Autumn Life

Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth for a month!  Time has been weird-- it's like we're super busy, and yet, when I look back, it's really hard to even pin down what we were doing except all the usual (kind of boring) life stuff-- like having youth activities and back-to-school nights and all that jazz...  Most of it isn't really stuff I blog about.  But then if I poke through my pictures, I realize there are still stories to tell.  So I will persevere!  You will read about my boring/busy life!

We spent quite a bit of time rearranging everyone's bedrooms now that Bentley is gone.  Colton and Camille are no longer sharing a room, which is probably good, given their ages (although I've loved what great friends they are and continue to be, and I do think sharing a room was a big part of that).  But Colton seemed quite thrilled with his new room and is keeping it SO CLEAN.  I'm super impressed:

Seriously, we NEVER saw this much of the floor when this was Kendra's room!!!

So Colton moved into Kendra's room, and Kendra took Bentley's (which means she is now Scooter's owner, and she totally hates that ridiculously noisy bird).  Ryder and Camille both stayed put.  But with Camille losing her roommate, she now has an empty lower bunk bed, so Bentley will stay with her when he comes home, which will probably be exciting for both of them!

Right after I got back from Utah, we had a combined activity with a few other wards where the older kids did speed dating (after we had a little chat about the standards for dating).  Craig had this idea, and part of it included serving them very small appetizers with each round, so every time they switched partners, we'd bring them a tiny salad, or a couple meatballs, or a potsticker...  It made for a very busy night for those of us in the kitchen, but it actually went really well and the kids seemed to have fun.  Craig always has awesome ideas!

I think we had about 26 kids or so?  And the numbers were pretty close to balanced, so that was nice.  Go, Rivanna Ward, planning awesome activities!

A few days later we had the most INSANE lightning storm!  Craig and I drove up to Carter Mountain so we could see it all around and just sat in the truck and watched it all for about a half hour.  It was so cool!  I love stuff like that so much.  I wish we could have gotten out of the truck to see it better (it wasn't even raining!) but that seemed a little too reckless for parents with four kids still at home.  

It was dark outside, but with the phone taking a slow picture, this was what we ended up with...!

Craig and I have tried to make dates to the temple a regular thing, and it's so lovely.  It's also become mandatory to take a selfie while there, which makes me happy!

I ended up putting together gift bags for a couple of Adam's weddings.  A lot of them get delivered to hotels where the guests are staying, but then they usually want a few delivered to their rehearsal dinner.  I thought this one, with the bags lined up on the stairs, turned out so pretty!  (And added bonus: the venue didn't want people going up the stairs, so this was a great deterrent!)

Yes, they're alphabetized!  I'm a professional.

Camille-- who really enjoys making demands on the YM in our ward-- was bugging Wylan to get her a cowboy hat and he totally came through for her!  What a nice guy.  She was so happy.

My friend Crissy got married and Craig and I were invited to the wedding.  It was... an experience.  Up until a couple weeks before, Crissy had been married to our previous bishop.  The timing was uncomfortable.  And I can really only describe the aesthetic of the wedding as Redneck Proud.  But Crissy seems very happy and I wish her the best.  And her ex-husband is already dating my friend Amy, who was separated from her (cheating) husband for years before he finally actually divorced her, so I'm wishing them all the happiness, too.  And to her credit, Crissy seemed genuinely thrilled for the two of them.  But let me tell you, there has been some HOT gossip in my ward this year.  Whew!

Crissy and Preston

Meanwhile, we got this fabulous picture from Bentley:

Fans of Arrested Development will understand why this is hilarious!

The church held a worldwide concert for the youth, so once again we combined with a couple other wards and met up at this member's really cool house.  How do people end up with the money for this kind of place?

You can barely see Ryder in the yellow shirt there

The screen is actually really big, it's just pretty far away.  There was also an awesome rope swing that went out over the hill.

And a gorgeous sunset to boot!

Colton was very excited to start learning to play the saxophone in middle school band!

He is one cool dude!

Adam and I did a short hike at Ragged Mountain.  We didn't do the whole loop, but walked for about a mile, found a nice bench in the shade with a view of the water, and sat and talked for a good hour or so.  It was delightful.

I guess this is nice?  If you're into this kinda thing?

Ryder's Teacher's Quorum planned their own temple trip.  They're such a good group.  And they took some really fun pictures once they were done.

(I think it's hilarious that they have more grownups chaperoning than teachers, but what can you do?)

Daniel (sitting in the middle) looks crazy here, but also hilarious

Kendra has discovered the joys of thrifting and bought herself this super-cute pleated skirt.  My Grandma Bentley always loved pleated skirts, so this made me happy!

Okay, so this is just weird and I even feel weird blogging about it, but I'm going to anyway.  One morning when I went running, I saw something completely inexplicable.  At first I thought I might be seeing Starlinks-- it looked red and shimmery?-- but then it resolved into this one bright light, which moved across the sky (it was going right to left), but left this arc of light behind it as it went.  I literally have NO IDEA what it was.  If it was a plane, it would have had flashing lights, and a helicopter would have been noisy.  There was no humidity in the air to cause the light glowing behind it.  Anyway.  I'm not really a believer in UFOs, but I still can't figure out what I saw.  The picture isn't particularly impressive, but I'm sharing it here anyway:

It was moving slowly enough to get this picture, so it definitely wasn't a shooting star.  And it looks too close to have been anything in outer space anyway.

I really don't know what that was, but I don't want to forget it.  The truth is out there somewhere!!!

On a more mundane note, we convinced Adam to get chickens, and now he can't stop-- I think he's got six now?  We went over to "meet" them-- my kids love all chickens!-- and enjoyed the good weather while it lasted.

I love that silkie in the background!  (Also, this is the nicest chicken coop ever!)

Craig went to an elder's quorum shooting activity and had a great time until he forgot about the rifle's kick and gave himself this lovely cut:

Ouch.  It seems to be healing well, though.

And I had another round of gift bags for a wedding.  This time the extras were sent to Three Notch'd Brewery (which I walk by every time I go to work, but had never gone inside before!):

Then I helped out at the same wedding, so I got to actually meet the bride and her mother, who I'd been corresponding with to figure out the gift bags.  They were lovely, and it was a very nice wedding.  They barely made it through the outdoor ceremony before it began POURING-- I was so happy for them that the weather cooperated enough!

Farmington has lovely views, even when it's about to rain

And here's one of the rooms all set up-- such great colors!  We heard about another wedding the same evening, but at Keswick Hall, where they didn't have a backup plan for the rain and all the guests had to go running inside the hall and no one though to grab the cake on their way in-- how sad is that????  Adam would NEVER.

Kendra, meanwhile, had a band competition and they won!!!!  It was so exciting!

Terrible quality picture.  I hate how iPhones and Samsungs don't pay nicely.

It started raining for that wedding and it was like it didn't stop for two weeks.  The second week was remnants from Hurricane Helene, but the outskirts of the county had a few flooded streets even before that, which meant they canceled school for a few days.  (YUP, you read that right-- they canceled school because of RAIN.)  It was...  a lot.  I mean, I feel like my Seattle roots give me a certain amount of street cred where rain is involved, but this really started to get me down.  It was SO. MUCH. RAIN.  (And so much of my kids home with me when I really should have been getting stuff done!)

Anyway.  Two of those rainy Tuesdays we'd hoped to plant bulbs at the church for YWs, but clearly that didn't work out.  So one day we tried to make slime instead.  As she was stirring up her Elmer's glue, Jadyn mentioned that it looked like yogurt or something and she kind of wanted to eat it, so I got this picture, which made me laugh:

(She did not ACTUALLY eat the glue, just for the record!)

We had another youth temple trip (or, at least, all the youth who would leave the house even though it had been raining all day)(it really wasn't by that evening, though!), and Adam took Colton and Camille for us-- first they hung out at Farmington while he attended to a rehearsal dinner, and then they saw The Wild Robot, which they all seemed to enjoy.

Bishop Selfie

We didn't plan this, but I love the pops of red between me, Ryder, and Kendra!

Just the youth (not a lot of young women, but the young men are well represented!)

Kendra was supposed to be playing with the marching band at their homecoming game that night, but they moved the game up a day to avoid the worst of the rain, and I was so glad that meant she could come with us!

Speaking of Kendra and homecoming, she went with Evan (who also plays in the marching band and indoor drumline) and they had a really fun time together!  He asked her about a month ahead of time.  I totally respect that.

She also found this dress at a thrift store!  How pretty is this???

They're so cute!

I need to take a moment to complain about the rain some more.  Because I'm showing you all these pictures where it isn't raining, so you probably don't believe me, but really, we got SO MUCH RAIN.  I feel like this entire school year has been me not being able to figure out my groove, and with a few days being canceled for rain, and my refusal to run in the rain, this messed up my schedule so much!  And once the rain finally did stop, I promised myself I would get back to running regularly.  It feels like I'm ALWAYS starting over trying to learn how to run.  I will say-- my first morning trying to get back to it, I saw a shooting star AND a fox, so that made it feel worth it, at least.  

And then, as if the school cancellations had thrown off my groove, they decided to change the kids' bus times!  Now-- this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because I think it meant that Ryder and Colton's bus actually gets to school on time, something that hadn't been happening before.  And Camille's bus is a bit later, so she gets a few extra minutes of sleep, which is nice.  But it also means that the window between Camille getting on the bus and Ryder and Colton getting on their bus-- the window during which I used to shower and get myself all ready for the day-- suddenly got shorter by over thirty minutes!  And that has completely messed up our entire morning schedule.  We no longer know how to do anything and it's constant chaos.  Sometimes I'm showing up at Camille's bus stop with wet hair and smeary mascara that I haven't had time to fix.  Sometimes Kendra shows up for our morning devotional in her pajamas, forgetting that she's supposed to go straight to seminary next!  It's a disaster and we're still trying to figure out how to make it work.  Pray for me.

Bentley, on the other hand, informs me that he is skipping sleeping in order to climb Y Mountain at 3am with a bunch of guys and watch the sunrise.  I guess that's what college is all about, right?

The kid next to Bentley is his roommate, Riley.  I'm not sure who the other guys are (or why one of them had to take his shirt off and look like a frat boy, but whatever)

I went to tuck Camille into bed the other night only to find a bandit, happily reading on her lower bunk!

This girl cracks me up

Our friends the Gaskins invited the youth over to make haunted houses and everyone seemed to have a great time!  (And it was so fun for me just sending Kendra and Ryder and not having to drive them!)

l-r: Sawyer, Steven, Alex, Calvin, Truman, Ryder, Daniel, Cedric.  The boys all built this house together...

And the girls (Violet, Luci, Ella, Kendra, Jadyn) built this one!

And scary faces!

I'm glad we have fun people who do stuff like this-- I would never think to organize such a thing!

But I did host book club, and since the book we were reading, The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, had all kinds of witchy things, some of us decided to dress up for the occasion.  So here's my coven:

Camille is my familiar, which is perfect because in the book, Kitty Bennet is Lydia's familiar who she's magicked into being a girl (which actually makes all kinds of sense, since in the real Pride & Prejudice, Kitty has almost no personality whatsoever except that she's always following Lydia around!)

And here we're trying to look witchy, although we clearly have no cohesive idea of what that means!  😂

I also lit a whole bunch of candles and had them placed all over the room, and I made chocolate peanut butter chip cookies and olive oil cake (which just sounds kind of witchy doesn't it???) and they both turned out amazing, so I was very happy!

The next night was the school's Hispanic Heritage Night.  We usually don't go (I think I was vaguely worried that this wasn't really for white people?) but Camille had worked hard learning a song and a dance for the occasion and really wanted to get to show it all off to us.  It turned out they had a TON of amazing food and it was a really fun time.  Camille's teacher (who Ryder and Colton have also had, and who is just the sweetest person) was up front and center wearing an incredible costume and dancing her heart out with her students and the whole thing made me cry it was so carefree and delightful.  

I know Olive on the left, and Mara on the right.  Not sure who the kid is on Camille's other side, though...?

And then this little boy popped into the middle of it all 😂

So we were really glad we'd finally attended Hispanic Heritage Night.  And THEN, as we were driving home, I looked out the window and realized that the sky was PURPLE.  At first I figured it was just sunset (still gorgeous, but not too out of the ordinary), but then I realized that it was purple in the north, not the west.  We were seeing aurora borealis!  AGAIN!!!  So we parked the car and walked to the end of our cul de sac and watched it.  As before, the pictures make it a little better than it really was.  But it was still really cool!  At one point, we had a huge pink stripe across the sky right over us!

So that was a magical ending to a really fun day!

The next night, Friday, Craig and I had planned on having another temple date, but then Kendra announced that she was going to the movies with Evan, and Ryder had a field trip to DC and would need to be picked up late.  And I didn't really want to leave Colton and Camille home alone for that long, so suddenly everything was a mess (kind of like my mornings!).  But we managed to figure it all out-- we found a ride home for Ryder (and I took those boys to the school at 6am, so it was a mutually beneficent!), and Colton and Camille were invited by the Lundgrens to go to a skate night, so we didn't need any babysitters and Kendra could enjoy her date, too.  Huzzah!  I love it when things work out so well!  😅

Camille and Wren

Walker and Colton

And we got dinner at Chuy's after the temple, so what more could you ask for?