the Brigham City Temple under construction. It reminds me of the Kirtland Temple with windows like Salt Lake.

Tuesday, June 28 -- I bought a bottle of washable colored bubbles to try but when I opened the bottle I was a little scared. They were SO BLUE! Like a whole bottle of food coloring blue. I told the kids we could try them but we had to blow them outside and they had to be in old clothes. Porter stood on the balcony and blew the bubbles and the other kids were below on the driveway. They did look pretty cool as they were bright blue. As the kids reached out to pop them, their hands turned bright blue too. I left them to their bubbles and went to weed a flowerbed. A few minutes later Noah and Aleise came up behind me and said, "look, Mom, we're avatar!"

You can breath easy moms because this stuff is like magic! I sent the kids in to get cleaned up and I had blue ALL OVER the counters, the bathroom cabinets, the white rugs in the bathroom, not to mention three blue children with blue hair. But it all washed out like a charm. Every single bit. I was impressed! And they come in all colors! Crayola needs to get together with Jello and share their non-staining secrets.

Wednesday, June 29 -- I wanted to paint my ugly wooden front door (since a new one is out of the question for now). So I thought I would keep the kids entertained by letting them prime this faded bench so we could paint it. They primed it alright! I think they used half of the gallon of primer. They even got ingenious and used the skateboard to lie on to roll underneath the bench to paint the bottom. They kept busy and I got my front door painted -- although the jury is still out on whether or not I like it...

Thursday, June 30 -- Our dear friends the Hartneys live 45 minutes away in Twin Falls. We don't get to see them as often as we like but we do take a day now and then to hang out together. Samie got these cool curlers that worked so great on her daughter's hair that she wanted to try them out on Emily. We had a wonderful day playing and chatting together.

Friday, July 1 -- In case you haven't caught on yet, if I forget to take a picture one day I just post one of this cute little guy. Can't get enough of him.

100 Days of Summer -- June 18-24

Saturday, June 18 - Emily danced at the Highland Games in Hailey, where we watched, as my kids say, "men in skirts throwing heavy objects." Emily is getting quite good at Irish dance. She learned hard shoe this year, which is really fun to watch and listen to the girls stamp out the rhythm of the music as they leap and and skip across the dance floor.

Sunday, June 1 -- Fathers Day. I love this man. A lot.

Monday, June 20 -- sleeping out in the tent in the backyard. This happens a lot in the summer.

Tuesday, June 21 -- Aleise's 5th birthday! She had a friend party that she has been planning for at least six months. Worried that it wouldn't be warm enough to play in the water like she wanted, I filled the pool from the hose hooked up to the hot water from the washer in the house. It turned out to be a beautiful day, though. It was a little tricky keeping track of seven kids 5 and under in our pool at once. They played water games with balloons and sponges, hit a water pinata, ate goldfish and swedish fish and cake, and had a really good time. We live in a great ward with wonderful families to make friends with.

Friday, June 24 -- We went to Utah for the weekend and got to see Despicable Me in the park with Paul and Diana and their kids. It was really fun, even if no one got to bed until midnight!

100 Days of Summer -- June 12-17

Sunday, June 12. Noah loves playing football lately. He is always begging someone to play with him, even if they have to do it while holding a baby. Football has become a Sunday afternoon tradition.

Monday, June 13. Aleise's first day of Irish Dance. She was so excited! And she makes friends so easily. She wasn't in class ten minutes before she was holding hands with two of the other little girls. We now have two fast-footed Irish girls in the house.

Tuesday, June 14. The boys slept out in the fort, which was more of a tent by the time they finished doctoring it up to keep out the mosquitos.

Thursday, June 16. 4H meeting at our house. We made fruit kabobs for our cooking lesson.

Friday, June 17. Oliver found his tongue today. And spent most of the day with it hanging out of his mouth.

100 Days of Summer

June 5 - Sunday dinner at Mom's house. I love the time spent there with four generations of family. Here is Oliver and Pa. Pa absolutely adores babies! I am not sure what they are having a conversation about but they are both pretty wrapped up in each other.

June 6 - It finally warmed up enough and dried up enough for us to get the garden planted. Then we had to figure out a way to water them. We water the garden from the pump at Pa's house that pulls the water from the river but the river is so high that we had to pull the pumps because they were under water. With a few pieces of pipe and some scrounged wood, Dad and Kevin were finally able to raise the pumps up enough to hook them back up. I was relieved because I wasn't looking forward to bucketing water to 28 tomato plants, 30 rows of corn, and all our other stuff.

June 7 - Planting corn. What decade do we live in again?

June 8 - Tonight was a city council meeting in which our property was annexed into the city limits, despite our vehement protests.

I don't know where my camera was the rest of the week, but I don't have any pictures. Saturday was such an awesome day though! It was warm and sunny and we got a ton of yard work done. We mowed and trimmed and cut down trees and made a wood pile by the firepit and weeded all the herb garden and transplanted a bunch of flowers. We all worked hard together and at the end of the day we really had something to show for it. (Most of my days don't seem much like that.)

100 Days of Summer

So I had this great idea that I would capture this summer on camera by taking a picture of our normal lives every day . I am having a difficult time remembering to take a picture every single day but I think it will be fun to look back and remember some of the normal summer things that we don't usually photograph.

May 29 - Ironically, my first photo in this summer series is of snow. The weather can't seem to commit to summer around here. We have had a few warm days but they are few and far between. For Memorial Day weekend we went to a Lutheran Church Camp, of all things. They were doing a work retreat, which basically means that you come and work to get the camp ready for the summer in exchange for your food and lodging. We had so much fun! They have such a beautiful facility and we met such warm and welcoming people. Kevin was having a ball as he got to help rig all the sailboats. It was really cold (in the 30s) but we were staying in the amazing lodge, which is really more like a hotel. We worked hard, ate good food, learned new songs and had fun with friends. We drove home on Sunday in quite the snowstorm.

May 30 - One thing we have seen a lot of this summer is water! It has been a very wet year. We have filled sandbags for all our neighbors who live on the river, as the water level is really high and continuing to rise as the snow melts off the mountains. Here are the kids at Shoshone Falls. There is so much water pouring over the falls that it is like standing in the shower just to walk down to the lookout point.

May 31 - One of my favorite things about summer is being able to bring fresh flowers into my house from the yard. These are some of the last lilacs of the season. They don't last long but, oh, they smell good!

June 1 - I made a delicious salad for lunch today. Spinach, strawberries and mandarin oranges in an oil and vinegar dressing with sugar, poppy seeds and paprika. So yummy!

June 2 - My friend Karla has a cat that recently had kittens. Emily has been begging us for a pet for the longest time. She really wanted a puppy but we weren't ready to commit to that yet. She has been promised one of the kittens when they get old enough to leave their mama. In the meantime, Emily likes to go down to Karla's and visit them.

June 3 - We had our friends the Zollingers over tonight for homemade pizza and games. They brought Just Dance and we had a fun night dancing - well, okay, mostly we had a fun night laughing at Kevin's dancing!

June 4 - We have been getting a Bountiful Basket every other week and it is really fun. It is like an adventure each time we go pick up our basket to see what is in it this time. Foods my kids would never eat if I were to buy them at the store, they somehow like to try if they came in the basket. I am such a seasonal produce shopper that it has been kind of fun to have cantalope and corn on the cob already this summer. Saturday we also got a couple of flats of strawberries from Bountiful Baskets and I spent the day making strawberry jam. We have been rationing our last few bottles for a couple of months now. I also spent a good part of the day watching fire trucks in my backyard but that story deserves a post all its own!

Preschool

Aleise had a wonderful time at preschool this year! Even though she only went one day a week, she has learned so much. Her teacher, Jacque, is fabulous and Aleise loved learning and making new friends. She knows all her shapes, her numbers 1-10, she can count to 30 and she knows all her letters and the sounds that they make. She is reading simple sentences and she even knows how to write her last name. That is something that my homeschooled little ones have never really needed to know! She loves to "do school" and is looking forward to being officially in school in the fall.

Oliver's Blessing Day

Oliver Fynn George was blessed on April 17, 2011 by his father in the Heyburn 2nd Ward. He looked dapper in the romper that Grandma Becky made. It is the same outfit that Porter wore when he was blessed. He was given a beautiful blessing in which he was told he would be a righteous example to those around him. After the blessing, Porter, who was holding the microphone, said, "Psst! Dad, you forgot to give him a name." Kevin never said what his full name was!

Those who stood in the circle were Uncle Samuel Noyce, Uncle Paul George, Uncle Jeremy George, Dad Kevin George, Papa Tim Hurst, Grandpa Bob George (whom Oliver looks a lot like) and great-grandpa Oscar Egbert.

Here are four generations of wonderful guys!

My latest article for the Sentinel publication

Some of you have asked about the monthly article I write for a national homeschool publication. Here is my latest. For those of you (ahem, sisters) who only look at my blog to see pictures, skip ahead. There are no pictures here.

It has been a rough couple of months at our house. We brought home a perfect and healthy baby boy and rejoiced in having him as part of our family, however, we were having some difficulties with baby number five. He was jaundiced and his billirubin levels continued to rise despite spending a week plugged into the wall on a phototherapy light. He cried literally all the time and would not sleep without being held. Of course, everyone had a solution for us. Sleep him on a slant; put a ticking clock in his crib; feed him some sugar water; don’t eat anything with gluten; stay away from lactose; let him cry it out. All this advice, while offered by well-meaning friends and relatives, was not working. Finally, after weeks of crying, both mother and baby, we went back to the doctor. Upon weighing him we discovered that this five week old baby had not gained a single ounce since birth. We were sent immediately to the hospital for some tests. The diagnosis on the lab order sheet read “failure to thrive”. I sobbed all the way to the hospital. I felt that I had completely failed my tiny little son.

As summer arrives, I reflect back on the last year of school and evaluate our progress. Are my children thriving? Is the curriculum I am using still meeting their educational needs? Generally, as we homeschool, we have no AYP to meet, no committee to write up our standards and benchmarks and convert those into learning goals for our classrooms. Many homeschooled students do not participate in standardized testing to measure their progress against other students across the nation. How do we know, then, that our students are thriving? Personally, I ask myself if my children are enjoying learning. Beyond the love of learning that I want to instill in them, there are a few other things that are important. Are they “becoming acquainted with all good books, and with languages, tongues and people” (D&C 90:15)? A huge responsibility rests upon our shoulders as the educators of our own children in a community where there may often be little accountability to anyone other than God and His spirits that we instruct. Are we instructing them “more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine…of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms” that they may be prepared in all things (D&C 88:77-83)?


Aside from thriving academically, I want to also make sure that my children are thriving in other areas of their lives. Not necessarily thriving in the way the world might measure my success as an educator or their adaptation into the world around them. Rather, I wish for my children a success that makes them very different from the world. For example, my children are very behind their peers as the world might gauge their social adaptation. My kids own no iPods or smartphones. We don’t have an x-box or a PSP. They aren’t up on the latest movies and they don’t know the words to a single top 40 song. My kids are reading Little House on the Prairie, Chronicles of Narnia and Anne of Green Gables. In our house, a world still exists where Laura looks up to her Pa, Gilbert Blythe is the kind of guy girls dream of marrying (marrying!) and good bands together to rid the world of evil. There is not a vampire book among them. And I am thankful for that.

My teenage son doesn’t spend his afternoons trying to get to the next level in the latest multi-player virtual game, but he did teach his little brother how to ride his bike. Instead of practicing applying makeup in her bedroom mirror, my ten-year-old daughter is loving learning how to change her baby brother’s diaper and helping her little sister read. In a world that is forcing children to grow up way too fast, I am happy to hang on to every minute of snuggling in the sun for read-aloud time, even if the teenager has read the book five times already. I smile to myself as I listen to my two preschool children playing with action figures in the other room as the one toy says to the other, “You will be sorry that your father joined Hitler’s team!” I make myself remain patient and not be bugged when my daughter follows right at my heels all day, wanting to be a part of everything I am doing, whether it is cooking dinner, bathing the baby or sorting the mail. I am glad that it is me that she is following and wanting to be like and learning from. And I strengthen my resolve to be a better person because I know she is watching.

Spiritually, I want my children to thrive as they are “nourished from the good word of God.” So we contrast Hitler and what he was trying to do that led to World War II with the people living after Christ visited the Americas when “there was not any manner of –ites” among them. We write comparison/contrast essays about Abinadi and Martin Luther. We talk about the code of chivalry that the knights kept in medieval times and about what Christ taught in the Beatitudes.

I think of the opposite or antithesis of that diagnosis of “failure to thrive” and I think of abundance. A child fails to thrive because something vital and necessary is lacking in that child’s daily life. So as I evaluate the school experience of the past year, and years before, I look at the abundance that is being offered to my students. What I want my children to know, more importantly that anything else that they can be taught, is who they are and that they are loved – not because they are part of the “in” crowd or because they have the right label on their jeans, but because they are sons and daughters, literal spirit children, of the God of heaven and earth. Because of that, they have enormous potential and an unlimited inheritance. And they are here on this earth to learn all that they can to be ready to become heirs to that – an abundance that they cannot comprehend. It is through teaching and learning with my children that I feel abundance in my own life. An abundance of responsibility but also an abundance of joy.

As for my littlest guy? His problems stemmed from a lack of nourishment. For some reason, baby number five was just not getting enough to eat from breastfeeding. Like homeschooling, that can be a difficult thing to measure. It had always worked before. But you probably know from homeschooling that what has worked great for one child will not always be what another child needs. Also like homeschooling, everyone had some advice for me. There were lots of tears and lots of fervent prayers (just like homeschool). Thankfully, it was something that was able to be corrected. He was put on a high-calorie formula every two hours and, in only a weekend, he gained a whole pound! Now he is thriving in an abundance of love AND nourishment.

"Love Handles, Back Fat and Bellies" or "other disadvantages to not being able to nurse"

I am really out of shape. Seriously. I can FEEL the love handles peeking up over the top of my jeans. My biggest jeans. I think I caught a glimpse of back fat in the mirror as I was getting dressed (yes, I turn my back to the giant mirror on the bathroom wall to get dressed after a shower). When I lie down on my side, my stomach lies obediently beside me on the bed. My daughter peeked in on me in the bath tonight and said, "Wow, Mom, I think you are getting too big for that tub!" And, while I would like to think that she was referring to the fact that my legs were halfway up the wall (because we do have a tiny tub) it could just as easily have been other body parts she was talking about. Before getting up from sitting on the couch today, I reached to lift the child that was sitting on my lap ... but there wasn't a child there -- just my belly. While I am rejoicing in my baby's double chin and chunky thighs, I just don't feel the same about mine. Something has got to be done. I cannot exist in fat-hider clothes forever. Someday it is bound to warm up.

Mother's Day

I dream of pictures I will paint,

Of poetry I will pen.

Great works of wisdom, love and light

To inspire my fellowmen.

But first I have some works to do,

All dear ones to be sure.

A home to make for those I love

and many, many more.

Then, sorrowing, one day I find

My time is almost gone.

Those homey tasks have filled my hours

And left many things undone.

But as I look in each dear face

I see I've had a role

In painting pictures and writing poems

On some of God's choice souls.

I didn't write this myself but it speaks to my heart and describes exactly how I feel about my role as a mother. I am so very awed by the confidence God has in me to send to my home five of his wonderful children to call my own in this life and throughout eternity. Nothing I can accomplish in this life is as important or as lasting as what I do with them. And nothing makes me happier or more fulfilled than being their mother.

I rejoice that I am a woman and I am humbled and so very blessed to be a mother.