25 September 2016

The Faux Paw mascot came to our pack meeting this month.  Faux Paw is a character that teaches kids about safety.  From the left are Noah, Cameron, Eddy, Jake and Gibson.

 Here's a photo of Gibson wearing the enormous cat head.  

 Here's a photo of Abe with the crane he built last Sunday.  It's hard to tell in a photo, but the tower rotates 270 degrees and the bucket raises and lowers.

This Sunday Abe worked on his family night treat for tomorrow.  He's making a chocolate cream pie.  Here's a photo of his freshly baked pie crust, the first he's ever made.

                  

18 September 2016

Our friend's son, Grant, came over this week to build robots with Abe.  Abe helped him build a scribbler and they took apart an old cell phone to see if they could build anything with the phone parts. Nope, but it was interesting to take apart.

Helen auditioned for her school play and got one of the main parts.  Her school is doing the play to raise money for laptops.  One of her teachers wrote the play about the founding of Gold Hill, Oregon.

When possible, Becky likes to meet Brandan for lunch on Fridays.  Brandan usually has about 30 minutes for lunch so it's easiest to bring a picnic to his office.  This Friday was a beautiful day to eat outside.  Becky forgot to pack forks so we used apple slices for utensils.

 After several seasons of recreational soccer, Abe is playing competitive soccer this season.  The competitive team has longer practices and some of their games are out of town, but the level of play is higher.  His team won their game on Saturday.  For the left are Bennett, Tyson, Dillon, Logan and Abe.

 Every year Brandan signs our family up to wash windows as an auction item for our ward youth auction.  We had a few hours on Saturday so we washed the windows for the family that won our service.  Brandan, Gibson and Helen worked outside and Becky and Abe worked inside along with the woman who bought the window washing.

Abe worked on building a crane out of cardboard, tape and string.  We"ll post of photo of his finished project next week.

11 September 2016

School started this week.  Helen and Gibson both went back to school on Tuesday.

 Gibson is in 4th grade at the same magnet school he went to last year, but with a new teacher.

 Helen is in 6th grade.  She has the same teacher as last year, but at a new school.  She gets to sleep in an extra half hour!

 Abe started school on Wednesday.  He's in 8th grade.  This photo is actually from the second day of school and he was barely willing to pose for it.

Abe learned how to make tamales this week.

The activity day girls had a color dodge ball activity this week.  The younger group invited the older group to join them.  One of the leaders bought the same powder used for color runs.  Each girl got a bag with a different color of powder to throw at each other.  Throwing colors was a lot more fun than throwing balls.  The powder mostly washed out although Helen's hair is still pink.

Helen bought a hammock and Abe bought a second hammock. They now have a little hammock village strung between our maple and mimosa trees.  The kids slept in their hammocks on Friday night.

Abe's Australia post

These last couple of weeks, my Dad, my grandpa and I took a trip to Australia to visit some distant relatives and spend a bit of vacation time there. Our flight from Los Angeles to Brisbane took fourteen and a half hours. The flight left at around midnight on Friday the 19th and arrived on Sunday the 21st in the morning.This is a picture of the church that we went to on Sunday.

After church, we headed over to look at the Brisbane temple. It has the same type of designs as the Medford temple but had a lot different trees and shrubs on the grounds.

After sightseeing in Brisbane, we headed up to Cairns(pronounced CANS). On Monday, we booked onto a boat that carried a couple hundred people out to the Great Barrier Reef, took them out to snorkel, scuba dive or ride around in boats and then took them back. We had a wonderful time snorkeling with each other and looking at the fish.

Here's a picture of me snorkeling next to the boat. The boat rented out fins and life jackets for free.

My grandpa brought an underwater camera on the trip, knowing that we would use it. Here is a picture that he took of the fish and coral on the reef.

 Included in the offer of our boat ride was a glass bottom boat and a semi submersible boat. This is me on the glass bottom boat, looking at the fish below.

On Tuesday, we took the same boat out to a small tourist island called Fitzroy Island. We spent the day on it and then the boat picked us up around 5.

This is a map of the island. You could do a deceivingly long and steep hike to the summit, but we just took it up to the lighthouse.

After our hike, we stopped and snorkeled on the beach for a little bit. The view was incredible.

On Wednesday, we drove up to a rainforest tourist town. It had several wildlife sanctuary including a koala garden that had several other types of animals in it. You could also hold a koala.

In the crocodile exhibit there were 15 freshwater crocodiles laying around.

There was an adorable wombat that was walking around. I loved seeing wombats.

There was a section of the sanctuary where you could hand feed kangaroos and wallabies. Here's me hand feeding a red kangaroo.

I got to cuddle a koala! He had very soft fur and was pretty sleepy.

On the morning we headed back to Brisbane, we stopped by a botanical garden. It had so many different kinds of plants.

After our visit to Cairns, we flew back down to Brisbane on our way to Adelaide. In the Brisbane airport, I bought a stuffed animal wombat that I named Fitzroy.

While we visited in Adelaide, we stayed in my Grandpa's nearest timeshare in a small town called Normanville. It had a very nice golf course on it that we planned to play on.

Our relatives were Cynthia and Murray Hull. They have dozens of binders full of information on our ancestors that moved to Australia and America.

It was hard finding food that I could eat but one thing that I could eat were Australia's chips(french fries) and they were very good.

On Saturday, we went to the Adelaide temple to do baptisms. It was a very beautiful temple.

Here's a picture of the Ingalalla Falls near our resort.

We went walking on the beach in Normanville. It was a very nice day.

Here's a picture of us on the golf course on our resort.

There were a lot of sand traps on the course and I'm not very good at golf so I was hitting out of a lot of these.

In Adelaide, theres was a horse drawn tram that went back and forth to and from Granite island.

We spent a day and a half on Kangaroo Island. We met some beekeepers who had lots of animals. I got to hold a lamb.

We stayed with a couple who lived on the island and they took us around to see several cool sights. This is a picture of the Remarkable Rocks, a rock formation created by the ocean and the wind.

On our last day we flew up to Sydney for the night. We got to visit the Sydney Opera House.

After a tour of the Opera House, we ate dinner on the harbor looking out over the bay.

Here's a picture with a little bit of everything, a gum tree, the Sydney opera House and the ocean. I had a great time on the trip and saw so many amazing sights.

4 September 2016

Gib needed to plant a garden for cub scouts, but he doesn't love vegetables.  He planted a watermelon and grew a lovely melon.

 We weren't sure how to tell if the watermelon was ripe, but it looked like a watermelon should look.

 Here's Gib with his watermelon.  It was delicious.

 Helen performed with her violin group at the Shakespeare Festival Green Show.  It was a fun outdoor concert.  Becky took these photos while the group was warming up.  The plaza filled up by the time the show began with an appreciative audience.  Helen is on the far left of the front row.

 Here's a close up of Helen.

 Helen's friends, Sophie and Clara are twins and invited Helen to their tea party birthday party.  A group of elegant girls came over to pick Helen up for the party.  From the left: Ally, Clea, Sophie, Helen and Clara.

 We met some friends at Lake of the Woods on a surprisingly chilly morning.  One of the little girls fed one duck some popcorn.  The popcorn attracted 6 more ducks.  Gibson made it his mission to scare the ducks away by throwing water at the ducks.  You know the saying, "Like water off a duck's back?"  The ducks didn't seem to mind the water one bit.

We welcomed Abe and Brandan home on Saturday!  Abe will take some time this week to blog about their adventures.