Wrapping Up The Summer Of 2015

Seeing as how August is almost over, and how everyone's kids are back in school by now, I'd better sneak in another quick blog post with the rest of our summer 2015 "miscellany." Here's what we managed to squeeze in for our last few weeks of freedom, before my girls headed off to school.

The girls did a little hip-hop dancing!

No sooner had we arrived home from our Colorado vacation, than we got word that our friend Cindy (who runs a hip-hop dance studio in town) had a few openings for her week-long dance camps. Lorelai and Celeste had both done these summer dance camps in years past, and really enjoyed them. Best of all, Aurora was now old enough to get in on the hip-hop action as well. So, on a whim, I signed up all three of them.

Lorelai was in the older girls' class (8-11 year olds), and she had a lot of fun, as always. I don't know if she will ever have a steady "career" as a dancer, but she sure does enjoy these hip-hop classes over the summer (she is starting to think of them as her "summer thing"!). Watch her in this video, as she does her whip and her nae nae (whatever the $*!% that means; I'm too old to understand most of this stuff).

Celeste and Aurora were in the 5-7 class, and they had so much fun going together. I was a little hesitant to send Celeste at first, since she wasn't all that thrilled with the hip-hop dancing last time around. However, she warmed up to it this year, and they loved the dance they got to perform for the parents (inexplicably, my daughters are big fans of the band Fall Out Boy, and this is one of their favorite songs right now).

Will my girls ever take one of Cindy's hip-hop classes during the school year (she offers weekly classes on 6-week rotations throughout the year)? Only time will tell. At least they helped them pass the time in the waning days of summer.

Everybody got slumber parties with Grandma!

Just as they'd done at Christmastime, each of our girls took turns having a one-on-one "sleepover" at Grandma Barrett's house. I am so grateful that Sandy has done this with the girls; it's such a good opportunity for them to get to know their Grandma a little better. Each girl was treated to a dinner out with Grandma, followed by a movie night, and then a home-cooked breakfast and shopping the next morning. Each girl came home with a new outfit and lots of smiles.

Aurora was the first girl up, followed by Celeste a couple of nights later. Lorelai was the last one, partially because she had another commitment at the Green Valley Country Club the same day...

Lorelai participated in a golf camp!

 Now that Nathan is way into golf, he wants to get the rest of the family just as excited about it. He took me golfing with him on his birthday, and he often brings the girls along with him on afternoons when he golfs. At the very end of the summer, we went one step further and signed Lorelai up for a kid's golf camp, called First Tee. It took place at the Green Valley Country Club, right next to Grandma Barrett's house!

The camp wasn't very long; it ran over two days, with three hours of golf instruction each morning. But Lorelai LOVED it! She learned a lot, she made friends with the other kids in the program, and she got to spend time with Grandma at either end of the program. Plus, she got a cool new shirt too.

She looked so preppy and cute and grown-up. And later that week, we found a picture of her in the local newspaper too. First Tee made my daughter famous! Afterwards, Lorelai told me she wanted to go golfing with Dad more often. I'm sure we can arrange that, especially as the weather cools off. Hopefully in the next year, we can sign up Celeste for First Tee as well...I suspect she will have just as much fun as Lorelai did.

We also went on a few outings in town before school.

We got wet at the zoo!

I have posted many, many pictures of the Reid Park Zoo on our blog before; you probably think you've seen the whole thing by now. But our zoo membership is close to expiring; there's not a lot of time left to relive our favorite moments! Only a few more times to get soaking wet in the splash park...

...watch the giant tortoises lumber around...

...and sample the Dipping Dots at the cafeteria! (for the record: the girls have been asking to try Dipping Dots for ages, and when I finally acquiesced, they were not terribly impressed. I TRIED to warn them, but does ANYONE listen to me??).

Still on the to-do list: ride the camels one more time, get a souvenir at the gift shop, and feed the giraffes. This is not to say we'll never visit the zoo again, but I suspect we will visit it a lot less as the years roll on. Gotta get our fun in while we can!

To celebrate the New Horizons Pluto flyby, we visited the Planetarium!

The University of Arizona's Flandrau Science Center is a small (but pretty cool!) science museum with a planetarium attached. The last time we visited the planetarium, it didn't turn out too well...the kids got wiggly and restless, didn't care much for the show, and had to go to the bathroom the whole time. Since a few years had passed, I thought we could revisit the science center and hope things would go a little better!

 

This time around, the morale was much improved. The planetarium show we picked this time was called "Exploring New Horizons." It was a general overview of the solar system, with particular emphasis placed on the outer planets. Just the week before our visit, the New Horizons spacecraft (partially built by the University of Arizona!) completed a first-ever-for-mankind flyby of Pluto, and new images and data from that distant (formerly known as a) planet was still flooding into NASA. Before the main video started, a museum proctor shared a series of the most recent images from the fly-by, noting that their information on Pluto would be updated on a daily basis, as they continued to receive information from the spacecraft, which was now heading out of our solar system.

For a space nut like myself, this was an incredibly cool presentation. I am so impressed at the scientific and technical prowess required to get such detailed, awesome data on such a faraway object; I love to speculate what will happen to that lonely little probe as it ventures further and further into the unknown. The girls seemed pretty interested as well...plus they loved the planetarium dome and the star projection onto the ceiling! I'm glad they were more enthusiastic about the whole thing this time.

Afterwards, we spent a little time wandering around the science museum, seeing what else there was to learn and to do.

They loved looking at all the exotic, fancy minerals...

 

...staring at giant fossilized trilobites...

...and climbing the geological "climbing wall." Overall, a successful trip to the science center!

The girls got colorful at a birthday party!

When Nathan went out of town for his brother Evan's wedding on August 1st, we had the weekend to ourselves. Celeste's friend Emma threw a birthday party, and on a whim I decided to bring everybody along.

 

It turned out to be a really fun party, especially for the kids. There were playgrounds to play on, kiddy pools to splash in, food to eat, and dogs to pet. But the highlight was the "color powder war" that culminated the evening...

 

 

Everybody looked really interesting by the end of the night! After thanking Emma and her family for the fun party, we snuck over to the new shaved ice truck not far from our home, and sampled some of their delicious ice-cold wares:

I don't know how long this shaved-ice truck will be hanging around, but we are in love with it! Very delicious and refreshing, especially on these hot summer days.

But wait! Late summer didn't mean just fun for the kids. I had a few notable events too:

I went through a big box of my childhood treasures.

Granted, this may not be exciting for everyone...but it sure was for me! While in Colorado, my mother handed over a couple of heavy boxes filled with many of my school mementos...trophies, certificates, concert/play programs, photos, and best of all...stories! I was quite the prolific author back in the day, and I wrote tons of stories, both for class assignments and for fun. Some of them (which seemed the height of dramatic skill at the time) were now pretty hilarious; others were just plain fun to read. The girls were almost as excited to see the stories as I was; they actually spent several days going through the box and reading many of the stories! Their one complaint; I wrote many of my stories in cursive, which they can't read yet! I'd better get started teaching them, so they can read my great works of literature to my future grandchildren someday when discussing our family history.

I had a dear friend stay at our house for a few nights.

Several years ago, I became good friends with Tawnya and Josh Clawson; they lived in our ward for a few years, then moved to an adjoining ward for another year or two. Two years ago, they moved back to Boise, Idaho, and we were very sorry to see them go! But they are still renting their house from down here, and so they have come back to visit a couple of times. On this occasion, I was eager to get caught up, and convinced the Clawsons to sleep in our home during most of their visit.

It was such a fun, exciting weekend. It was so great to get caught up with Tawnya; she is such a vibrant, exciting person who has an enviable zest for life! I look up to her in many ways, and admire her strength and her integrity. Most of all, I love her friendly, outgoing personality, and her boldness...she makes me laugh a lot and think a lot, too.

We didn't make any huge plans; mostly, we hung out at our house, eating, talking, and playing games. They have children close in age to our girls, and all the kids had a ton of fun playing for hours and hours. The Clawsons had spent most of the summer living in Costa Rica (just because they wanted to...that's the kind of adventurous souls they are!), and it was fun to hear about their experiences. Nathan and I are becoming more "hermit-like" as we get older, and the Clawsons' visit was a great way to shake us out of the doldrums! It was a good reminder to us that we have a lot of wonderful friends, many of whom don't live too close by. Hopefully we can be better correspondents in the future, both with the Clawsons and with our other far-away friends!

I was able to see another friend sealed to her family in the temple!

Last (but certainly not least!), on the last weekend of summer break, I was fortunate enough to see a really awesome woman be sealed to her husband and children for time and all eternity in the Gilbert Arizona LDS Temple. Laura has been a member of the LDS Church for most of her life, and she and her husband have slowly increased their church activity in recent years. They have been working towards a temple marriage for a long time, and it was beyond thrilling to see them finally achieve their goal.

Laura and Antonio have two adorable children: Brianna (who is Celeste's age) and Christopher. Seeing them be sealed to their mother and father was a very emotional, touching moment for me. I know the temple is a very sacred place, and that in the temple I feel closer to God than in any other place on earth. I know that sealings performed in temples bind families together for all time; death is but a temporary obstacle that can be overcome thanks to the sealing power of the priesthood. I hope that Laura will be able to go back to the temple often, and partake of that spirit as well.

I don't know if Laura will even remember that I was there that day (we don't get to see each other often enough!), but I hope she will know how happy I was to see her in the temple, and how happy I was to share that wonderful moment with her. There were several brothers and sisters from the ward who were able to attend, and I loved the positive feelings that were there. Going to the temple is a great way to finish off the summer; it leaves you with a hopeful, energized feeling. Let's see how far it carries me this fall!