Celebrations, Pioneering and Projects

June is always filled with lots of celebrating at our house.  This year it started with an anniversary staycation.  We went to the temple, ate at Tucanos (we had gift cards!), stayed at the Anniversary Inn in Salt Lake, and got up the next morning and went hiking up above our house.  It was a lovely way to celebrate 22 years together!

Grandma Lana's beautiful garden.

We went to a chalk art show.  You'll notice I am bundled up.  That's because June was rainy and chilly!!

I refinished our basketball standard.  It was pretty rusty and the paint was all faded and chipped away.  It was a quick and easy project that the kids helped me with.  Apparently I forgot to take a before picture...

Lots of rain in June!  It made everything turn nice and green!  We are so grateful for all the water we got this year, both in the winter and in the Spring.

Maren turned 18!  Maren loves to be independent and has been ready to adult for a long time!  She is super responsible and hard working.  She is so good with kids and animals.  She is so helpful to me.  She brings a lot of joy to our home and we are really going to miss her when she moves out in the Fall!  

You may notice the cake looks shorter in the second picture.  It didn't like it when I transferred it and I lost a layer!  Haha!

Elias, Isaac and Grandma Lana came to celebrate with us.  Elias got his license so they drove themselves down.  It is fun to have all the cousins (and us) growing up!

Lili and Abi came the next day and stayed for a couple of days while their parents were on a cruise.  We had fun with them!

Matching shirt and ice cream cone.

I finished Maren's t-shirt quilt!  However, she was on her senior trip with her friends, so I never got a picture of her with it.  But Ryan modeled with it for me.

It was Father's Day!  Rod came down for dinner and some ping pong.  We love Dustin and our grandpa's!  We got the best!

Our dog is weird sometimes.

Our kids are weird sometimes.

We had a Pioneer Trek with the youth in our Stake!  Dustin and I went along on the food committee.  Our boys both went, but we couldn't convince Maren to go.

There was cell service there, so we got to talk to Avery briefly on the first day.

Grant's group doing the water crossing.

Food committee doing our thing.

Being on the food committee was a lot of work!!  We pretty much worked constantly from 6 a.m. until dark.  But we did get to break away and watch the kids have fun, now and then.  And we got to do the hoe-down with them on the last night.  We always love being where our youth are!  

The equipment/food people stopped and looked at some old kilns on our way to the next stop.

The kids ate well.  We had a taco restaurant cater the first night, and the Samoan ward brought roasted pigs the second night.  The food committee made all the sides.

All done!

Avery's birthday was the day after we got back from Trek.  She is 20!!  She got to call us on her birthday and she opened our package while we were on the call.  It is fun to be able to talk to her so often!  She is happy and doing great things!  She is serving in Enumclaw, Washington right now and there is only a small Spanish branch there, with 2 sets of missionaries.  So, she does a lot of service in the community.  She always has a really positive attitude and brings so much joy to the people around her!  And us!

All that rain made our flowers pretty.

I refinished our front door!  It felt like I had a lot of time in June.  That rarely happens anymore--where I feel like time is moving slow.  So it was nice to feel like I had time to get things done that I've wanted to do.  *Spoiler alert--about the time I finished this project, we got really busy again!