Family Home Evening Fail. And kites.

Jesus wants me to be loooov-ING, and kind to all I see...🎶

So we have been fairly consistent with holding a weekly family home evening. If you're not a Mormon, it is just the evening once a week that we set apart to do activities together, at home usually, as you might have deduced from the title. Typically we do something fun, with snacks and with a spiritual thought or lesson. (Official description here. It's by the cookies.) Anyways, we mostly have Riley to thank for our consistency - she asks to do it every. single. day. Usually multiple times a day. They love picking songs, having "grown up" discussions with us - "So...the Holy Ghost is inside me right now?" - playing games, and, at Riley's insistence, finishing with a draw-off of something relevant to the lesson. Or irrelevant, whichever.

The kids often pick "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" for opening hymn. This is because in their classes at church there's a game where they get to jump out of their seats at every perky "beam" part, and they like to perform this song for family sometimes via Skype. I thought: "we should have this on the blog." It's precious! It's fun!

It's a disaster is what it is. You know the term 'camera shy'? Riley and Joe are the opposite of that - they see themselves on a screen and they go a little beserk. And maybe I picked an especially slap-happy night for it, I don't know. But here; it is what it is:

This could only end in tears, as they say. Maybe next time I'll film them on the sly, with my camera phone instead of computer so they can't see themselves while it's filming.

Such as I did the next day when we were flying kites (again - kids like those kites!). We were on a donut run, happened to have the kites in the car, and made an afternoon of it. This is one of those classic, candid kid moments I want to remember - kites have become kind of a Munion family tradition. May you never be to mature and too cool for a kite!

The music is Lover's Waltz by Jay Ungar - such a pretty piece for a beautiful memory.
 

*FHE lesson helps for this lesson here
*My FHE Pinterest board 
*A few more parks to add to our "before we leave" bucket list
*Summer reading; I haven't even heard of some of these, but they look, well, enchanting!

*Riley, from her car seat, looking out at a rusty old cab driving by: "*sigh* I wish we had a taxi car..."

Night!

We camped, we climbed, we cooked.

We have had some fun weekends with Dave being free, free as the wind, and summer on the rise. Memorial Day we did a cookout with friends (some of which brought a play tent  Riley spoke of it after as her "camping trip") and it was a good pre-camp exercise - bonfire, hotdogs, s'mores, canoeing, hiking/strolling through a wooded park...

Turtles were in a abundance.

 I can't get over how green everything is. Summer I love you! While we were there we got to making plans for an overnight trip to Interstate Park, on the St. Croix River that separates Minnesota and Wisconsin. We made reservations, divied up the meal assignments, and hoped for another weekend as glorious as this one was.

Nope.

 Although the day before was sunny and in the high 80s, the day we had to head out into the wilderness it was a cool 60 degrees and pouring rain. More than once on the drive there I thought of turning back but you can't ditch your friends like that, and anyways, we probably would have drowned in a sea of tears if we failed to camp after telling the kids we were - they have really been looking forward to it this week.

 The rain dampened no ones spirits.

 It did dampen the wood a bit but with a little (a lot) of fanning to the flames, we got the hotdogs for the kids and salmon/veggie foil packets for the rest of us roasted nicely.

 Did I take too many pictures? Yes. On a rainy camping night, your kids first camp night, you document. And really I don't know what else you would expect from me at this point.

That night the temperature dropped to 40 and while the kids were snug in their sleeping bags, Dave and I had brought one blanket between us (we had gotten used to sleeping on top of the covers, it's been so warm). The blanket was big enough only if we turned in tandem. Haha. Good for snuggles though.

You know what our tent is missing? Black out curtains. Riley was up at 6, absolutely thrilled to wake in a tent, still camping. Gleeful! We tried to snuggle her back to sleep. It went as well as you know it did.

Aw, he did it!

Haha nope! No he certainly did not!

 Joe slept till seven but was Riley finally managed to "accidentally-on-purpose" wake everyone with her excited giggles. There are worse ways to wake I guess.

After we warmed our bones by the fire and had a breakfast, maybe another s'more or three, we went for a little walk along the river. I love morning air and sunrises, but this it is a rare situation that finds me out in them with my family.

 Then we struck camp before heading to the part of the park with glacial potholes (we visited this back in spring break, but definitely worth another go!)

 At the visitor center we had lunch, hiked around, watched rock-climbers scale the cliffs and threw a good amount of pebbles into the holes bored ten, fifteen, twenty feet down.

Before we even left the parking lot, this one.

What a fun weekend! I never thought of myself as a camper, despite years of girls camps and also working at a Girl Scout camp the summer before I met Dave. But I might be coming around. I have hiking sandals. I successfully cooked salmon for six people at a camp fire in the rain. And I quite enjoyed it! Definitely helps that my companions are all camp-savvy, and my little ones were over the moon about every little thing. Yay it's raining! Look, worms! Marshmallows on a stick! Flashlights! Truly, they are the best companions in an adventure - everything becomes a really freakin' big deal.

I'm thankful for adventurous friends and this beautiful world. I'm thankful for my comfy mattress though too. G'night!

PS: Tuesdays nights I'm all charged up from soccer, which I don't get home from till 11:30, and so it's prime blogging time. But. I hope Dave is available to uh, be the early riser with the chillins or I'm gonna be hurting.

Early Birthdays

Last week a bunch of the kid's friends moved out of student housing and on with their lives in various states and before we all left we had a last hurrah/early birthday party for Riley and Joe. Riley has been looking forward to having her buddies over for her birthday practically all year, and Joe insists that his birthday is the same day as Riley even though it is exactly a month after, so...2 birds, one stone. Riley and Joe have really missed their departed friends since then and I'm really glad they got to make a few more memories with their playmates they've spent so much time with this year.

They painted frames which I put these party pictures in later to remember each other by.

They are very bad at "hide and seek" but they really, really enjoy themselves anyway.

Birthday candles! It was Riley's choice of yellow, rainbow cupcakes.

Balloon tennis/sword fights, ring toss, painting project, hide and seek, duck duck goose and a whole lot of random in between. Oh, and juice boxes and cheetos. Epic, by Riley and Joe standards. It doesn't take much to make their day.

MBA! Dave, Dave, You're so fine...

You're so fine you blow my mind, go David! Go-go-go David!

Dave graduated this week! The culmination of 2 years of late nights and early mornings, traveling and conferencing and schooling and still somehow managing to be a very present father and husband - I don't know, he is something else, that boy. *

Don came in for the blessed event and Riley and Joe were good as gold and we just had a really nice time listening to the addresses and seeing our lean and long ginger stride across the stage. It helped that Riley and Joe each had yarns and needles and pony beads to make necklaces for the graduate. But I really enjoyed the talks. And turns out MBA graduation is blessedly shorter than other graduations, at least this one was. Only took an 90 minutes or so.

We took, ahem, one or two pictures. I was getting sentimental thinking of all the lasts and wishing people farewell. It has been an era, and there are a lot of people we are going to miss, but it will be exciting to see where they go and what they do with their degree. They're a bright bunch.

We did it!

Cookie monsters.

 It was fun. Fa-reezing, by the way - 43 degrees and windy, like MN getting one last laugh in, but a lovely day nonetheless. Then we went to...

haha is that not the crochetiest man you've ever seen? Look out grumpy cat, Dave's gunning for your job. Smiles were much more available after we got in and ate.

And just like that, we were done. It seems like yesterday we were packing up and leaving UT, and life has just tripped along at a fantastic rate. It has been very full, and VERY educational, on both our parts. I have a running list in my head of things I've learned while in MN. A few being:

• Make time for what matters
• Ask the play group moms - they have answers
• How to stretch a buck
• There's no bad weather, just bad outfits for the weather (ie, buy the parka. And the duckboots)
• Kraft Mac and cheese: Riley portion =1/4 cup noodles, 1 Tbs butter/milk/cheese (no this is not a misplaced item - that is something really worth knowing in our house!)
• Do for others and let others do for you
• Keep take and bake baguettes in the freezer
• Dishes can wait till morning
• Pick up the phone, make the call
• Small changes in daily habits make a big, fat difference ultimately. All the difference, actually.
• Play is important for adults too
• If you can't explain it simply to a four year old, you need to study it more
• Not flossing is like wiping your bum and missing the crack (ok, not really, but I saw that on a billboard here and I rarely forget to floss now. You're welcome).
• Be kind to yourself - if you wouldn't say it to a friend, don't say it to yourself. 

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment, so I'm going to pat myself on the back and call this a success for me too.

And what is next for the Munions? Thanks for asking, we'll let you know sometime in the next month or so - Dave is interviewing and weighing options and whatever it ends up being, we are ready and excited. We will be visiting UT in July for my friend and college roommate's wedding. Then...to infinity, and beyond!

*For more shmaltz on the topic, go here - I blabbed about it to the public too.