Camping Trip-New Tent Trailer

 After years of discussion and looking online at trailers, we finally took the plunge and got one. We found this on KSL classifieds. We were going up to Orem for the baby shower and Scott was able to go look at it one day and then we bought it before heading home. We are the third owners but it is in really great shape and pretty well taken care of. It has 2 king size beds and a pop out table which adds so much room. It has a big storage area on the front and under most of the seats. It does have a little shower\toilet combo but we won't use it often. It wasn't something we had to have, but the rest of this trailer was so good we went with it.We are still figuring it all out. We got it home and opened it up to clean and inspect it. I washed and bleached and Febreezed so that it could feel more like "ours." I ordered new mattress covers, and thanks to Amazon Prime they were here in no time. The girls are so thrilled, they played in it and invited their friends in.

 the kitchen

 little fridge

 We packed up and left Friday morning just for an overnighter.

 The trailer with stuff in it

 We went south past Blanding to a place called South Cottonwood. It has the coolest stream with sandstone waterfalls. I thought for sure there would be people there because of spring break, but we got it all to ourselves.

 Whitney loved the sand, although she wasn't successful in making sand castles.

 The hot and tired pregnant lady decided the water was too tempting, and before we knew it all the girls were wading. It was fun, and good for these poor desert Utah kids who don't get to play in the water much.

 After the stream we drove up the mountain so Scott could show us some sites. This is an old mine transfer station.

 Isabel jumping

 Old stuff

 We had tinfoil dinners

 The moon was gorgeous and bright. The night was chilly and we were glad we had blankets. There is a heater but we ran out of batteries but it's ok. We will figure it out.

 Some cool trees by the camp

It was good to get away for a bit, good to take the girls camping which has been hard since they were so little (and horrible sleepers) and Scott works so much, especially in the summer. But we are committed to doing it more often and doing little trips as much as we can. The little guy will have to be flexible and we hope he will sleep. Thankfully the girls are big enough that it seems doable. We are grateful we can have the opportunity to make good memories for our family camping like we both did growing up. We will get these girls toughened up and teach them the ways of the camp soon enough. In the morning Dad cooked "dirty hash browns" and we played some more, packed up and went home to shower off all the sand and do the laundry before Sunday.

Cheer Camp 2014

 The theme this year was Throwback Thursday, the girls practiced Monday -Wednesday after school and performed at halftime on Thursday night. Each group had a different decade, even the cheerleaders found a bunch of old uniforms that were pretty awesome. All the girls did well, I did not have the best spot to see them all because this year all four were old enough to participate, but they all did amazingly and it was fun for them. (this is a fundraiser the team does every year)

 Isabel helping with a cartwheel across the legs

 Abby. Sara was the top of a little pyramid but was on the other side so I didn't get a picture but she was so excited.

 Sara did Walk Like and Egyptian

Bedroom #2

 Somehow we ended up with pygmy bunk beds, but Scott got them together without too much trouble and they work,so...

 The reading corner with their bean bags and lantern lamp

 Beds made up

 dresser and clothes moved from their other room

 Name boards up. Funny, we made these years ago and they ended up matching....guess they really like their fave colors.

Magnet boards up and ready to go.
There are still a few finishing touches to do, but overall their room is colorful, streamlined (you should have seen the bags of garbage we pulled out of the old room!)and hopefully a place where they can be happy and comfortable for many years to come.

Butler Wash Hike

We are so thankful that for various reasons Scott has had a few Saturdays off lately, yay! we wanted to do something fun and decided to go for a hike. Below are some pot shards found on the ground in a spot Scott knows. The girls love being archaeologists and finding things. I think it is amazing to find items left from possibly close to one thousand years ago just sitting there. We are always careful to leave things where they were, but we took photos. 

Black and white pottery

black and red pottery

corrugated pottery

the site, would have been an old kiva. (spiritual building)

We left that spot and drove to a place called Butler Wash. This is a developed area with a trail. We hiked to the cliff dwelling overlook. Well, Whitney rode. And she didn't want to get out at all.

The view.  It was a good day in San Juan county. I love that we can go do these things almost any time we want.

Bedroom Makeover Part 1-Painting

To update the bedroom, we are moving the big girls into the old extra room. This is the before picture. It used to be the office, kinda guest room, kinda junk room which the kids would destroy into mess on a regular basis. So we cleared it out.

Clean and taped. I love Frog Tape, by the way. Months ago in the summer, I was trying to find a project to distract myself from being sad. I took the girls to the paint store, hoping they could finally come up with a compromise. Up until then I had not really decorated their room because one would want "music" and one would want "space" themes. Or other equally impossible ideas. So after all my talk and a long time, we came out with....a bucket of blue and a bucket of hot pink. But hey, you are only young once. Then I got pregnant and felt so sick for months. I finally had my energy back and some ambition to get this done. The trick was to figure out how to mix both colors. I decided on a chevron accent wall. Normally I avoid trends, but I figured once chevron is out, we can call it the ZigZag wall. Then I painted 3 walls blue.

I had read a bunch of tutorials on how to do chevron. If I was going to do it, I wanted it right. So I did the math to get the stripes to hit at the edges of the wall and be as zigzaggy as we wanted. Also to be the right size. This size made it easy to use a regular roller.

This is my scale drawing, inches to millimeters of the wall, I then decided I wanted one more point and recalculated.

Then we drew points on the wall going down and used a level to connect them. After that used the laser level to mark the horizontal points. All were marked with sidewalk chalk.

Then we joined the points with tape, making sure to keep the tape on the inside or outside of the area we wanted the stripe. The little scraps show where we do NOT want to paint. It looks weird but it is correct.

Then we trimmed the points with an exacto.

A trick is to then go over the tape with the background color. If there is any leakage under the tape, it will match! and it seals it up nicely. Totally worth the little bit of extra time.

Then two coats of the pink. I probably needed one more to cover, but after days of painting, climbing and crouching with this belly, I was done. It was Saturday night and I was ready to clean it up. Taking off the tape was so fun, and it turned out really awesome. It is all in the prep. I am really happy with our result.

The finished wall, the other two (window and closet) are blue and the other side is pink. Coming next will be getting everything moved, new bunks built, and final touches. I think it will be a nice place for them.