More Celebrating and Hiking

After Colton's baptism, the next most notable event was probably Kendra's first day of school!  We were all excited for her to finally get to go in-person.  And I have been just a little sad to finally admit that she is taller than I am.  I suspect many of my children will pass me up, but this was the first one and it's a weird feeling.  I wasn't particularly emotional about it until I was looking at our family portraits on my phone from a year ago and I realized that was the last portrait where she was smaller than me!  Kind of bittersweet...).  Kendra getting to go to school ALSO marked the first day EVER that all my children have gone to school.  14.5 years waiting for that day-- Huzzah!

This was also my last day with my parents, so we enjoyed hanging out in a much quieter house until I had to take them to the airport.  {😢}

We'd had pretty good weather while my parents were here, but then it snapped back to being really cold and rainy, which made it hard to figure out what to do with hiking club.  So I finally decided to keep things close to home and we just hiked the trails at Monticello.  That's the only hike I'd done before this year, so it felt like cheating?  But the weather was cold and sunny and we had a great time, so who cares?

We had Beth and Sydney and their Yaya this time!  Adam took this picture and apologized profusely for the rainbow sun glare in the pic!  😂🌈

I think this bridge is so cool...

The weekend after this was INSANE.  We had some multi-stake training with Elder Rasband for a good chunk of the day on Saturday (Craig was in meetings from 10:30-12:30 and had to give the closing prayer so that was kind of stressful, and then I joined him for the meeting that was from 12:50-2:30).  Then we had a short hour to undo whatever damage the kids had done to the house during these meetings before Craig's parents arrived to celebrate Colton's birthday with us!

Hiding behind his pile-o-presents

He had been begging for MONTHS now for his very own Scout-- he is SO HAPPY here!

Very jubilant singing!

He'd also been begging for these dinosaur legos, and got them put together in just two days!

He was one happy birthday boy! 😆