Rocky Mountain National Park

The weekend before school started we went camping in the Rocky Mountain National Park.

I am not much of a camper, but the kids sure do enjoy it.  So I grit my teeth and go along with it every once in awhile.  It is a good reminder of how to use survival skills during the Apocalypse I suppose... 

 Look at those happy faces, waiting for the fire to be built.

 Supervising the wood cutting.

 We always end up camping next to a creek, no matter where we go.  Luckily, this time, my kids stayed dry.  Usually they are water hazards.

 Enjoying dinner.  We had tin foil dinners, roasted hot dogs, had smores and we even cooked a cobbler in the dutch oven.

 After dinner relaxing.

 For breakfast we made hotcakes.  I remembered to bring everything but my camping spatula.  It is super hard to flip hotcakes with plastic forks.

 We enjoyed the weekend hiking around the National Park.  We even saw some moose!  It was a beautiful weekend.

 Anya up on the Tundra.  It has taken the grass 500 years to grow as much as it has, according to the literature we read.

 Hiking the Tundra

 We can definitely see why it's called the Rocky Mountain National Park.

 observing the Tundra.

Riding home in style.  We sure do love traveling in our Wanda the Traveling Honda.

New Arrivals!

We had two new arrivals in our extended family over the summer!  

On July 10th, her big brother's birthday, Camilla Jane arrived.

She is my brother's second kid and we love her to pieces.

 The proud papa...

 Big brother loves her too!

In August, my sister had her first baby.  He arrived before his due date like a good little boy!  Lots of dark hair and looks just like his dad.  I had the privilege of being in town when he was born.  It's so much fun to love on a newborn.  Babies just don't stay little for very long!

 Jonathan Ezekiel Victor Sebastien 

Anya was in town with me, so she got to meet her new cousin too.

Yellowstone!!

Our summer trip this year was to Yellowstone National Park. 

It was fabulous.  We ended up renting a big cabin with Matt's sister's family in Island Park, ID.  It was so fun to spend that time with them enjoying the awesome sights of Yellowstone.

The whole gaggle of us waiting for Old Faithful

Who needs to see it when you have the book mark of it!

There she blows!

The Grand Prismatic Pool

Gibson Falls

Norris Basin

I think this is all of us!

Mammoth Hot Springs

Upper Falls at Yellowstone's Grand Canyon.

Yellowstone's Grand Canyon

What?

Love these two!

Norris Basin again!

Swimming in the Firehole swimming hole.

Bison traffic jam.

We saw a Grizzly!

This was taken from our car with my normal camera lense.

We saw another Grizzly eating it's kill.  I think it is or was an Elk.  This was taken with my "spy" lense.  He was actually just a brown dot to the naked eye, very hard to see.

The Saphire pool

The loft in our cabin rental!

It was a great cabin.  It inspired us to look for a cabin to buy that we could rent out, but also use for family events.  It may never happen, but it sure is a nice dream!

Passing time while dad is away...

Matt went away for about a month, the month of June.  While he was away we decided to pass the time.  We ended up going on a girls night to Wicked.  We left the boys home with a babysitter. It was awesome.  Still one of my favorite musicals!

Bonus, the Turners (and about half our ward. Hi Brother Rich!!) was there that night too!

We also went to the Circus.  Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey of course!  We realized that the last time we took the kids to the circus was before Matt was deployed.  The boys had never been.  So We decided to go, with our good friends the Turners again!

It was a blast!