September 2015

We started off September with a fishing/camping trip on the Wild Strawberry River over Labor Day weekend.  Daniel and I fly-fished with Tristan and Oliver, and the younger four played around and had adventures in and out of the river.  Packing clothes for these kinds of fishing/camping trips is the worst – it’s usually freezing cold in the morning, and we’re out early down by the river and bushwhacking through all sorts of wild terrain, and then by mid-day it’s hot and sunny and even though they need to start out the day with enough clothes to protect them from the cold and wildness, at some point they always end up in the river – sometimes when it’s still cold, and later when it’s hot.  After a few trips like this, the kids kind of figured out what their favorite combos were; somehow those turquoise leggings became Cindy’s Official Fishing Pants. 

Here’s Lizza, Henry, and Cindy on a fence:

Oliver all set to go in his waders.  Rachel and Cindy partnering up.

Lizza started out with Tristan. They worked out a system where she got to net any fish that he caught.

Taking breaks to catch caterpillars and do some reading:              


Finally warm enough to swim a little bit in the river:



Henry being risky and excited and enthusiastic – my favorite way for him to be (maybe minus the risky). 



Later in the afternoon I took the younger four who were ready to be done back to our campsite, which was right next to Starvation Reservoir.  We hung out and got dinner ready while Daniel and the older boys kept fishing. 

This water was freezing.  Normally water of all types tempts me to get in, but on this day I felt just fine about staying out and taking pictures while these crazies swam around. 


Cooking hot dogs for dinner over a hot fire helped everyone warm up:

And then finishing up dinner with some Dutch oven peach cobbler helped everyone feel pretty happy about life in general:


After that we added telling creepy stories by the fire to help everyone be just the teensiest bit scared to sleep in their tents that night.  Thank you Henry for your scary, scary stories.  Also, I am still proud of that fire, even though this happened two years ago.  It was a tricky thing to build a fire early enough in the day to cook our hotdogs, and then keep it going all through the evening without running out of firewood before the boys got back super late from fishing . 
 

We had just enough left for a fire the next morning, which was a good thing because it was cold. 


Day two of fishing. 


Here’s Oliver doing some shadow casting like Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It.  Just kidding, he’s just regular casting.  But this picture seems like he could be shadow casting, if that were a real thing. 


Me and my boys.  Henry and a snake.


Here’s Rachel and Cindy, probably in the middle of The Family Game.  This is their favorite game to play when we’re camping or fishing, or basically any time they are outside and feeling either tired/hungry/hot/cold/bored, etc.  It works for all of these situations because how you play The Family Game is you pretend you live out in the wilderness and you don’t have any food or shelter or parents, and lots of bad stuff happens to you but it’s all a big adventure.  I’ve never actually played, but I picture it kind of like the Oregon Trail game that we used to play when computers were first invented. 

Although it is most helpful on long fishing/camping trips, it has also been played several times at baseball games, football games, and soccer games, by anyone who wasn’t interested in watching the actual game.  Cindy also plays it regularly with her best friend who lives next door.  Cindy will come in and ask for snacks, saying, “Mom, I really need some granola bars because we’re pretending it’s really cold outside and we’re lost and we don’t have any parents and we only have one grandma but she’s really mean and we have to search for our food, so I want to hide some granola bars and then we’ll find them.”  She loves to pretend to be poor and starving and orphaned – the sadder and more dramatic the better. 


Some other September things:

Cindy made these lines of cars (I am not sure why, but most of my kids have liked to set cars up instead of drive them around.  I guess we’re not really car people.  We’re more “set things up in lines” people):


Lizza played a lot of soccer, and we fly-fished some more up American Fork Canyon. 


We went to football games:


And big family dinners:

Oliver broke his hand playing football.


And Lizza and Cindy made this fort out in the backyard, complete with a bin full of hundreds of books:


Sometimes when the older kids were all at school, Cindy built her own forts right in the kitchen, and this is what those looked like (super cozy):


She also put together her own fancy outfits for when we had to go out and about running errands, and this is what those looked like (princess gloves, pinwheels, a recorder, fairy wings, and a metal box full of “special things”):


Here’s Daniel in Ann Arbor, at the BYU-Michigan game.  Sad, sad game, but a fun trip.

Also fun – Brandon Flowers concert in Salt Lake with our older four. 


Last September thing – Henry, Lizza, and Rachel being cute sitting on rocks out in the backyard.  I think this was picture day, and I knew I wasn’t going to order any of the school pictures, so I took my own. 


That’s it for September.