The fun of it all!

We started out our August with a great family home evening with a sister in our ward.  I had to teach a class for RS on family home evening and had the opportunity to meet Sis. Barksdale from our ward.  She so graciously offered to come over for FHE and bring the lesson AND treat for all of us!  What an amazing sister!  She had the kids captivated as she taught about the contents and translation of the Book on Mormon.  She then had us (on our own "Golden Plates") write in our own ancient writings, and then pass them to the person to our right and they had to translate our writings, like Joseph Smith translated the Golden Plates. Here are our writings...

This is Sis. Barksdale and all of us working hard to create our own ancient writing. 

Here is Meg stroking her chin as she tried to translate.  Some of our translations included...

"For behold, I will try to be kind to those around me..."

"And it came to pass that Dad is weird."

"And it came to pass that Megan will make my bed because I made her's today."

And of course, "Blake is Awesome!"

Gardening in Texas has been really rough this year and aside from a very few mini tomatoes and 1 squishy cuc, the only thing our garden will grow is yellow squash.  I cannot waste even one.  Needless to say the kids have had their share of squash.  We even made a vegetable regatta boat (That you race in a rain gutter) with one of the squash from our garden, and Jason won his race with it.

So needless to say the kids weren't thrilled when I came in with this large one, one day,  We went to bed that night and Grant couldn't figure out why his pillow was so heavy, only to find the infamous squash stuffed inside.  We had a great laugh and got the hint that enough was enough!:)

We got to go with some great families in our ward to float the Comal River just south of us in New Braunfels. We went with the Buxton's and the Velasquez's and a few stragglers from other families and had great time!  It was no white water like we'd see in Idaho...not even like the Boise river, but it was a leisurely trip in some cool water.  We all worked up a sweat pumping up the tubes, cause it was probably already over 100 by 10am.

The kids had to rest before we walked down to the water:).

As we got down to the launch area we quickly saw that we were not the only ones with this great idea to beat the heat.  It felt like a thousand others were joining us on the water, and with the amazing speed we were all going, we sometimes got to know others better than we would have liked c(:!  It was nice to see some green though, since so much is brown these days!  The scenery was great and there were some beautiful homes along the way.  We even floated though the middle of Schllitterbaun (the HUGE water park down here.)

(Blake's in the back in his cool new white sunglasses)

(This is the back of Paige's head and me) Taking pictures and trying not to get the camera wet was a challenge!

Some of the kiddos at the end (Jason, Megan, Paige, Sophie and Brennan).  They had a blast jumping out and swimming along the way. 

The teenagers.  They all tied their tubes together and were off.  What a great bunch of kids though!!

This is Josh, Aiden, Blake, Nick, Elli, and Mari. 

One night Jason was earning some extra chore $ by scrubbing out the garbage cans, and Paige got creative and  set up a drum set with the drying cans.  She was making quite the music when...

Jason came along and after a few seconds the two of them came up with this...

Blake planned our last FHE and took us all cliff jumping again and invited several other families.  Then we had a fun BBQ last night with some more families in the ward.  We are so blessed to have such great people in the ward!  There's nothing better than great company and great friends for the kids!  What a fun time of life and we are all enjoying the..."the fun of it all!"