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After my kids turn twelve then they do not get anymore friend birthday parties. When you have five kids it just gets too expensive. This year Anne turned twelve and had her last friend party. This year she wanted to have a swim party. It almost didn’t happen because the weather was not cooperating. Luckily the weather cleared in time for her party and she and her friends were able to go to the community pool and go swimming. Then they came back to the house and played some games, ate pizza, ate cake and ice cream, opened presents, and had a good time. I think Anne had fun and it was nice to be able to meet her friends from school(her party was on the last day of school).

Nancy and I have been thinking about the best ways to teach our children how to work. This past week we instituted a new chore program. Each day the kids have daily chores that they need to complete. If they complete their chores they get points. Once they’ve earned up enough points they get a treat. Even Nancy and I get points for doing some of our daily chores. The kids also get points for attitude. Attitude points are completely subjective and can be taken away if they whine, are naughty, etc. Kind of like House Points in Harry Potter’s world. Once the entire collective family earns a certain amount of points then we get to do a family activity like go bowling or miniature golfing or something fun like that. We need 2,000 total family points in order to do an activity. I figured it would take about 5 or 6 weeks to earn up 2,000 points.

On Saturdays each kid has major cleaning chores to do. I tried to devise the chore lists such that it will take each kid about two hours to do their chores. There are no points for doing Saturday chores. Saturday chores are just part of the price you pay for being in the family.

This past Monday we had a special Family Home Evening where I explained the new chore program, and the rewards, to the kids. They did pretty good throughout the week although Samuel lost his attitude points every single day except Friday. He was also grounded for the entire weekend from playing with friends so that should tell you the kind of week he had. Overall it worked pretty well. The kids needed the usual pushing and prodding but they did their chores and towards the end of the week they started to do them without as much prodding.

This Saturday was our first day of doing Saturday chores. I thought we would get a lot of whines and moans and groans from the kids but we had a family meeting this morning and gave out the assignments and the kids set about doing their work without any complaning. Nancy and I helped the youngest two kids with their chores and helped the other kids with things like getting the cleaning supplies out of the cupboards and such. I was so pleased and surprised that they worked hard for two hours without complaint that at lunchtime I awarded an extra 100 bonus points, 5% of the total needed for an activity, to our family total. It’s probably too early to call the program a long-term success but I would say the first week was an outstanding success.

You may have noticed that most posts have been updated to replace our names with nicknames. This was a small measure to provide a bit of anonymity. No, I’m not terribly worried about people knowing who we are – if you know us then you know us. I just thought the nicknames would act as a bit of a roadblock for any true online whackos out there. I’m not willing to password protect the blog so the nicknames seemed like a reasonable security addition.

UPDATE 07/30/2009 04:11 p.m. – I got rid of the Nicknames because it was too hard to be consistent and they sounded dumb anyway.

For some reason I love to take pictures of my flowers each spring because I think they are very pretty. Here are some of them that I took recently. Which one of these pictures do you like the best?

Flower #1

Flower #2

Flower #3

Flower #4

Flower #5

We decided to have Luppin’s birthday party in May because we were gone on vacation on her official day. Actually on her birthday we were visiting the Capitol building in Washington D.C. and being led around by Representative Chaffetz’s staffers. This year she got to have a friend party so she was really excited. We invited seven girls and all but one showed up.

At the party we started off by putting stickers on our princess crowns. Then we got the party going by playing the candy bar matching game. If they matched two of the same candy bar pictures, they got the actual candy bar. After that game we played pin the tail on the donkey. They had a hoot seeing the funny places the tail got stuck to. After that we had cake and ice cream. It is funny because when I was a kid I remember the cake and ice cream were the best part, but the girls were more interested in jabbering than eating either cake or ice cream. I think I threw the bulk of it away in the garbage can. After the cake came the presents. I think this was very fun. I had each of the girls one at a time bring up the present she got for Luppin and then each of their presents got spotlighted and I could write down who brought what. After the all the presents were opened and before they could tear into them and get Barbie/Polly pocket stuff everywhere, we went to the basement to do the pinata. Because we have an unfinished basement it was easy to tie the rope up on the ceiling and have the girls whack away at it. I think they liked this game the best of all. Luppin did want to play musical chairs, but we ran out of time. All in all a very good party.

It is an end of an era. All my kids have attended Challenger School and at the end of this school year my last baby will have finished her stint at this great preschool.

On May 15th I got to attend the last spring program I will ever go to with one of my kids. I went alone so I had to take both the still pictures and the video. I still haven’t downloaded the video, but when BYUFan has the time maybe he can post the video.

Here is Luppin as the sun coming out after the rain. They were going pretty fast so this picture is blurry.

Here she is again doing actions to a song.

Every spring BYUFan and I sign up all of our kids for some sport through the county rec center. This year instead of having the kids all in one sport we had them in three different sports. Emily and Anne chose Volleyball, Texas and Luppin chose soccer, and Samuel chose Flag Football.

Last night was Samuel’s last game and I finally remembered to bring my camera. I wish BYUFan could have been there because I am not very good at taking pictures that turn out. Maybe next time we sign Samuel up for football BYUFan will be around to take the pictures.

The first two pictures are of Samuel attempting to kick off at the beginning of the game. He was not too successful so another boy had to do it after buddy had his chance.

getting ready to kick

Good Try Samuel!!

Usually Samuel is in the front line trying to keep the other guys away from his guy who has the ball. This time Samuel got to be the one with the ball. I think he did a great job.

Here comes the ball!

GO BUDDY GO!!!!!!!!!!

Sam had a lot more fun in flag football than he did in soccer. I am sure he wants to sign up again soon.

While doing my secretary work this past Sunday, Luppin’s teacher comes up to me and tells me a funny thing she did in class the week before. They were having a lesson about the word of wisdom and the teacher was talking about how tobacco is not good for you and that you shouldn’t chew it or smoke it. Luppin raised her hand and began to tell the class how her daddy ate tobacco with everything. Daddy has Tobacco on his eggs, his tomato sandwiches and he uses it almost every night with his dinner. After the teacher stopped laughing because of her comment, she explained to sweet Luppin that it was Tabasco not Tobacco that her daddy used.

Towards the end of our vacation we decided to go to Yorktown, where the British surrendered to the Americans at the end of the Revolutionary War. Yorktown was also the site of action during the Civil War as well. One of the reasons we decided to go to Yorktown is that our National Parks pass we bought earlier in the week for Jamestown was also good at Yorktown. We checked out the Visitors Center and then walked around looking at various captured cannons and other artillery. I really enjoyed the fancy castings and inscriptions on the cannons. My favorite was a captured British mortar with a Latin inscription that translated roughly as “I bring not the rays of the sun but the thunderbolts of Jupiter”.

A Yorktown Cannon

After checking out the Yorktown Visitors Center we decided to check out historic Yorktown’s town center. We enjoyed walking around the town – the weather was nice and the kids were good and we were generally having a good time. We took pictures of the kids at the Yorktown victory monument and even found a cannon ball embedded into the wall of a Yorktown house. The cannon ball likely came from a French ship that blockaded Yorktown and cut off any British retreat to the sea.

Yorktown Victory Monument

Kids at the Yorktown Victory Monument

A ball in the wall

Everything was going well until Diana peed her pants. This was a major annoyance as all the kids are generally well past the “accident” stage and we hadn’t come prepared with extra clothes or underwear. Diana’s accident cut short the walking part of our Yorktown tour but luckily for us there was a driving tour that you could go on as well. We made Diana sit in the back of the car on a towel and struck off for the driving tour which covered both the revolutionary and civil war battlegrounds. We stopped at every information point along the tour and carefully read all the signs. It was beautiful weather and I enjoyed the driving tour through the woods and countryside as much as anything we did the whole vacation.

The next day was our final day of vacation so we headed to Baltimore to turn in the rental car and visit Nancy’s Aunt Joyce. We had lunch with Aunt Joyce and went to their little farm and played with the Shetland ponies that Joyce keeps as a hobby. Unfortunately, it was raining all day long and nobody thought to get the camera out of the car in the rain. On Saturday, we flew from Richmond, VA to Boise, ID via O’Hare without incident and then made the 5 hour drive home from Boise.

All in all, it was a fun vacation even though the airline problems got us started on the wrong foot at the beginning. That being said, now that I’ve taken my family to Washington D.C./Baltimore/Williamsburg/Jamestown/Yorktown once in their life, I have very little desire to return again in my life.

On Wednesday we had an appointment with our Congressman (Rep. Jason Chaffetz) to tour the U.S. Capitol. We had tried to get a tour of the White House through Rep. Chaffetz but the staff member told us that since Chaffetz was a freshman rep and also a Republican, the Obama Administration wasn’t making any White House tickets available.

We rode the Metro in to Washington D.C. in the morning and made our way to the House office building. The kids probably enjoyed the train as much as they enjoyed anything else in D.C. When we got there Rep. Chaffetz wasn’t in the office but his staff was very nice and they escorted us on a wonderful tour of the capitol building including spending time in the House Gallery watching the debate on the Hate Crimes bill.

Riding the Metro

Each state had two statues in various parts of the building. Utah was represented by Brigham Young and by Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television. Brigham Young is about as Utah as you get but Philo is controversial because Idaho often claims him as one of their own.

Hanging with Brigham Young

The rotunda was impressive and made you dizzy craning your head to look up at the building. We heard the various little tidbits that the congressional aides have been trained to tell about each painting and nook and cranny of the building.

The impressive Rotunda

After our tour of the Capitol building we found a McDonalds nearby that was jam packed with the DC government employee lunch crowd. We shared tables with a couple of business people who looked upon us and our collection of Happy Meals with bemusement. After lunch we made our way over to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I thought the kids would really enjoy this one but they were rather ho hum about it. The place was jam packed with busloads of school kids but our kids didn’t think moon rocks and space shuttle parts and looking up the inside of a Saturn V rocket was as cool as I thought it was back in 1982.

The one thing that Emily and Anne really wanted to see was the Holocaust Museum. We made our way over to the museum and Nancy and I took Caroline, Sam, and Diana through on the quick tour while we let Emily and Anne go slow and spend as much time as they wanted. Anne seemed to be fascinated the most – she spent time reading every display and carefully looking at every exhibit. We let Anne take as much time as she wanted up until the point that Caroline, Sam, and Diana were frustrated and cranky and ready to go home. We had planned on visiting other Smithsonian museums and possibly the National Art Gallery but by the time we were done with the Holocaust Museum everyone was “museumed out” and we decided to catch the Metro home before the rush hour crowd overwhelmed us.

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