Adventurous kids – Page 30 – Letters from Home

Prom, Concert, Bear

The boys have reached some milestones and there have been a few nice windows into their lives recently. I am thankful for the things they have experienced during this school year, from academics and new responsibilities, to music, art, and friendships.

Daniel’s independence has always been high, but driving to school and up the freeway to work each day really seals it. He is a good listener and a steadying influence among his friends. It was a very different experience to send him to prom than it was to send Paige. I was glad to have the kids spend some time at our house after the dance.

Timothy is 4-5 inches taller than he was last August. He is a true friend. The way he wears his sleeves at his concerts is just. too. cool.

Mark finished his 4th grade math and grammar over a month ago, so we forge ahead in the 5th grade books, even though we’d both rather be doing other things. He earned his Bear and we bought the big Webelos handbook so we are ready for new challenges.

Two groups of friends

One thing I have been surprised to see is how our kids have found friends from the same families. The families don’t live close to us; the siblings don’t hang out together; they don’t attend the same schools; our boys have just found similar temperaments and interests in these friends. One night last week, several of them crossed paths at our house. I am thankful that they have good friends.

Family update

Richard is a busy Scoutmaster. One night he took Mark with his Scout troop to tour the State Capitol.

1-DSC_0585 — Mark is in his last weeks as a Bear in Cub Scouts.

1-DSC_0598 — Richard is doing an amazing job working with these boys. Recently, all of the deacons completed their requirements for Duty to God. The incentive? Doughnuts.

1-DSC_1137 — Timothy participated in the school district band concert, the only trombone player from his band to be selected.

1-DSC_1150 — Our tree erupted into masses of blossoms, its boughs weighed down in heroic efforts to be lovely. Seriously, we have never seen such blossoms on our magnificent tree.

1-DSC_1191 — We watched our nephew for a couple of weeks and we resurrected the toys and board books from storage to entertain him.

1-DSC_1192 — Mark is our only baseball player this season, and from now on. If the pitch is good you can count on him to get a hit.

1-DSC_1204 — This is the ONLY quilting I have had time to do in a month, but this English Paper piecing project was mostly done by hand, while watching Fixer Upper on Netflix.

1-1-DSC_0630 — Paige moved out of the dorms and into a little apartment on University Avenue owned by my parents. She is attending school this summer. Over the past few weeks we learned that she received a full scholarship and was accepted into two art programs. She declared her major to be Illustration. Sorry, Paige if I have this project oriented the wrong way. I love it in any direction.

1-DSC_2479 — This is an old picture, but Daniel is elusive. Busy with a new job as a clerk at Geneva Rock, playing piano, and studying for an AP test, he has many interesting conversations with friends about Prom coming up in a few weeks.

1-2016-03-12 015 — Photo by Janine Clarke. When I looked at this picture of our Relief Society choir, the first thought was, a stranger would never guess that the little woman with the messy ponytail on the back row is serving as the Relief Society president. I don’t look presidential. I am young. When I sang in this choir I trembled and thought I was going to fall over from fright. See how weak I am? My calling is hard. I hear sad things and the hardest thing is that I want to run to people all the time, but I can’t and shouldn’t. I am not the solution to anybody’s problems, but I do think I can point them to the real solutions in Christ. I do this with hugs, meals, visits, notes, teaching, and prayer. So much of what I do is on my own, but my counselors and secretary are the very best and hold me up in countless ways, whether it’s encouraging words, powdered sugar late at night, driving, taking over when I am too busy with family emergencies, and teaching me. They also make me laugh. I didn’t know them when I asked for them to be in my presidency, but my Father in Heaven knew I needed them.

My Grandmother’s Obituary

1-DSC_0108 — Photo by Rachel Gee. We attended Richard’s dad’s 80th birthday party in St George. Good times.

Skiers

Richard uses an app to keep track of his speed, distances, and trails up and down the mountain. I look at the stats through my eyelashes and try not to think too hard about it.

Richard and the boys have been skiing many times this season. These are some photos they took with our neighbor Shane on a couple of days at Solitude. I need some photos of Mark because he goes skiing just as often as the rest of the boys.

Timothy the Naturalist

Timothy the Naturalist 2005, 2007

Timothy’s personality and interests really emerged when he was two-years-old and we moved to Arizona. For one month we lived in corporate housing, which was a tiny apartment with a pool. Every day the kids and I would escape the narrow rooms and spend time at the pool. Daniel and Paige learned to swim there. Timothy played in the water, but didn’t spend much time there. He was more interested in the landscaping and the potted orange flowers. The older kids would stay in the pool and Timothy would get wet, climb out, and begin exploring in his orange life vest.

He fingered the leaves and petals, studying them. The pots of flowers were tall, so the blossoms were at his eye level. Little words came from his mouth as he tended one pot after another around the pool and drew his hands along the long leaves of the palm plants.

I nicknamed him, “My little naturalist.”

When he was four-years-old I took the kids on a field trip to a nature preserve in Sierra Vista where they could see desert animals. The curator/owner hosted an insect and reptile show which included a Gila monster, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and other desert creatures. Timothy sat entranced, taking his turn with the tarantula and showing great interest in each animal. The finale of the little show was a 6-foot python, heavy and fat. The guide allowed older children to hold the python, saying that she couldn’t allow younger children to do it because it was so heavy.

Timothy knew he was smaller than the other children, but he remained hopeful that he could hold the snake. He stood behind Paige and Daniel in line. When the curator looked down into Timothy’s hopeful face which included two very blue eyes, some freckles, and round, flushed cheeks, she shrugged and smiled. She must have recognized a fellow naturalist, because she draped the python behind his neck. The snake’s tail curled beneath one of his arms and its head was poised near his shoulder. I don’t know how he could stand under the weight, but he did, cheeks sticking out with his wide smile. Later, the woman gave him a large poster of Gila Monsters and he insisted on putting it on his wall. Only a true naturalist would enjoy looking at a Gila Monster poster above his bed for 5 years.

Daniel’s Innovative Technology projects

Daniel’s friends applied for a school district innovation grant and received around $8,000 to create a class where they can meet and design. They call the class “The Maker Collective.” Obviously, they didn’t consult their mothers for the name.

They are designing with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. No, I do not know what I am writing about.

They have designed buzzers for Jeopardy game, have an additional $10,000 grant to build a robot for a hospital, and many other projects. They have failed in some things and ruined some equipment, but Daniel is working hard at their fundraising efforts. Lately, he is writing a tutorial for people to use their fundraising product.

I don’t get to see what our kids do in school very often, so I thought I’d share. Photos are from the district Facebook page.

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

2006-2012

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

In 2005 the realtor who listed our home in Austin recommended that we try the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum once we moved to Tucson. This was great advice. Going to the Desert Museum became a pattern in our lives while we lived in Arizona. It was the place we tried to take all of our guests; it was fun for kids and parents. It was one of my go-to home school field trip destinations. We went there several times a year.

A trip to the Desert Museum was a sensory feast. After driving 20 minutes on the freeway and other busy roads, we turned onto a narrow, winding road. Rock shops appeared along the road as other signs of civilization dwindled. We drove another 15 minutes among cliffs and ancient saguaros, tall and haunting. Not only was the road winding and narrow, it had great dips and inclines, making it feel like a roller coaster if we took the curves and dips with some acceleration. The van would fill with squeals of laughter as stomachs dropped with the dips and turns. The smell of sunblock floated in the air as the kids prepared for the day in the sun. I could look back and see children’s eyes wide with excitement. Sometimes they would raise their hands high above their heads for the declines and quick ascents. I’d turn up the music.

We always started the day early, arriving at the Desert Museum as it opened. I loaded our green stroller with water bottles, snacks, hats, the camera bag, sunblock, and notebooks. It was quite a production, setting out for a day in this mostly outdoor museum. It grew hot quickly, so we followed a path where we knew we could find shade at the hottest parts of the day. The “museum” felt mostly like a walk in the desert with occasional docents along the way holding birds, skulls, or other desert animals. There were enclosures for animals, but only a few structures that provided shade.

Our favorite attractions were in the summer, when the butterfly gardens were teeming with caterpillars and butterflies and the monsoon rains had awakened the flowers. We avoided school field trip days by going in the summer, too. Sometimes we would stop to sketch the hummingbirds or linger and watch the desert tortoises in the early part of the day. By 10:00, we were usually very warm and we would make our way to the pavilions with air conditioning and then the ice cream parlor built out on the trail. The ice cream cones always seemed like manna, and I didn’t care that it was only 10 am because it made the grumpiness disappear.

There were mammals, reptiles, insects, spiders, monkeys, and birds to see. Our favorite animal was probably the mountain lion that had a cave where it would sleep, its face sometimes pressed up against the window for the kids to admire closely.

The mountain lion was always at the end of our ability to cope with the heat, so we would head up the hill toward the cave for the rest of the day. The cave was man-made, and you entered on a paved path. Inside there were exhibits about space and volcanoes, rocks, and minerals. Best of all, there were tunnels going off the main path for the kids to explore. These cave-like tunnels were narrow, smooth with wear, and a little smelly with mildew and stale people smells. Those who braved these narrow passageways were rewarded with a view of cave formations, great stalactites and stalagmites illuminated in golden light. I would sit at the base of these tunnels on a rock and let the kids wander and play for about an hour, hearing their happy voices echo through the corridors.

The final leg of our journey took us out of the cave past a “mine tailings” exhibit where kids could search the gravel for shiny, colored rocks. Each guest was allowed to keep one or two rocks. Serious thought went into these choices. Pockets were emptied on flat surfaces and the rocks were admired, but in the end, only a few would become ours. We stored our treasure rocks in the small compartment in our stroller. One last stop before the big hill to the parking area was the excavation area where kids would put on goggles and chip off plaster from around “fossils” of ancient animals.

The snake and insect houses were either first or last, as they were located at the entrance. I don’t know if the kids remember these exhibits as much, but there were Gila monsters, scorpions that glowed under a black light, and rattlesnakes.

The end of a trip to the Desert Museum always felt like a triumph, having conquered the elements with every device we had. The drive home often included a trip to the McDonald’s drive up window on the fringe of civilization. It was hard work being desert explorers, but we loved it. If I could go back to Tucson for a few days, I would take the kids back to this magical place. Their longer, lankier bodies may not fit so easily in the cave, and some of that wonder of childhood would be gone, but I know that they would have fun. It was ALWAYS a good day at the Desert Museum. How many things in life are like that?

The Jeep

2004, 2009

One night when Paige was seven I was driving home from a Relief Society appointment and saw that someone had placed a yellow child-sized Jeep next to their trash can on the curb. I had always thought that child-sized cars were adorable and I began to have visions of our kids riding around in this little yellow jeep. Oh, I wanted this piece of trash!

I went home and asked Richard to go and get the jeep for our kids. He walked up the street and wheeled it home while I hid in the house, hoping our neighbors wouldn’t notice that we were going through their trash. When we inspected it, we learned that it didn’t have a battery and it had some electrical problems. Richard worked on the electrical parts and bought a new battery. Eventually he got it moving. The wheels were brittle and cracked from years of sitting in the sun and the plastic was old and faded, but it could go!

Paige and Daniel loved that jeep. The motor sounded like it was screaming when they pushed the pedal, and the cracking plastic wheels sounded brittle as they scraped along the sidewalk. I chuckled at Paige who made gutsy 3-point turns, shifted gears quickly, and pushed the jeep to its maximum speed. This quiet little girl was born to race! With Paige driving, she and Daniel would raise their hands high above their heads whenever they crossed a driveway and let out a loud squeal.

Our neighbor Natalie, who was 4-years-old like Daniel, joined the derby in the evenings with her own pink and white Barbie jeep. Paige and Daniel would take turns driving our jeep. All of the neighborhood friends came out in the evenings that summer. Tien, Sadaf, Natalie, and Daniel raced past the house with a clatter, screams, and laughter. Sometimes they raced bikes, scooters, and a tricycle along with the jeeps on the sidewalk in front of our house as the sun went down.

The yellow jeep was loaded into the moving truck when we went to Arizona, but it was damaged in the move and the kids drove it a couple times around the yard before it gave out. We parked it on our back patio and the kids would sit in it, imaginations turned on high, pretending to drive.

In 2009 we bought a child-sized truck so Timothy and Mark could have the driving experience. This truck was new and didn’t have the condition issues of the first jeep. It even had a working radio. Our favorite place to let the kids drive the truck was in the grassy field a couple of blocks west of our house. There we let them drive across the grass, around the paved path, and up and down the grassy hills. Timothy and Mark were excellent drivers, but Mark seemed to like to drive it the fastest. He would also turn the radio dial until he found a hard rock station, turn up the volume, and go tearing up the hills and down.

The children, each around age nine, grew out of the toy cars. Their legs were too long and buckled up to their chests when they sat at the wheel. Jeep and Truck memories only make me smile.