FHE Games

We just finished Family Home Evening and I was reminded of some favorite Family Home Evening games when I was a kid. Horse and Swing were the two favorites. I think both of them my parents took a beating for. Horse we would climb on my Dad's back as he would run around the coral. I'm not as old as my dad was when I was little but my knees can hardly handle it (that also could have something to do with a tile floor). But swing was the real favorite. When playing swing one parent would grab our arms and the other would grab our feet "One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and for to go!" Then we would be tossed mercilessly onto the couch. I'm surprised no springs broke (or maybe they did, I was probably too young to notice or care). I may not remember any of the lessons but I certainly remember the games!

Fun Fun Fun!

John and Hyrum in Timp Cave

We had a great trip to Utah. We got to see lots of family and had lots of fun. While there we hiked to the timpanogos caves with my sister Natalie and her family. Despite having lived in Utah for six years this was my first time visiting the caves. It was really neat. A steep hike but well worth it.

Cousins!

And the kids got another junior ranger badge. That's 3 in one summer! They were so proud and so excited to get another one and promptly forgot about them the next day.

Hyrum knows how to enjoy his ice cream!

The kids had so much fun with their cousins. They played for 3 hours out in the kiddie pool, and were so sad when they had to come in (we didn't want them to be burnt to a crisp). I wish they had cousins to play with all the time.

smile please!

Does anyone else have this problem when trying to take pictures of their kids?

If you never have this problem, I don't want to hear about it.

4th of July

We had a great 4th of July. While visiting my parents we got up early to take the kids to see the hot air balloon launch. If you ever have a chance to go you should. It’s neat to see them being blown up and taking off.


That evening we got together with John’s family for dinner and to celebrate Michael’s birthday. There were fireworks at the school just a couple blocks from my parents house so we were able to just walk down to them. Nice to not have to worry about parking. Hyrum doesn’t like loud noises but he did pretty well. He kept his ears covered and would bury his head in my chest but kept peaking out to see the fireworks.
Davis Family

Grand Canyon

Note the kids sporting their Junior ranger badges. They were so proud.

What a fun weekend! This last weekend we got to go to the Grand Canyon with John’s work. AAA was sponsoring a service project there. They provided free admittance to the park and 2 free nights of camping, and we spent Saturday morning cleaning up the park. I think this is my 4th trip to the Grand Canyon and I still can’t get enough. We all had a lot of fun but I'm not going to write too much because we are busy getting ready for our next trip. Here are some pictures though!

Hyrum, John, and Alan

Alan loved having big trees to climb. Bonus points if you can find him in the picture.

Smores!

Ethnic Cooking

I love food from all over the world and I love to try and cook all different kinds of food too. Two helps to my cooking has been these cookbooks. For Chinese cooking I like Yan-kit's classic Chinese cookbook. Brent and Anna introduced me to it and it is fabulous. The recipes are great and they even show pictures of the ingredients that are more unusual to help you find them at the store.

The other cookbook is Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking. I love Indian food and this has given me some great recipes. I'll have to admit though that it's not the easiest to follow. It uses litres and grams instead of cups and pounds. So I always end up guesstimating exactly how much I am supposed to use. For that reason I have only tried a limited number of recipes in this book, but it sure is good food.

I have to tell you before you rush out to buy these cookbooks where my favorite place is to get cookbooks from is. The Library! I actually don't own my own copy of the Chinese cookbook yet (but that is soon to come). You can get lots of cookbooks at the library and then decide how much you really want to buy it instead of ending up with yet another cookbook in your cupboard that you only actually use two recipes out of. Lets hear it for the Library!