24 November 2019

Helen shared this photo of herself and Sierra at the stake dance last week.

The youth in our ward collected donations for Thanksgiving baskets this week.  This is a photo of Helen helping sort the donations.

 This is a photo of Gibson playing in leaves with Eddy and Camden.

Helen performed with the Siskiyou Violins at a local store for their Christmas kick off event on Saturday.  Helen is concentrating hard as she tries to play a Bach Fugue while sharing a stand with two other violinists and not knocking into any shoppers or ceramic dishes.

Here's a view from below.  The violinists are standing around the railing on the upper story.  The store was packed with shoppers and merchandise.

This is the outside of the store with shoppers lining up to come inside.  It was a fun, festive event.

A diaphragm on our sprinklers wore out and the manufacturer stopped making the replacement parts. This meant BRandan needs to replace the entire assembly.  Gibson helped glue the sprinkler pipes back together.

Gibson taught his deacons' quorum lesson on Sunday so he made cookies for his class on Saturday night.

 Here's an update photo of Abe and Brandan's longboards.  They both finished decorating the bottoms of their boards.  Abe spray painted a sunset on his.  Brandan used sharpies to zentangle a design.  Abe already added the grip tape to the top of his board.  They both need to attach the trucks and wheels and then they'll be ready to ride.

17 November 2019

Abe competed on his school scavenger hunt team again this year.  The students worked for three days to find answers to a long list of random questions, then they met at SOU to defend their answers.  Crater finished 4th out of 12 schools.  Becky finished class just before the awards were given out and took this photo of Abe and Abigail.  

A few weeks ago, Abe and Ashton won a corn hole competition at school.  Neither of them had tried corn hole before, but they got lucky.  In case you haven't been watching ESPN lately, corn hole is a bean bag toss game and is very popular right now.  The rules are similar to horse shoes.  You get 1 point for landing a bean bag on the board, and 3 points if your bean bag goes in the hole  As a prize for winning their school tournament, Abe and Ashton got to enter a community tournament on Saturday for free.  The boys were quickly outclassed by the more experienced players.  In the photo you can see how the opposing team (orange) landed their bean bags so they created a barrier around the hole, making it even harder for Abe to score.  Even though the boys lost, it was fun to see something new and be impressed with the other players' bean bag skills.

10 November 2019

Crater Soccer held their awards banquet Monday night to celebrate the end of the soccer season.  Back row from the left: Coach Bones, Camden, Logan, Abe, Joe, Skyler, Jayden, Jake, Malakai, Spencer and Coach Testor.  Front row: Ben, Tyson, Diego, Toby, Davis, Braden, Carson, Colton and Clint.

Abe received a scholar athlete award, the most valuable player award for his team and was voted to be on the honorable mention team by the Midwestern League coaches.  There are 9 schools in the league.  The coaches chose 1st, 2nd and honorable mention teams with 11 players on each team so it's a nice honor for Abe.   As a team, Crater's boys soccer had the third highest GPA in the state of Oregon.

These boys represent a good portion of the team's high GPA.  Besides being great athletes and great students, they are kind, hard-working and fun to spend time with.  From the left are Abe, Camden, Jayden, Spencer, Malakai and Jake.

Gib's team held an end of season party on Tuesday.  Gibson received an award for teamwork.

 One more award: Helen has been taking a cooking class this trimester.  Her team won first place in a competition to create the tastiest dog treats.  They made treats from a combination of coconut, pumpkin, apples and carrots.  Although the official judges were people, a bunch of dogs came to the competition to sample the treats.  From the left are Helen. Kennedy, Nikki and Kirsten.

The trophy they won was placed in the school trophy case.

 The Young Men made paracord bracelets for their activity this week.  They followed along with an online tutorial.

 Here are the finished bracelets.  They will be donated to Operation Gratitude which sends the bracelets to people serving in the military.

 Down the hall, the girls were learning how to use watercolors and writing out the new Young Women's theme.

Our family helped with two Eagle projects on Saturday.  The first was installing a message board at the trailhead for a popular hiking spot.

 Here's a photo of Abe attaching shingles.

The second project was repainting the lines on the playground at an elementary school.  It was a great day to be outside and get a lot of work done.

3 November 2019

Salem and Sofi celebrated their October birthdays together in Utah.  Maggie shared this photo with us.

 Here's a photo of the same beautiful ladies in 2005.  Sofi was 8 years old.

We had a lovely Halloween in Oregon.  Helen and Gibson went trick or treating with a group of friends and then got together with a bigger group of friends to watch a movie and swap candy.  Brandan and Becky passed out candy to the hundreds of trick-or treaters who came to our house.

Helen, Gib and Nick dressed as characters from the TV show Psych.  Nick is Detective Carlton Lassiter, Gibson is Shawn Spencer and Helen is Detective Juliet O'Hara.

Abe spent Halloween night playing games at Camden's house.  Clockwise from Abe are Abigail, Elizabeth, Camden, Jake, Maggie, Enoch, Spencer, Ashton, Sydney and Malakai.

Gibson played in his last two soccer games for the fall season this Saturday.  The high school coach stopped by to check out the upcoming prospects for his team.

Every month, Brandan holds a Bishop's Youth Fireside for the youth in our ward.  Recently, some of the youth asked if they could have the fireside next to a fire.  Brandan said yes and the Young Women's president, who lives in the country, agreed to host it.  He spent some time this weekend getting ready for the fireside.  Andrew, Camden and Aaron helped him move a piece of iron to use for a fire ring.