7 July 2019

Since the seminary curriculum is being realigned to match the Come Follow Me curriculum, Abe realized he wouldn't study the Old Testament in seminary and instead he will study the Book of Mormon for 2 years.  After listening to him complain a few times, we organized our own summer seminary.  Abe will only be home 6 weeks this summer, so it will be a very quick overview of the Old Testament.  Every person in our family will take a turn leading the discussion for a week.  We meet from 7-7:30 am, before Brandan goes to work.  Participation is completely voluntary.  This is a photo from our first morning.  Seven feels very early in the summertime.

Our city recently finished building pickle ball courts in a park near our house.  We played pickle ball for family night this week.  The courts are smaller than tennis courts, the paddles are larger than ping pong paddles, but a similar shape and the ball looks like a whiffle ball.  It's a fun and fairly easy game, kind of like playing ping pong on a court.  The ball moves a lot slower than a tennis ball or even a ping pong ball which gives you more time to react.

We enjoyed a terrific small town 4th of July holiday.  After going to the parade, we went to a neighborhood picnic.  We all had to try the jalapeño lemonade which was dreadful.  

We spent the afternoon rafting the Rogue River.  Abe stayed home because he was working at the fair grounds, cleaning up trash from the valley wide firework show.  The rest of us enjoyed a beautiful afternoon on the river.

Here's a photo of Helen eating cherries.  The kids favorite place to sit is at the very front of the boat so they took turns.

Brandan steered in the back of the boat.  We waited for a quiet spot of the river to take photos.  This part of the Rogue is fairly calm, with a few class II rapids for excitement.  Becky got dumped overboard going through one set of rapids which knocked the breath out of her and made her lose her sandals.  Amazingly, we found the sandals floating in the river about half an hour later and were able to recover both of them!

 The river is very cold, but we paddled up Elk Creek a short distance where the water is shallow and warmer.  Helen and Gibson got out to play before we continued down the river.

We got home from rafting in time for dinner and our neighborhood firework show.  It gets bigger every year!  We enjoyed visiting with neighbors and friends and watching the show.  In the distance we could see the fairground fireworks so we knew Abe was enjoying fireworks, too.

Another family tradition is cleaning up from the firework show the morning after with a group of neighbors.  Here are all the spent fireworks.  Besides clearing away the boards, we comb the field and pick up the small pieces of plastic, plaster and cardboard that fly off with every explosion.  He reuses the mortar tubes every year.  Matt added 4 new boards of fireworks this year, making it his biggest show yet.