Alpine 2021- Good Times Seasoned with Puke

We did a big ol' vacation for most of the month of August. Elliot missed the first week of school, but not the second because his school shut down because of a Covid outbreak. 

First stop: Alpine for a Johnson family reuinion! Getting there is always a hike for us. We flew into Salt Lake and spent a night on the Farm with my Uncle Dave and Aunt Audrey. 

Honoring the tradition of letting little kids drive on the rocky road that dead ends at the farm. 

Things got a little swervy. 

Aunt Audrey was awesome and had these rocket things for us to play with. Elliot was SO into it. Isaac enjoyed the novelty of lush grass.

Big thanks to Uncle Dave and Aunt Audrey to treating us to some Reed's Dairy ice cream!

This picture captures the essence of childhood summertime. 

Time for a walk to one of my favorite places on earth.

They liked it as much as I did.

Then it was on to Alpine!

The big group picture! "Only" around 100 people showed up this year. If all of the desendents of my Grandma and Grandpa Johnson showed up, there would be more than twice that many. 

My dad and his siblings

Within minutes of arriving, my kid were drinking soda in the “secret fort” under the tree. And thus began the three week sugar rush. 

My gal by our cabin. We scored one that was close enough that our baby monitor reached the back corner of the lodge.  Sooo nice at nap and bedtime. 

Annie with her Alpine Store spoils. 

My autistic cousin Rohan was intensely obsessed with the Billy Joel live from Shea Stadium 2008 concert. He constantly re-enacted the concert and enlisted others to perform the opening act for him and be his back up singers. He scored this awesome golden microphone at the alpine store that really upped the experience. 

Isaac taking a turn on the very out of tune piano when it wasn’t being used for a Billy Joel concert

I was in charge of a kids nature walk. I whipped out my classic duct tape nature bracelet activity. At the end I realized that two of the boys had live grasshoppers taped to their bracelets. 

Kristen contributed with delux bubbles blown with a rope ring supported by two dowel rods. The main ingredient was veterinary grade lubricant with a big "NOT FOR PUBLIC SALE" warning on it. I was very amused by the thought of my cousin obtaining contraband items for the family reunion. 

The Glen clan was in charge of the Women's retreat this year. My task was to attempt to reign mom in. I quickly resigned myself to utterly failing at that task and somewhat helped with the garland you see depicted here. We did a speed dating type game to get to know relatives. 

Annie was quite shy around most of her relatives... except for the time that she started taking her shirt off in front of the whole family at bonfire time? Not quite sure what she was thinking there.

Alpine highlights:

-My cousin Amber came equiped with power tools and constructed an obstacle course in the field that my kids spent many hours on

-Kristen and Amber (really the stars of the show this year) also put together an intense escape room in old Chester Hall. Elliot and I did it together with a few other relatives, and it was a true challenge. 

-For the bonfire this year, we broke into groups and each had to whip together a musical number. My group did a rousing rendition of "in the jungle" with a truly magnificent falsetto solo by Josh Williams.

-Someone put together an awesome video to celebrate what would have been my Grandma's 100th birthday. They read her life history and put pictures and music to it. I laughed, I cried, it was wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDJ07Q78EA

Alpine Lowlights: Isaac got sick. Like puking off and on for an hour during the middle of the night. It was a unique challenge dealing with the puke in a cabin with all our kids. We managed to not wake up Elliot and Annie while changing bedding and containing the puke in our cabin without running water. We got through the night with flashlights, wipes, and hand sanitizer. The next morning Aaron took all our contaminated things to the laundry at the hotel where Mimi and Grumpa were staying. Then we had a fun time trying to keep Isaac distanced from everyone else for the next while. Fortunately he was pretty good about staying in his stroller and the second night we made it through with no puke. 

After Alpine we went back to the Farm for another night, where we found these neat unicorn hats in the basement crawl space. 

The next day, we planned on going to church in Idaho Falls and then driving down to spend a night in Orem with Aunt Wendi. That plan quickly went out the window when Elliot woke up puking. I think Isaac had a new round as well, or maybe that was before Alpine... it all kind of blends together in memory. Mimi and Grump went on without us while we stayed at the already contaminated house of the long suffering Dave and Audrey. 

The not sick gals got to go on a lovely sunday farm walk. 

Luckily the stomachs settled down pretty quickly. The next day we woke up early to drive 4 hours to Salt Lake followed by many more hours flying to Virginia.

Mean Buttology

Once upon the time when Elliot was about to start Kindergarten in the midst of a pandemic I considered homeschooling him. I spent a week or so researching various curriculums and downloaded some free materials. Fast forward to this summer when I decided to try out the free marine biology course from The Good and the Beautiful (www.goodandbeautiful.com/free-downloads/marine-biology/). Claudia had done it with her girls during the year and I had been admiring all the crafts and worksheets on their walls. 

Marine Biology (or Mean Buttology as Annie called it) was a great hit! Elliot does really well with any kind of one on one attention. He was very diligent with his invertebrates book and proudly taped every experiment, craft, and worksheet to a section of the wall that he labeled "The Marine Biology Wall" with a brick patterned sign. The chair where we kept in progress work got labeled as well. He made a strip of paper to mark off the whole "Marine Biology Zone."

I failed to document the Marine Biology Zone very well. This is the only picture I have with it in the background. 

I learned a ton and I could tell that a lot was clicking with Elliot as well. Annie was enthusiastic about the science experiments, but protested mightily when we did any of the reading/writing activities. A highlight was the blubber experiment. We put our hands in ice water, then tried it again with a butter insulated zip lock bag glove thing. The funny part was that we had Annie go first. We told her to put her hand in the ice water and see how long she could leave it in there. She made a funny face but kept it in for a really long time before asking if she could take it out. Elliot and I went next and both only lasted a few seconds without the blubber glove. I don't know if it is a testament to her toughness or her obedience. She's a champ!

The reward for working hard and learning: A trip to the Aquarium in Phoenix! We are always happy for excuses to go visit Mary and this was a good one. We have been to this aquarium before but not for a few years.

Elliot and Andrew in the shark tunnel! 

Cactus Harvest

 I did a new thing this year! I was going on a morning jog on the wilderness trail when I came across a short saguaro with some fruit I could reach. It was kind of pink, so I went ahead and picked it. 

Showered version of me with my prize! I mixed the fruit into a bowl of yogurt for breakfast. 

Annie and I both gave saguaro yogurt a thumbs up!

Emboldened by our success, I recruited some helpers to come do a more intense harvest.

You may think that children would be tempted to whack each other with such lovely long sticks. 

You may be right. 

We got it under control with a few targeted threats. 

Our targets

Knocking off the fruit of a relatively short guy. Bree was an excellent catcher. 

It was harder than it looks! Those fruits are stuck on hard and you really have to push to knock them off. 

Saguaro fruit does not have spines on it like prickly pear fruit does unless it gets them from the side of the saguaro. I wore a glove just in case. The fruit was kind of mushy and not all that great by itself. We froze most of it to toss into smoothies. We also froze some to make the first ever Saguapsicles (patent pending, this is going to be big time folks)

Saguaro fruit spread on some peanut butter toast

Of course I also had to do my annual prickly pear harvest. I borrowed Stephen's juicer. The juicer works really well but just takes a long time. Next year we will pick and juice in one day and then do jelly time the next day. 

Behold the glory! A pitcher of prickly pear lemonade, some setting jam, and some canned jelly in the background

Elliot rides a bike & Loses a Tooth

 I've been trying to persuade Elliot to ride a bike for about 3 years now. We tried bribery. We tried peer pressure. What finally worked was seeing Annie zip around on her strider bike. He couldn't stand for that! As soon as he expressed a slight willingness to learn, I borrowed a bike from the Sevey's and made a sticker chart. Riding the bike around the gym when we were there for volleyball/playgroup would earn him screen time. Then there were four challenges at the end for increasingly long routes around our neighborhood. 

I can't give Elliot too much shade for his bike avoidance since I learned just a month before him. I made it 3 decades without learning how to ride a bike. My mom got hit by a car while riding a bike when she was 16 and spent a year in a wheelchair, so there is some understandable bike trauma there. My siblings all learned somewhat at scouts or neighbor's houses, but I never got on a bike until my college roommates pushed me around the Helaman Halls parking lot. It was terrifying. I went on a bike ride with 9 year old Blake that summer. He left me in his dust while I crashed into various rocks and then walked the bike home. Aaron got me on one once, but I never got past the point where I was in constant panic mode- until this year! My friend Bethany Mulder gave me her old bike before she moved away and gave me some lessons. She deserves a sainthood for her patience. Now I can ride and I love it! 

We learned in the church gym. He didn't have training wheels. At first I would hold/push him back and forth while he got used to peddling. Then I would let go for the middle part before helping him stop at the end. Then he was able to ride and stop by himself after an initial push. Then a few sessions later he was zooming around all by himself while my heart did these little pride explosions. 

The grand prize was for riding his bike all the way to Stanley the rock snake and back, which is a little over a mile. Wild Katz proved to be well worth his efforts! 

One of the few pictures I got of Elliot at Wild Katz- he was running all over the place exploring while I kind of kept up with the littler kids.

Isaac absolutely did not know what to do with this clear floor panel on the upper level of the jungle gym thing and it cracked me up.

In other news, Elliot lost his first tooth! It got loose when he was eating a burrito on our campout and fell out a week or so later when he was eating some cantaloupe. He instructed me to document the food related details of this experience for the blog, so here it is folks!

Camping

We finally made it camping again! There was supposed to be an unofficial ward campout in July. Unfortunately pretty much everyone who said they wanted to come ended up being out of town or scared off by the monsoon weather predictions, so it ended up being just us and the Nelsons. We managed to downgrade to a smaller campsite. It was predicted to be a rainy weekend, so the campgrounds were emptier than I've ever seen them.  

Just a little cutie on a stump

Isaac approves of camping. We stuck the baby in a pack and play in our 2 man tent by himself while the rest of us slept in our bigger tent. Worked like a charm. 

These kiddos loved exploring the campground and climbing on all the things. Meanwhile, the other kiddo worked hard to eat as much dirt as possible while his parents cooked dinner. 

Annie now sticks out her tongue every time someone points a camera at her

Elliot was constantly asking me to "take a picture and put it on the blog"

Sad that he couldn't eat more dirt, but happy to be carried around

It started dumping rain right as we finished our short hike. Elliot put on his rain jacket and had a great time making a dam with rocks in the mini rivers in the dirt road. The rest of us hid in the car like a bunch of wusses and the Nelsons headed home with their sleepy baby. It wasn't long before the rain passed, so we went out to play some more.

One of the prettiest places I've ever made sandwiches! That creek was pretty much dry a few hours earlier. 

I was kind of annoyed that Elliot wanted to just wander around the picnic area instead of going on one of the trials, but our wandering ended up being my favorite part of the trip. 

We found 5 forts! They were all unique and all big enough to fit two kids. The biggest fit our whole family. It was an absolute blast wandering around and saying "maybe we will find a fort over here" and then finding them! Big thanks to whoever took up fort building as a pandemic hobby. 

Elliot is quite proud of his rock climbing abilities. 

The ol' pine moustache

And the classy pine unibrow paired with some chewed food

There's that stuck out tongue. Again.