And Yet More Summerishness (stay with me)

More summer fun! More photos!

First, our trip to Craguns, the old-timey lakeside resort in Brainerd, MN that friends in our ward have been visiting for years. We were honored to get an invite.  Here are a few snapshots of all the fun:

Ethan, Elise, and the other cool kids.

A little strumming on the beach. Elise is using another girl's guitar and was quick to notice how much nicer it was than the $75 Wal-Mart special we bought her before we knew that this whole guitar playing thing would take off. Now she's saving for a nice one--she pays half, we pay half. And we're happy to do it.

Muscles!

Tubin'! Nice and easy version.

Tubin'! Holy Cow! version.

The ladies of Craguns. And wonderful ladies they are. Hard to believe that I've known them all for less than a year. There are so many excellent people in this world for a person to meet.

Ethan, Elise, Jonas, and Not-Wyatt (although he does have a blond head) taking a dip.

Swoosh!

Blammo! (See how burned out I am on blogging? I'm resorting to comic book onomatopoeia.)

Forrest crossing the finish line of the Craguns 5K. The Hallstrom family actually bookended the 5K, since Ethan (who inherited his sense of direction from the Grandma of the Sweat side of the family--love you Mom) got a little lost on the route and wound up doing an 8K instead. He kept it together, though, and I was proud of my directionally-challenged yet emotionally mature young man.

So easy! So easy! (Sweat family: this must be sung as a jingle, Tony-style.) We all know what happens after you sing "So easy," yes?

This is the way most wake boarding ends. It's a life lesson, I'm sure of it.

All the kids in our Craguns group. Wyatt was the youngest by 4 years. So strange to go somewhere with a group and not have babies and toddlers running around. And again, yes, I realize this means I'm getting old.

The whole lot of us. We had a ball.

The day after we got home from Craguns I celebrated my 39th birthday. It was a day of grand festivity! (She said sarcastically.) Actually, I was totally okay with having a more low-key birthday this year. Birthday, shmirthday. I say we all just pretend I'm still 38, mm-kay? Anyway, I spent the majority of the day at Jonas's baseball tournament. Jonas did a great job. The team won the first game but lost the second, which made me kinda glad because if they'd won the final game would have been on Sunday and Jonas would have missed it. I'm guessing that's not so much in line with the whole "team spirit" thing, but it worked for me.

Power. Focus. Control. Jonas.

The above picture is particularly sentimental for me, because not only does it represent the final picture taken of Jonas's baseball season . . . but it also represents the final photo taken with my Nikon D40's lens. After taking this picture the lens suddenly seized up. Wouldn't turn. I popped it off the camera and when I shook it (which is what all humans do when something is broken, right? I bet even Great Apes shake things when they break in some evolutionarily-programmed response. Dave? Opinions on this?) Anyway: I shook it and it rattled. Not a good sign. The repair person at Ritz Camera agreed. So now I'm out one Nikon D40 lens until I can find $125 in my couch cushions.

Oh, and we washed Jonas's Nintendo DS. And remember how I left my Kindle on the airplane? Yeah, so we're getting ready to go on a cross-country drive to Utah soon and we're suddenly down a camera, a Kindle, and a Nintendo. I'm trying not to feel too sorry for myself and only occasionally succeeding.

But back to summer!

Soon after Jonas's team lost their game and my camera broke, Andrea, and Andrea's Grandma Cuca and the kids pulled up for a quick Minnesota visit. Andi is the Queen of All Roadtrips, and this year she took a northerly detour to come see us. And I'm so glad she did! Not only was it great to see Andrea and the kids (Jonas and Brandon had a most excellent time, and Wyatt and Whitney really hit it off too), but we got to meet Grandma Cuca. It is impossible not to fall in love with Grandma Cuca: her great stories, her Mexi-Texan accent, her homemade tortillas (!!), her insistence on cleaning everything. I'm so glad everybody came.

We visited the Como Zoo:

The Two "W" Cousins, hamming it up.

I love how Brandon has his arm around Wyatt here. Ethan wasn't with us--he was filming a movie with some kids from school--but I know Ethan would love being a docent at the zoo like these kids. We're going to look into it for next summer.

The only appropriate caption for this photo is "monkeying around," cliched as it may be.

Grandma Cuca and all the kids cooling off with a little ice cream

The Obligatory Giraffe Photo

Chillin' at the gift shop. Gift shops: they are like the Hotel California for children: impossible to leave.

We also spent a nice evening out on the boat:

Courageous kids braving the tube.

"Cousins. Identical cousins!" Okay, I realize that little jingle is one even I'm too old for, but I still know it. And they don't really look identical in this picture, but trust me: side by side? And especially from the back? These boys are IDENTICAL.

Elise also spent a week at girls' camp. She was a little nervous before she left because not very many girls from our ward were going, and she didn't know anyone from the stake. But she ended up having a really great time & came home all smiles.

Elise and her new friend Jazzy.

All the girls at Girls Camp. I'm sure Elise is in there somewhere.

Elise and her Dad on the day he came up as the "Priesthood Guy" / "Canoe Helper." She had a lot more fun that it appears in this particular photo.

Then, last but not least, Forrest and I celebrated 19 (!!!! seriously??!!!) years of wedded bliss last weekend. On Saturday we decided to get the heck on out of the suburbs, so we went and had some extremely yummy casual seafood (tacos, po boys, peel and eat shrimp) at a restaurant at Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis. Here we are, mostly obscuring the raging waterfall:

We really should take our sunglasses off when we have photos taken, but it's hard enough to ask a stranger to take a picture with your camera phone. Too much to ask that we remember to take our sunglasses off too.

After our yummy lunch, we went to the Walker Art Museum, a modern art museum in Minneapolis. You know, I feel like I'm relatively well-equipped to understand art, but some aspects of modern visual art still leave me thinking, "Huh," or even worse, "Huh?" (I've gotten to the point that I truly believe some visual artists want me to feel that way. It's not that I'm dumb, it's not that I "don't get it." It's that somehow, the ability to make another human being think "Huh," or "Huh?" now equals artistic expression of the highest order. I'm not sure that I buy it. Anyway.) There was some good stuff to see at the Walker, to be sure. I think our favorite exhibit was by this Scandinavian dude, Mark Manders. His art was kind of cool and weird and spooky, but the best stuff wasn't his art. It was his grandiose little notes about each piece. Dang, I was hoping some of his notes would be on the website, but they're not, and I can't remember them well enough to quote. There was one piece -- an arrangement of tea bags -- where he said something like, "I am absolutely confident that I have succeeded in creating the most perfect arrangement of tea bags possible." Suffice it to say that Mr. Manders is more than happy to claim his place as one of Humanity's Most Important Artists. I found it charming, actually.

And that's it for now. This week has been a pretty slow one, which has been nice. Lots of hanging out at home. Went to go see Harry Potter 7 (thumbs up, even if it was a little confusing for those of us who didn't read the books), went on another boat ride. I've even been able to scoot out of the house and leave the kids at home doing chores (and playing video games) while I go write for a while. Other than the ridiculously muggy heat, it's been a good week. I'm glad to have a little down time before the second half of our summer -- Road Trippin! -- begins.

Summerishness Part II

I just realized that before we leave on our lake trip with friends from the ward and have Andrea and the kids over for a quick visit and Elise goes to girls' camp, I'd better catch up on some of the other stuff I've been neglecting to mention thus far. Again, sorry to cram so much into one post, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

 Here goes:

1. Ethan went to EFY and loved it. I keep asking him to do a guest post, and perhaps he will, but until then I can at least post a couple of pictures. I stole these off of the Facebook page of one of Ethan's friends. (Gah, that's a complicated sentence to parse. "One of Ethan's friend's Facebook pages?" See what I mean?") Anyway: stole them unabashedly. The wonders of photo tagging, social networking, and skulky mothering.

Ethan doing stand up at the final talent concert. He looks comedianish in this shot, doesn't he?

I only include this one because there are girls in it, and girls were one of the highlights of the event for Ethan, I'm pretty sure. I would ask him to elaborate in his oft-promised guest post . . . but somehow I'm doubtful he will.

2. Right after Ethan got home from EFY, he turned around and headed to the Boundary Waters canoe area with his dad. We knew the forecast was full of rain, but I was hopeful that the storm would clear out fast and they would at least get a few dry days. No such luck. As I sat at home and typed "Ely, Minnestota" into Accuweather, watching the satellite image of swirling clouds gather right over the spot where I knew my boys lay protected by nothing but skimpy tent polyester (are tents made of polyester?? I'm too tired to google this, but you get my drift), they huddled in their tents while the wind shrieked and the rain poured, etc. etc. It weireded me out not to be able to contact them via cell phone, to be honest. But they weathered it well. (Ha! Weathered.) It didn't rain continuously and they were able to get out and do some canoeing and fishing, plus Ethan will be able to point to this experience as evidence that he can, in fact, do hard things. And, yeah, they did leave one day early, but their group was the last group out, so that scores a few manly points there too.

Stylin in the wilderness

The view from the canoe

Seeking the comfort of reconstituted fettuccine alfredo

Leeches! Not Ethan's foot. Or Forrest's. But still: Leeches! Wyatt was disturbed.

Gotta love a good poncho.

Father + Son + Toughing It Out Together = Manly Bonding

The Northern Pike

"You get to go home in three days."

3. Photographic proof of my good times with Michelle and Sally:

We realized we'd spent days together without taking any pictures at all, so right before I took Sally to the airport we asked a waitress at the restaurant where we were lunching to take our picture. Alas, that picture was deemed unacceptable (I won't say by whom, but needless to say that we all hold veto power over photo acceptability), so Sally, being Sally, unabashedly asked the nice guy sitting at the table next to ours to give it another shot. This one worked out. Although my hair doesn't look too hot. It was "staying up until 3:00 a.m. after watching the Justin Bieber biopic, then running a quick brush through it and curling the ends even though the top was a little greasy" hair. So you understand.

I love those girls.

4. Wyatt has been playing soccer! It's a really low-key, instructional type of soccer, but he's been having fun. Well--mostly having fun. When they played an actual game he fell down at the beginning and spent the first half limping around and holding his arm and shooting accusatory glances my way ("why are you submitting me to this torture, Mother?"). But he got over it during the second half and had fun kicking the ball around with his friend Max.

The team. Wyatt's friend Max is to his left.

The team, doing "goofy faces."

Foot connecting with ball! Given the fact that I shot these from the sidelines using my cell phone camera? Not too shabby.

Foot connecting with ball again! And a hint of a smile.

Jonas has been busy with baseball, too, although I haven't taken any new pictures. Their final tournament is this weekend and I'll be sure to take some there. We've really enjoyed playing Little League here in MN. All the super serious kids do "traveling teams" and aren't on the citywide Little League teams (in South Jordan, the super serious kids played Bingham Baseball as well as did Superleague and All Stars), so while the games are taken seriously, there not AS serious as some of the kids (and, ahem, parents) occasionally made those Bingham games. Plus, all the kids get a chance to play all sorts of positions. Jonas has pitched and has spent a lot of time in the infield, and he's done great. And he's hitting like a rock star. He hits almost every time he gets up and and has enough strength to knock them a lot farther than he did last year. It's been fun.

5. Utah trip and Segullah retreat

Whew! See what I mean about having a lot to catch up on? Last weekend I headed to Utah for the annual Segullah retreat and had a most excellent time. Not only did I get to spend all day Friday and into Saturday afternoon with some of the most spectacular human beings I've ever met (of whom I took no pictures this year . . . sigh), but I also got to spend some time alone and my mom and dad's, which I've hardly ever done. My mom treated me to a heavenly pedicure, during which we both were able to enjoy the vigorous pulsations of a massage chair and the snappy banter of our Vietnamese pedicurists. (Is that what they're called?) They talked both of us into putting flowers on our big toes. When I initially said no, my pedicurist looked offended. "What? No flower? But you must have happy feet!" I acquiesced. Luckily, I did have the wherewithal to take a picture of our buffed and polished feet:

I always have a wonderful time with my Segullah sisters, but it was even better this year to spend time with Mom and Dad too. Love you guys. The only bad part of the trip was the part where I left my new Kindle in the seat back compartment of the airplane, but I try not to think about that part too much. Grr.

6. The 4th of July

Our 4th was a very low key affair, and I'm glad. We spend the day kicking around the house, until we finally decided to drive to the little town of Afton to get ice cream and see the sights. Alas, the ice cream place was closed, but I was able to get some nice pics of the kids at the park:

Wyatt, doing his new photo-smile, wherein he turns up one corner of his mouth in a kind of grimace. "It's the only smile I have!" he told me, on the verge of tears. Ah, photo smile awareness. It ought to be a developmental milestone.

Pretty Lou. And she got her braces off!!! Much rejoicing in the land.

Ethan, atop the swing set. The boy needs to climb.

Jonas, lounging atop the play structure. I'm pretty sure neither Ethan nor Jonas are supposed to climb to the top of either of these structures, but since we were the only ones in the park . . .

Kid Pic Attempt #1. Behold Wyatt's new developmental milestone. And also Jonas's closed eyes.

Kid pic attempt #2. While Wyatt and Jonas look better, I'm sure Ethan and Elise would prefer attempt #1. So hard to please everyone. I'm just glad they all stood still and humored me for a minute.

After discovering that the ice cream was a no go, we went to Culver's and got frozen custard instead, then we headed over to the city of Woodbury's 4th of July celebration and staked out a spot for fireworks. The kids were a touch bored for a little while since we hadn't gone with friends . . . but they got over it. And the fireworks? Spectacular. I always love a good fireworks finale.

And that is that for now. At least now I can leave on our vacation without the nagging sense that I was getting hopelessly behind on my blog. (The blog--such a taskmistress. And yeah, I'm pretty sure she's female.)