Summer Highlights

"If odour were visible, as colour is,

I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds."

~Robert Bridges~

I always have mixed feelings about summer. First of all, I really don't enjoy temperatures anywhere above about 80 degrees, and even then I need a breeze. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have this ingrained idea that summertime should equate to "the lazy days of summer," yet I don't seem to have many of those, and that idea is in direct opposition to Aesop's fable of "The Grasshopper and the Ants," which is also ingrained in my head. This often leaves me feeling raw, as if I'm in the middle of a great tug of war between multiple personalities!

Being a baseball family, summertime is packed with travel, travel, and more travel, and a lot of late nights under the lights of ballfields. While I love the inspiring changeup of seeing the world through a roadtrip and being in different places, and I love watching my kids play ball, the work is stacked up when I get home and all those late nights make it hard to get up and get the outdoor chores done in the cooler morning hours.

I love a rocking and rolling summer thunderstorm and the positively delicious aroma of rain on the wind as it kisses the dry earth. I love the heavy perfume of a patch of petunias and the invigorating smell of a just-mowed lawn or a field of cut hay. I don't like mosquitoes, earwigs, grasshoppers, and fruit flies. It's a mixed bag, for sure.

I wouldn't trade four distinct seasons for anything, though. Each has its blessings and banes. As always, gratitude and attempts at balance go a long way in a happy life.

As August slips away, I like to look back and see where I've been and what I've done so I know the summer didn't just pass me by and leave me wondering "Where did the summer go?" Even acknowledging small delights and happy surprises keeps the scales of joy and contentment tipped in my favor. Here are a few highlights of this year's summer.



A round of family Frisbee golf in a canyon park, with the inevitable retrieving of a stuck Frisbee,
which was followed by the inevitable Insta Care visit for a tetanus shot:

Ma and Pa Swallow, returned to raise another brood on my front porch:

Encountering an entire bush in motion with moths...

...and catching one!

Embracing gravity with friends:

Reflecting on the ways that God keeps his promises:

Seeing sacrifice and perseverance pay off:

Summer night lights:

Shoshone Falls:

Seeing, smelling, touching, tasting red:

Simple joy in a cute pair of festive shoes (and, no, I don't have another pair exactly like this :) )

Field trips and  bucket list destinations:

Watching my stars shine:

FINALLY having a close encounter with a muskrat, after nearly a dozen wetland field trips:

Being torn between watching the ball game and watching the osprey who were watching the ball game:

Experiencing triumph in tests and trials, gratitude for miracles and medicine, recognition and respect for the power and reality of the priesthood, and witnessing the wonder of the human body and its ability to heal:

My first (very cool) encounter with a Western Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar:

Apricots! Early spring weather finally cooperated to give us a great summer harvest:

Peachy paradise in crepes and smoothies and in juicy goodness dripping down my chin and wrist:

A sweet-tart plum harvest turned into jelly and fruit leather and more smoothies:

Watching my boy bloom where he's planted:

Celebrating another year of marriage:

Discovering a "new" swimming hole:...

...and meeting the swimming hole's local residents:

Conquering some personal fears and inhibitions and loving it:

Getting one missionary ready to leave:...

...and welcoming one missionary home:

Having the whole family together again:

Some additional highlights include some media that was particularly special this summer.

Here Comes the Boom is not a new movie; it's been around for a few years. We didn't know anything about it, though, until one of my kids saw it on the shelf at the library and checked it out. We. Love. This. Movie. Besides being funny and entertaining, it has some good messages and things to think about, especially in the realm of education and inspiration, as well as the American Dream and citizenship.

The following videos are to songs that meant a lot to me this summer. I'm not necessarily recommending the videos because as I've posted previously, videos often ruin songs for me (though I do like these ones). But they're the easiest and most legal way to share music. So, if you don't want your perception of the music influenced by the videos, play them and listen with your eyes closed.

The first song is "Humble and Kind" sung by Tim McGraw. I don't normally listen to country music, but I love, love, love this song and it has influenced me greatly this summer. I came to listen to it while driving my son to a doctor's appointment. The song came on the radio and not knowing it but realizing it was country, I switched the station. My son said, "Don't!  Go back. I like that song." Naturally I wanted to hear it if he was so insistent, just to see what he liked about it. And then my whole world changed, along with how I look at my son.

These next two songs are by Paul Cardall. Interestingly, they are on a CD I have had for years but not listened to. I got the CD for free during some promotion, listened to it once, and at the time decided there was only one decent song on the album. This summer I was cleaning out some things and was about to toss the disc in a giveaway pile when I decided to listen to it one more time to be sure it was junk. What I've come to believe is that I was meant to have this CD but I needed to really hear it for the first time now. I wouldn't have purchased it, then or now, so it was given to me. I think I had a sort of stupor over it when I received it so that when I needed the message in these songs, they'd be "new" to me and therefore have more of an impact.

Well, summer is over. It would be a sad, sad thing if summer ended and there was no autumn to trail it so gloriously. I hope your summer was blessed. If you think it wasn't, or that it was over too soon, make a highlight reel for yourself to count your summer blessings.

Adventurers Wanted - Book Clubs, Part 1

Let's talk book clubs. Ours was so much fun today!

Once upon a time, the vision in my head of a book club was adults sitting around with something akin to tea and crumpets, philosophizing and expounding on the virtues of Victorians or the vices of Russian authors.  (Sorry to my Russian readers. I still haven't recovered from reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as a teen.  Maybe I should revisit it as an adult to make peace with it?)  I envisioned a book club for youth to be a cross between that and the discussions we had in my AP English classes in high school.  

When my three younger children needed some sort of activity to do with friends that was both social and educational, I decided each needed his/her own book club, but they needed to be reinvented book clubs.  Thus, I've tried to tap in to both the needs and personalities of the members of each club, and also tap into the ideas and activities in the books.

In "Book Clubs, Part 1" I'll share a detailed narrative of today's meeting.  In "Book Clubs, Part 2" I'll share highlights of past book clubs to give you a range of examples of ideas.  

The reading for today's book club meeting* was the first of the "Adventurers Wanted" series, Slathbog's Gold.  Most of the boys cruised ahead and have also already read the rest of the books in the series that are published to date.  These books were a big hit with the boys.

First, I posted a sign on my front door in invisible ink to begin the adventure, representing the magic sign main character Alex saw that started him on his first adventure.

Next, I measured each boy for his weapons, just as Alex was measured in the book.  I handed each boy the weapons they measured for, which included things like a boom-a-rang, a giant fly swatter, a plastic baseball bat, a rope.  (These were just cheap things I purchased at the dollar store.)  I then checked that everyone had their "magic bags" (backpacks) loaded with lunch, liquids, and their new weapons, and we headed out for a four-mile bike ride from my house to a trail head at the mouth of a nearby canyon.

My best laid plans went awry before we even arrived because I had tasked my older boys to get there before us and lay wait in the woods to ambush the book club boys like the bandits in the book, but my older boys underestimated how fast the younger boys would ride their bikes, therefore those of us on bikes got to the trail first.  To distract the younger boys, I sent them through the woods to the river so my older boys could sneak ahead on the trail in the opposite direction.  

Now, being boys, and Cub Scouts, they didn't leave home without pocket knives, which means they immediately took to the trees and sawing off some limbs and skinning them for  swords.

Then we began the hike.  They made whistles of snake grass along the way.

We had hiked long past the point where I thought my older boys would be hiding.  Here's where the whole thing got really adventurous.  I forgot to mention that earlier I accidentally encountered what I assumed was a man relieving himself on the other side of the river.  We reached a point on the trail where we were kind of closed in and anyone could be hiding in all sorts of places.  As the boys paused to look at the river, a rock landed in it that none of us had thrown.  The boys looked at each other. Rocks began to fly over our heads and bushes were shaking.  It alarmed the younger boys; they shouted out some brave threats and then kept going on the trail, looking back over their shoulders.  They saw more movement and could tell that someone was following us.  I secretly called my oldest son to see if that was him behind us, and he said that it wasn't.  So I became alarmed, thinking back to the guy I'd seen earlier.  As we trudged ahead, the younger boys continued to spot someone dashing here and crawling there from bush to bush.  I kept wondering how much further until we reached my big boys.  The younger boys were under the impression that I'd hidden treasure somewhere along the trail and they wanted to find it already and get out of there.  

All of a sudden P1 came running over the hill at us with a club.  The younger boys freaked out, until they realized who it was.  I told them he was a bandit and to go get him and claim his treasure. But the treasure was with P2, who had gone running back the other way.  Long hike and long story short, the younger boys finally did catch P2, "beat him up," and won his treasure.  (If you're thinking this sounds awful, it was all play, and you have to read the book to see that this wasn't teaching delinquency.)

The treasure was gold and gems, aka Rolos and Ring Pops.

I should also mention that the adventure was heightened by the intermittent rain that fell, which the boys pointed out was perfect because the adventurers in the book got caught in a storm as well. 

After all this, my older boys went home and the book club boys went back to their tree to eat their lunches. We talked about the book as we sat there.  After spending another hour or so in the woods, climbing some more, whittling some more, walking the river, and having a knife throwing contest, we rode our bikes the four miles home, stopping to inspect three road-killed snakes along the way.  It was a grand adventure, perfect for the book we read, but also an example of turning reading into more than just a solitary, sedentary activity.

*Normally there are six boys in this book club.  It's been hard trying to jive everyone's schedules this summer.

A funny side note is that when I woke my older boys this morning and gave them some instructions for the day, which also included some economics reading, P2 rolled over and said, "Fantastic. School work and I get to get beat up.  Great day."