Pictures of My Girls

And speaking of things I meant to blog about-- Kendra got her braces off!!!

Here she's seeing her teeth for the first time in the mirror at the orthodontist.  How cute is she???

She's also had a band concert or two.  Who can keep track?  And here she is with Evan.

And, on a totally unrelated note, the other day Camille was waiting for friends to come and pick her up, and she was just laying in the grass of the front yard and it made me smile.

My angle is weird here-- I promise, our yard is not a vertical slope!  But you get the idea...

And speaking of Camille, I learned recently that I hadn't been on some app her teachers expect me to use, and it turns out I was missing out on all these pictures they'd been sending!  So here are a bunch of pictures of Camille at school (and especially on a field trip):

Third from the left

Camille is off to the right in her red and white sweatshirt

With Olive and Mara

And again with Olive and Mara!

Of Note

Craig and I sat down Sunday for our weekly planning session.  This is something we've been doing for years now, but once we both had callings working with the youth it became necessary.  We got through the coming week, and then did what Craig calls the lightning round, where we make sure we know what's going on for the entire month.  

And we have something pretty much every night up through Christmas.  The few nights that weren't booked were quickly filled in with shopping trips.  There were even a few things that we hadn't scheduled yet, so we squeezed them in between other things so that we would remember to do them if we felt like it when the time came.  (But told ourselves that if we didn't feel like doing them, we could just not go and no one would care!)

And the weirdest thing about this isn't that we're so busy.  The weirdest thing is that this is only marginally busier than we are all the rest of the time.  It didn't even bother me or stress me out like it used to!  This time I was like, Well, at least it's mostly really fun Christmas stuff!  Bring it on!

Who have I become?  And will it ever calm down?  And if it does-- will I even enjoy not being busy, or will I have become so used to it that not being busy will just feel boring?

Who knows!

Who can be mad if they're busy with stuff like this?

Devil's Marbleyard

I forgot to ever blog about this, but-- as mentioned-- while I was camping at Holliday Lake with the Young Women, Craig and the Young Men were hiking at a National Park called Devil's Marbleyard!  Similar to us, they had one leader get there early to make the fire and everyone else arrived once it was dark out and had to look for the campfire, which was over a bridge and in the woods!  But they all figured it out eventually, and I know from previous experience that Scott makes excellent hamburgers over a campfire, so they had a good time of it!

Once it was light in the morning, they could actually see the lovely river that they'd been crossing:

And then it was hiking!  See if you can guess where the name for this place comes from:

That, frankly, looks exhausting to hike over, but the boys seemed to really love it!

That's just crazy!

Oh, Ryder

There was a different, slightly less stony path to take back to the campsite, but I'm pretty sure even then going downhill was much more challenging than going up.  They felt very justified stopping for pizza on the way home!

The camera angle is making this slice of pizza look humongous, but Craig says it was only a slight exaggeration-- this place is known for their ginormous pizzas!

Happy boys (and men)!

Anyway, Craig could tell you a lot more about it, but I'm just glad they had a fun time and were safe!  The only casualty was Craig's water bottle, which fell down between rocks and Craig (very wisely) decided it wasn't worth trying to squeeze through them to retrieve it.  

Hooray for hiking and camping!