Despite the airplanes and the dog barking, we were able to get a reasonable night’s sleep in Vegas.  The kids were beyond wild the next morning while I tried to get them ready for church.  It was like herding cats and and I kept hushing them and trying my best to keep them quiet.  Finally at one point I thought, “Ya know, I am so tired of  killing myself to keep them quiet and behaved in all settings.  It just doesn’t matter that much except to me.  I just make everyone miserable.” For those of you who know me, you are cheering right now for this little moment of self awareness. My husband the most.  So I stopped trying to fight the losing battle.  Not five minutes later, we got a phone call from the front desk telling us that we needed to be quieter because the people below us were complaining.  Yeah, it was pretty much as mortifying as I always knew it would be.  So much for self awareness.  Mother Witch returns.  Sorry, Husband.

After church we headed south again.  At some point throughout the day every child asked, “Where are we going?” To which we would smirkingly answer, “To Disneyland!!”  But that answer wasn’t good enough for them.  They wanted us to tell them either how much longer we’d be driving or what city we were in. We’ve decided it’s just the next generation version of “Are we there yet?”  They are smart enough to know we aren’t there yet.  They want all the info in between. 

I have to put in this little tidbit about Libby and auto flush toilets.  She is deathly afraid of them.  They are usually loud and obnoxious and as soon as she is done, she jumps off the dreaded toilet and plugs her ears.  I have a hard time getting her to go until she is desperate.  As you might imagine, we had to use them a lot on this road trip.  She was getting  pretty gun shy and on 0ne particular  potty break, I had to reassure her over and over that it would be ok, that THIS one wouldn’t be so loud.  Poor girl, that toilet flushed no less than three times while she was still sitting on the toilet!  I used to be grateful for auto flushing toilets.  I’m not really anymore.

Here we are after dinner that night.  Jack in the Box did not agree with me and Liberty was just super tired.

As we pulled into our hotel Sunday night Liberty said, “That was so long!  We could not even have walked here!” 

Nope.

We headed to Las Vegas today, our first stop on the road to Disneyland.  While packing last night Reagan actually spent 20 minutes trying to convince us that he needed his own room at the hotel.  This is wrong on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin.  His audacious display of entitlement almost made us cancel the whole stinking trip!  Ok, not really, but we seriously thought about leaving him home. 

This morning when we finished packing the car and told the kids to get in, Liberty asked, “Where are we going?”  To which Levi answered, “We’re going to Disneyland!!”  Duh!!  Not five minutes into the trip they were asking for food and before we even got out of Boise, Cade was asking, “Where are we?”   However, once out of Boise, for a good hour, we had glorious peace and quiet while everyone read a book or colored.  It was awesome!  That’s when you know you are in a good place.  Obviously, since that gloriousness did not last the other nine hours, we are not in as good a place as we would like to be.  But I can’t complain.  I think we made it the whole day without anyone asking us if we were there yet.  And we only had to stop for one roadside pee stop!

 
The kids definitely paid homage to the electronics god today, and then some.  But oh, what an easy day it was because of it.

When we pulled into Vegas for dinner the kids were all super excited to see their first palm tree. 

Then finally, after fighting over who would sleep on the couch, smearing toothpaste all over the bathroom counters and yelling loud enough to wake all of our hotel neighbors, the kids settled into bed.  We are now looking forward to a lovely night sleeping directly in the Vegas Airport flight path and next door to a barking dog, because apparently at the Marriot Residence Inn you can bring your dog. 

Stay tuned for more…

We told the kids today!!!

As is typical with our children, there were more questions than surprise. 

And, as is also typical of our children, Legoland is the big draw. 

Another Halloween has come and gone.  It’s amazing to me how fast time flies.

Here is the star studded cast this year.

The Beautiful Princess.  Second year in a row

The Adorable Soldier (don’t tell him I said that)

The Studly Secret Service Body Guard

And President Ronald Reagan

Every president needs a bodyguard

They totally came up with this themselves. 

The Trading

And here it is Wednesday and the candy is already gone!

I don’t remember my mother ever carving pumpkins with us.  Maybe she did, but I only remember my dad doing it.  The same was true of camping. Now I know why she never did either of them!

Liberty was very happy to let someone else clean out her pumpkin.

Cade and Levi would have been too, but we made them do a lot of their own.  Note the absence of smiles on their faces.

The finished product. 
Taken two nights later because Reagan spent SOOOO long carving his masterpiece.

Reagan was at scouts when we took this, so we had to catch him later.

Don’t you just love how he’s oozing enthusiasm!  I LOVE tweenagers!!!  And I am sure I will love teenagers EVEN more!

We went to the pumpkin patch last week.  Walk through it with us!

Agritourism at its finest:

Ok, now for the real deal!

The Hayride

This picture perfectly captures the current attitudes in our household.  In all things, not just pumpkin picking.

So does this one.

The Patch

Liberty, Cade and Reagan found their pumpkins pretty quickly.

While Levi searched…


the others tried to keep from dropping their pumpkins. These were by far the heaviest pumpkins we’ve ever gotten. 

Still Searching…..
 
He still had not found the perfect by this point.  Levi takes pumpkin picking very seriously.

I’m sure this guy was looking for a pumpkin too.

Success!  Finally!

Love Fall, love the pumpkin patch!


Love how it looks on my doorstep!

I find myself today in a strange situation.  It is something your typical ‘stay at home mom’ experiences, but as I am not a typical ‘stay at home mom’ because I homeschool, it is not something I experience…ever.   I am home with a sick Liberty instead of at our weekly homeschool co-op.  Reagan left for school at 12:15 and the younger boys got a ride to co-op.  So here I sit with one kid all afternoon and that one kid is upstairs sleeping.  My house is quiet. My mind is quiet and not super frenzied with to do’s.  This must be how the other half lives!!! 

But, being the person that I am, I can’t just sit and do nothing, so, you are going to get a blog post! 

This week was the primary program.  It was the first and last time all our kids will be in the program at one time. 

It was the last time because Reagan turned twelve this week!  I can’t believe he’s that old, but there is no denying the prepubescent-ness happening at our house lately. 

He got a bed for his birthday!  That does sound pretty boring, I admit, but he has been sleeping on a mattress and box spring for a while so this was a step up!  He’s been wanting a captain’s bed, so it really was exciting for him.

We also got him a book on Ronald Reagan.  He loves Ronald Reagan, understandably, and has quotes by him up all over his room.

Liberty and Levi had a head on collision this week and though Levi walked away from the crash unscathed, Liberty did not.

Sorry for the up-the-nose shot.

My favorite thing about Halloween time is making sugar cookies with the beautiful fall colors outside my window.

My good friend, Linette, from New Jersey (now CT) came all the way out here to Boise to visit and go to Time Out for Women with me last weekend.  We had a fabulous time and it was so good to talk with her again.  Some people you just fall right back into it with even when it’s been a long time between visits and busy lives keep us from staying in touch well.  We both had three boys when we moved to NJ and then both had a girl for our 4th.  There are some things only a mother of three consecutive boys understands.

Thanks for coming, Linette!   I’ll come to CT next time!

Here are just a few things we’ve done the past few weeks.

I took Liberty to the library and she, as always, walked up and down the aisles selecting only the pink books. 

We went on a field trip to a local nature center and the kids had a run in with a bear.

We’ve been studying chemistry this year and we just finished up learning about the Periodic Table of Elements.  I offered a treat to anyone who wanted to color in and label the entire periodic table.  Cade did it, which was no surprise.  What surprised me is that Levi did one.  It took him an hour, but he did the whole thing!  This kid is pretty amazing.  He reads anything he can get his hands on lately.   

At the risk of offending any liberal readers, I’m going to share this bumper sticker I saw the other day and the dream bumper sticker I thought up as soon as I saw it.

My bumper sticker would say, “GET YOUR LIBERAL PAWS OUT OF MY WALLET! Sincerely, American Women.

This is Not related in ANY way to the bumper sticker, but the other day as we were driving along, Liberty suddenly asked, “Mom, is left wrong?”  I laughed good and hard and said, “No,” and then explained to her what Left and Right meant.(See? Not related in ANY way.) 

I’ve told you before that Liberty dances anywhere, anytime. All she needs is music.  Well that includes the department store.

We’ve been doing a little decorating and we now have a bat cave.

This is looking down into the basement.

And this is coming up out of the basement.

They are trying to get out the front door.

We enjoyed conference weekend in style.

Forts in the basement.

Please ignore the pink explosion on the floor.

Reagan can play four or five songs now on the cello.  Every day I’m grateful he chose the cello instead of a squeaky violin.  This is much easier on the ears.

That’s October so far!

We spent the first weekend in September in beautiful Ogden Valley just on the other side of the Ogden mountains.  The occasion was the 2014 Hymas Family Reunion.  I would love to say we all had a great time the whole time, but that would be stretching things a bit.  Taking our kids anywhere these days is just hard.  They fought pretty much non-stop and I was in tears half the time, I was so embarrassed.  Oh, and we single handedly ruined the once in a life time family picture.  Ok, so the first two are exaggerations, but the picture?  Yeah, we pretty much did ruin that.  I apologize once again to all of Rock’s family for my lack of grace and well, the kid’s lack too.  But there were lots of good moments and here are the picture highlights.

This was the amazing view off the balcony.  Kudos to M & D for picking such a fabulous place!  Who knew just over the mountains in Ogden was this gem!  It is even appropriately named Eden.  We will definitely come back here. 

Seven Little Hymas people!!  The kids LOVED getting to know and play with their cousins.

The boys traded Pokémon all weekend. 

The biggest thrill of all was the game room downstairs.  Ping Pong, Shuffle board, Pool and Air hockey. 

The hot tub was a pretty close second. 

No one drowned during this activity.

It was fun to see Rock catching up with his siblings.  In this picture they are laughing about how Sam and Rock used to have hair.

We roasted marshmallows,

Played with bubbles,

And sparklers too!

We also went to the Pineview Reservoir for a very chilly swim and some jet skiing!

The best part of the weekend really was watching the kids play with their cousins from across the country.  Wish they were closer!

Thanks for making it happen G & G!!!

We attempted a family camp out for the first time in years Labor day weekend.  It was a test run of just one night because the last time we tried camping as a family it didn’t end well.  See this post: Camp Washout.  In some ways this trip was a success and in some ways it was not.  But I will indeed go camping again even though the campout was not without its problems.

Our two hour drive to Lake Cascade took four+ hours because of a car accident up the road ahead of us.  We finally pulled into the camp ground at 10:00 PM and put up the tent in the dark with the help of the headlights.  We ate our hotdogs and smores and finally got the kids to bed close to midnight.  About five minutes after we crawled into bed it started pouring down rain.  It rained all night long, which meant that the probability of my sleeping in a tent dropped from low to 0.  At least we had put up the rain guard, which I thought I had been my brilliant idea, but Rock informed me the next day that he knew it was going to rain all along and would have put it up without my insistence.  The Punk knew I would’ve backed out if I’d known about the rain so he kept that little secret to himself.  He also kept the port-a-potties to himself too.  So much for his promise of flush toilets.

I laid there listening to the rain, stuck in my straight jacket mummy sleeping bag.  At some point in my life I’m sure a mummy bag was comfortable.  It’s not anymore.  After a while I switched with Reagan for a regular one and the straight jacket feeling lessened, but only slightly.  In the middle of the night, I woke up in excruciating back pain because my nifty air mattress was not doing the trick.  I searched in vain for my keys so I could get some Advil from the car and had to wake Rock up to get his.  At the same time Reagan decided he had to go to the bathroom.  While on his jaunt to the deep, dark, black hole that is a port-a-potty,  he saw some kind of largish animal.  This was apparently exciting for a young boy in the middle of the night while sleeping outside in said animal’s territory, but it was not exciting to me.  I think my trip to the car took less than five seconds total as I pictured being eaten by a mountain lion for a midnight snack.

While the rest of us made our failed attempts at sleep that night, Liberty and Cade snoozed away with no problems.  The sun rose early as it tends to do on campouts, but luckily, all the kids slept till 7:00 am, a record for camping.  The clouds had cleared and the sun was out so we crawled out of our tent to start the day.  Trying to keep little kids quiet in the early morning so as not to disturb other campers is always a challenge and Cade was sent to sit in the van no less than six times before he figured out that he should be quiet.  Just after we had sent him on one of those trips to the car, Liberty yelled as loud as she could, “Why does he keep yelling?!!!!” Despite the noise, we enjoyed bacon, eggs and hot cocoa around the fire for breakfast. Then we spent a relaxing morning fishing, rock throwing and exploring.  

The four hour long road trip.  This is a hug, believe it or not. And yes, that drug induced stare is directed at the DVD player.

Smores at midnight

Hot cocoa for breakfast

Fishing AND rock throwing.  Someday they’ll figure out that combo doesn’t work real well.

With the exception of the very long night, oh, and the very long drive, everything went well!  Cascade is beautiful and it’s always good to get up into the green mountains. We’ll try it again next year and maybe we’ll even go for two days!  Though I’m not sure I can go two days without any sleep.  And next time I’ll check the weather report.