First day of school

Alyssa and Blake on the first day of school!  Here they are in their new clothes looking way too big! It is hard for me to believe that Alyssa is already in 4th, where does the time go?  Blake was very excited to be a second grader.  His teacher this year is Mrs. Larson.  When he found out who is teacher was he said " I have Mrs. Larson and she spells her name wrong."  He thought Larsen was the only way to spell it!  Here's to looking forward to another great year.

Here is Alyssa with her friends Shayden, Jessica, and Maggie.

Camelot Family Reunion

The Larsen family reunion was at a place called Camelot near the Strawberry reservoir.  This is the third year we have been there with Doug's family.  It is a large cabin with exterior rooms on the side, so it can sleep most of Doug's large family.  In total there were 16 children and 16 adults. That is a lot of people to keep track of and  feed every day. 
The Strawberry river runs along side the cabin where we were able to do some tubing.  It was very cold so we only did it a few times, but it was lots of fun.  Blake was able to go with all the boys and learn how to shoot a gun.  I don't know how excited I am about that, since I am not a fan of guns.  So Blake was told to not expect to get to do it again until he gets to scouts. He seemed fine with that.
 Alyssa and her cousins had a fun time catching and playing with snakes!!  Yes I said snakes, she and some of her girl cousins loved the snakes.  I am so glad we were able to leave them behind!  Saturday afternoon I was outside enjoying the day when I saw an eagle fall out of the sky!  We think she was trying to catch something on the side of the mountain, but instead hit the mountain and fell.  She looked like her wing was pretty hurt, but we were able to get up pretty close to her and take pictures.  We think she had a nest up above and so I hope she was able to get back up to her babies.  When we got up the next morning she was gone, so I choose to believe she got back to her nest.  Alyssa was quite concerned and though it was cool to get up close to one in the wild.  Katelyn had a fun time crawling everywhere and getting into as much trouble as she could.

Injured Golden Eagel

Snakes!!!!!

The Wedding!

Thursday August 19th was Doug's brother Scottie's wedding.  It was a crazy week with a wedding, and a family reunion all rolled into four days! Scottie became engaged to Erica about five weeks before the wedding, so there was a lot to do very quickly.  They were married in the SLC temple and while we were waiting for them to come out it began to down pour.  Some of Scottie's friends got caught out in the rain out by the temple.  So Doug decided to go out and rescue them!  Armed with three umbrellas he ran out so they could all come back inside and get dry.  Too bad Doug wasn't so lucky, he was soaked and so was his jacket.We kept hoping it would slow or stop, but it never did.  So we ran out and took one family picture and that was it! 

 

 

Later that night was a wedding dinner with dancing.  Here are all of the grandchildren in Doug's family with Scottie and Erica.  Erica and Scottie planed the whole night.  So we had Thia food for dinner and a mariachi e band for entertainment.  The rest of the pictures are after the dinner with lots of dancing and fun.

This is Alyssa with her cousin Siena, they had so much fun together.  They have so much in common, and Alyssa was so excited for her to visit.  She lives in NC so they don't get to see each other often. 

Below is Alyssa dancing with her uncle Scottie during the money dance.  It is a tradition in Erica's culture to pin money to the bride or groom and then dance with them until someone else cuts in.  I think this is a great tradition and lots of fun! I think people in Utah should do this instead of having a receiving line, it would be much more fun!

Here I am dancing with Blake, this was the one and only dance we could get him to do.  All he wanted to do was play with his boy cousins.  He looks horrified having to touch me!  Thanks a lot Blake!

End of Summer water party!

All Summer my kids wanted to have a party.  It start with them wanting to plan a Mid-Summers Eve party, so I said you plan it and will do it.  They started drawing fairies and planning what games they would play, they are very creative kids.  As the Summer went on it kept getting postponed.  We also learned that Mid-Summers Eve is at the end of June, so we kind of missed that. I felt so bad that my kids didn't get to have a party with their friends, I suggested an end of Summer water party.

 Blake and Alyssa each got to invite a few friends and we had some of the kids that live on our street attend.  We had slip-n-slides, sprinklers, water guns and a pool with lots of water to go with it.  Of course Doug had to get in on the action and all the kids decided to gang up on him.  He went for pay back and used the hose on all of them.  The kids played a water balloon toss game, and they went through the balloons fast.

We had a pizza for lunch with watermelon, lemonade and popsicle to end the afternoon.  I am so glad I gave in and let the kids have a party, because it was so fun to watch them with all their friends.

Katelyn is standing at the sliding door wanting to go out and play with all the kids

Campout

Doug and some of the other dad's in our ward decided to take their kids camping!  Giving the mom's a night off, well kind of off.  So they did some hiking and some climbing and repelling!  Well from what I hear my kids did a lot of crying and freaking out!  It was something they had never done and were a bit scared!  Blake hit the mountain and kind of bounced off and Alyssa decided to climb down instead of repel.  They had a fun time with their friends and their dad!

Thanksgiving Point Gardens

It's two dollar Tuesdays in August at Thanksgiving Point!  So we decided to take advantage of it, and have a fun family night before the kids went  back to school!  We started off with a picnic and then we headed for the children gardens.  The kids wanted to play in the water, and were very excited.  When we entered they had assigned times for you do the Noah's ark water area.  We had awhile until our turn so we went and wandered the gardens.  Because this was a special event they had opened up access to the regular gardens from the children s garden.  None of us had ever done the main gardens, so we talked the kids into staying and missing out on the water.  Once they saw the water falls they didn't care at all.  We had so much fun wandering the gardens, and couldn't believe how massive they were.  Alyssa and Blake and I had a rolling race down one of the large hills.  No one won, because we kept rolling into each other.  Even Katelyn had a fun time crawling around on all the grass.  It was a great night, glad we took advantage of it!

If you noticed our new family photo at the top of the page it was taken in the gardens that night! 

Balloon's

Sandy City's balloon festival!

We got up early on a Saturday morning to go see the balloon launch at Storm Mountain park.  Too bad there was too much wind and all they did was blow them up and then let them down.  It was kind of a let down for us and the kids!  Oh well we decided to go to Chick-fil-a for breakfast, that almost made up for the ballons!