I was glad we made it home in time for Spencers wedding.  He had invited us to the ceremony which was really nice.  It was neat to be able to see inside the newly remodled Ogden Temple.  It was sure beautiful.  Kelley and I took out our own endowments there 36 years ago!  It's not anything like it was then though.  (Although I don't remember even seeing the inside of the temple when we went through for the first time.  I was pretty nervous and it was a lot to take in.)  I remember I was so worried I would forget all the things I had learned and not know what to do.  They didn't have a temple prep class back then like they do now, so I didn't have any idea what to expect.  Boy I sure think it's great that they do that now...it would take away a lot of the worries and you would know that you aren't expected to remember everything, making it a lot more pleasant experience!

Anyway, it was a lovely ceremony and they are a beautiful couple.  She is really a sweetheart and a darling girl.  I'm so glad Spencer found someone to share his life with.  He has been through a lot in his young life and deserves some happiness.

 

 This is Cliff and Emily's new little guy

 After pictures on the beautiful temple grounds, we walked over to this  great mexican restaurant for a family luncheon.  It was nice to get to visit with Kelley's family...Kim, Mia, Fred, Renea, Mark, Chris and Lisa, Emily, Cliff, Maggie and Andrew.  We don't see them very often so this was a happy occasion to get together.

 They had a real nice reception that night at the Weber campus.  It was fun to have the whole family (except Kellen) there.  We took some  pretty good family pictures but I can't find them!  I'll have to get them from the kids. 

 Gosh I'm sure grateful for the blessings of the temple and so glad that families are forever...I find my greatest joy when I am with my sweetheart and these kids and can't imagine my eternity without them!

A couple weeks ago, I got to go spend a week with Camille.  Kellen was going out of town for work  so I was glad I could be there to help her out a little bit.

We had such a fun time together.  I just can't get enough of this little bug. She is just so happy and  pleasant to be around.  It's a good thing cause if Camille had another one with Sam's temperment, I think it would push her right over the edge.  He can be the sweetest little guy, but then he can be the most difficult, unreasonable little stink you ever saw. 

Sunday morning, we were all getting ready for church.  Camille is really organized and  has the kids clothes all pressed and ready the night before.  It was the Primary sacrament meeting program so she wanted Liv and Sam to be ready to go and dressed nice.  So battle number one started before we even began to get dressed.  When the kids had had their practice for the primary program the day before, Sam had a bad experience.  When he said his part into the microphone, it came out really loud.  All the kids laughed at him and he got really upset.  He decided then, that he wasn't going to talk into the microphone again.  Camille talked to him till she was blue in the face trying to get him to understand that if he just talked normal, it would sound just right in the microphone.  He just kept saying he was not going to do it.  It wasn't until Olivia and Jordan talked to him and told him they were sorry they had laughed at him and that it would be ok when he talked into the microphone, that he said he would do the part.

Then It was time for him to get dressed.  For some reason, he has serious issues about wearing church clothes.  It's pretty much battledome every sunday when it's time for him to get his clothes on.  Camille and I had gone shopping saturday and found him some nice pants but he wouldn't have anything to do with them.  He busted out a full on tantrum, screaming and fighting with Camille.  She stays very calm....I don't know how she does it.  I tried to help her reason with him, but he wouldn't listen to me at all.  Camille said she knows how to handle him , so I just left them alone and got the other kids ready to go. I don't know what she said to him, I think some ninja turtle bribes were involved, but after a few minutes,(that seemed like an eternity) of listening to him scream, he settled down.  Camille got his pants on him and we were off to church. Suzanne and Jordan came and sat by us in Sacrament meeting.  Camille has done such a good thing with Jordan.  She picks her up for church every week.  She always invites Suzanne too, but she will never go...only to this program where Jordan has a part.  Suzanne came to the primary program last year too and was really touched by the spirit she felt there.  Camille said she bawled through the whole program.  She is pretty set in her ways though, and won't have anything to do with the church.  Jordan, on the other hand, has blossomed in primary.  She loves to go with Olivia and did a great job with her part on the program.  Anyway, after the sacrament, all the kids were supposed to go up on the stand.  We were holding our breath, hoping Sam wouldn't freak out.  He headed up to the stand, but then then came running back and said he needed his sun glasses!  Ha!  Thank goodness Camille had them in her bag!  I guess he must have felt safe behind them cause as soon as he put them on, he was fine to go up there and sit on the stand.  He was a pretty good boy up there...(as good as a three year old can be) and marched up there when it was his turn and said his part into the microphone just perfect.

   

 We went shopping on Saturday while Kellen was home to watch the kids.  When we went in the store, it was nice and sunny.  When we came out, it was pouring rain...I mean buckets of rain!  We made a run for the car but were absolutely soaked by the time we got there.

 Other fun activities...

 Bubbles

 Bowling

 Trying on masks...I love Emily's face!

 Baking

 Camille had the sister missionaries over for dinner Tuesday night. We made a nice dinner...(Camille's  yummy chicken cordon bleu, and I made some rolls ( the kids will always eat those)   We made apple pie for dessert and it was delish!

 Emily is so funny and cute.  Everytime she would put her blocks in the right hole she would raise her arms up and say Yeaaaaaaa!

 Camille was wanting to change her one wall around a little...one of her shelves had fallen down so things were kind of off balanced.  So we took everything down and patched the holes in the wall. (toothpaste works just fine!) She had some paint she had saved from when they painted  earlier, so we covered the holes we patched and it looked pretty good!

 After everything was dry, we hung up a new arrangement  (how does it look? stupid?..oh dear...I was laughing so hard I about wet my pants)with these coolest hanger things that just stick to the wall...then when you want to take it down, you just pull on it and it un-sticks from the wall!  These are my new favorite thing!  It doesn't even leave a mark!  I think it looks  real nice!

We started talking about me going home and how dumb it was for her to stay there alone while Kellen was out of town and Olivia had the next week off of school for fall break so we decided she should come to Utah for the week!  So we got Liv out of school early on Thursday and headed for home.  The ride went really well.  The kids were great so we powered through and got home by about 11:00.

Friday night was our long awaited family reunion. It was so great to see everyone.  We had a good turn out too.  I sure appreciated the support from my family. 

I have to really give all the credit for reunion success to Angie. Us girls may have a little bit of a problem when it comes to making  a decision, so when we were trying to pin down a date and place for the reunion and not having a lot of success, Angie jumped in and said she would take care of the details for us. Hooray!  She got online and found a park about right in the middle for all of us and reserved a pavilion.  Then she made a cute invitation and sent it to all the sisters.  We got it out to our families.   She said she would make sloppy joes and a drink and assigned us all to bring a salad and dessert to share.  It really just all worked out so good.  She even had some guessing games and a word search with all of our names on it that was fun. We stayed till it got too dark to play RACKO (how cute and thoughtful of her to bring that game...who knew it's Brenda's favorite too!)

It was fun to see Brian and Holli's new little Briggs  and Kelsie and Steve's baby Kai.  And right before we left, Brenda said Ivy and Anya had a song to sing.  Ivy busts out "I see the moon" just perfect!  It was really sweet. I bet mum and daddy were close by listening and enjoying that.

 Marks family was here for a visit so it was nice to see them.

Sure am grateful to be part of this wonderful family.  It's so great to see everyone's family growing and doing well.  Love them all so much

 So, I have a lot of pictures on this post but they scan over about a month and a  half of time.

Katie and Kelley have been searching for barn wood ever since she has been here with us.  They have found some on KSL...that's where they found this first load.  It was up in north Logan just in this guys back yard.  It was in a big pile that we picked through and took what we wanted.  They said it was from an old barn that had been torn down.  It looked kind of junky on the top, but when we moved boards around, we found a big stack of real nice big boards.  They were so long, Kelley had to cut some off the end to make them fit in the truck.

 Kelley and KC are so strong!  They were carrying two of these huge boards at a time.  It was pretty hard for Katie and I to carry one together!  Ha!

We drove by mum and daddy's place on the way out of town and I wish we hadn't.  The yard looked terrible.  It looked like he has let the lawn die and there were weeds all up the driveway and in the rock garden.  I felt like crying.

 

 

This next bunch of pictures is from a barn in Lehi that Kelley found on KSL.  The guy said we could come tear it down for a price.  So we drove down one Sunday afternoon to look at it.  Jimmy was at his sisters house so we picked him up on the way.

This barn was pretty big! They wanted us to haul everything away if we tore it down but we realized that was not going to happen.  A lot of the wood was not usable and it would take us way too much time to haul it all away.  We talked to him about it and he agreed to let us take it down, and take what we wanted, then just leave the rest for him to burn or whatever. (for a price)  It was still a good deal though because there was tons of cool stuff on this barn.  Some real cool doors and hardware and old beams.

 

 This guy (Chet) had three cute little boys.  One of them came out and showed us how to swing on his rope swing.

 On the way home that day, we ran into Spiderman on the freeway.  Decked out from head to toe.

 This was our next trip down.  We looked all around the barn, then kind of made a plan to how we would go about taking it down.  We started just by removing doors and inside walls that were neat looking.  Kelley and KC did a lot of sawing and Kate and I did what we could.  It was kind of fun to whack stuff with a big hammer and pull things down.  Then we carried the boards and loaded them in the truck.  Kate found a real old bottle  buried way under the dirt but when she took the lid off, it smelled so bad we didn't want to take it home.

We decided we'd give the little boy's swing a try.  I had forgot how fun it is to swing!

 This is what it looked like after we finished our first day of demolition.

 Kelley is the king of securing the load.  He makes sure it is done right.  (like most everything he does.

So this was our second demolation day.

They hooked a big chair up to the side of the barn, then hooked it to the truck.

They had cut a lot of the main beams but it was still holding up real strong.

Kelley tugged on it and it moved a little, but he started spinning his wheels.  So KC locked in the hubs and Kelley hit it again.  This time it came over with a big crash.

 I took a video of the barn coming down, but it was too long so it wouldn't work.  BOOOOO!  It was really cool!

 Kelley and KC got on the roof  and started taking the tin off.  It was a big job.  Kate and I went around and pried off boards  and logs that we wanted.  After they got the tin off, there were a lot of real nice long boards under there.  They pried the nails out (the people who built this barn must have found a sale on nails... seriously used more nails than I have ever seen!) and were handing the boards down for us to take to the truck.  They were really long heavy boards.  KC was trying to tip one over and he gave it a big push.  It did not go all the way over and headed towards Kelley.  He shouted "look out" and Kelley ducked just in time to miss getting hit in the head with it.  It hit him on the back really hard and made a big hematoma.  I can't even think about what that would have done to him if it had hit him in the head.  I'm so grateful he was protected! 

 We made a big pile for Chet to burn

 Kelley was giving me a hard time all day because I forgot my work shoes.  I really had to watch my step cause there were nails poking up out of the boards all over the place.

 They kept sawing and sawing, thinking the roof would come down, but it was really sturdy and strong!  They hooked the chain to it and pulled it a few more times and it finally came down. It seemed as though this old barn had a soul of it's own and even though it was very old and worn out, didn't want to give in and collapse.  I imagine if walls could talk, it would have some wonderful stories to tell of the animals it sheltered, the  warmth and protection it gave as new calfs were born there, and the childrens laughter that echoed as they played in the hay loft and swang on the rope swing.

 

 

 By the time we finished loading everything up, we were so dirty and tired...Haaaa! we all had dirt mustachs, but Kates was the best!  We will have to make one more trip...there were some great beams in the roof that were buried when it came down.  We will go get those next week.  Now they have some great wood to work with... I'll be posting pictures of their furniture soon!