Our First Kayak Expedition

So the kayaks came in the mail today. Used, tandem, inflatable kayaks off of Ebay to be exact.


We took them out to a local pond to give them a whirl. We don't have proper paddles yet, but the old canoe paddles worked fine in the mean time.
It was a pretty spring fed pond with gorgeous crystal clear water.

Hagerman seems to be full of beautiful water. I must admit that this place is really growing on me.
We had a great time!

Monday Night Explore

Last week we went to visit 2 of the plants that Daddy works at.

It was a lovely walk.....
With a beautiful view.....

Fresh clean spring water pouring out of the flume.......

I cried a little bit at this point because I'm afraid of heights. But I wiped them away, and went on to enjoy the rest of the night. :-)

We happened upon a very cute little snake. I like snakes better than heights.
Oh.....except for that time I almost stepped on a rattler in the South Hills, when I was taking all the kids for a hike. I certainly didn't like that snake. No sirree.

Then, on our way to the other plant, we stopped by the Clear Lakes Fish farm to look at the sturgeon in the viewing pond.
Can you see the dark outline of a big fish next to Hailey's left arm? That's a sturgeon.My baby boy enjoyed it too and he got his first mosquito bite.
I should write that in his baby book.

TEA Party

After morning school, the kids and I made signs and then drove over to attend the Twin Falls Tea Party last Thursday. It was a lot of fun and a great educational experience for everyone. The boys helped with the opening flag ceremony, and then all the kids went forward to help sing the Star Spangled Banner. One of our homeschooling friends, Truman Whitney, who is only 14, did an amazing speech. He did even better than the adults and he did it without any notes!

Here's my artist, Torsten, working on his poster. I love his lettering.

Discovering the Gorge

I haven't been hanging around the "blog" much lately- a mixture of a little sadness, some sickness, and much busyness has contributed to my lack of writing, but I will work on getting back in the habit of posting! And now that it is getting a bit warmer outside I may actually have something to write about. c'mon spring...you can do it...you're aaalllmost here...


Yesterday the whole family went to take a look at the deep canyon near our house. Hailey mentioned the view of the falls at the beginning of the trail looks reminiscent of Hawaii. .....ahem...well....if you squint and imagine real hard. :-)


Along the trail there is this look out point with interpretive signs that huge birds must have read and interpreted as saying: poop on me. You just know the birds are thanking humans for building this right here for their perching and viewing comfort. (click the picture to see what I mean)
I've been wanting to take the kids on this hike ever since we moved here, but thought I'd wait until Joel was there to help me keep everyone away from the cliff edges. I'm glad we waited for him because there was a heck of a lot of cliffs and edges on this hike. The land falls away on both sides of the trail until you're walking on a thin wedge of plateau with canyons on either side. The water below actually gets more clear and beautiful as you walk further down river because of all the underground springs adding their fresh cold water to the river. I love it.

We walked until we could overlook the Upper Diversion.
Idaho Power sends this water to a little dam further downstream, one of the many that Joel is learning how to operate in this new area.

And speaking of Joel, he took this interesting shot of some lichens.It was so nice to get out and explore. It will be fun to discover all the beautiful little spots around here this summer.

Paper Dolls

Here's a few pictures from the Modest Fashion Design activity we did in January. Using only tape, staplers and newspaper, the girls worked together to imagine and create fun outfits that were modest too. They came up with some real winners!

I'm still here.....

Well, we are all still alive..... barely. Just kidding- actually I'm doing much better this week. I think I haven't cried for 3 days in a row now! So things are looking up. :-)

The last 2 weeks were pretty rough. We couldn't have gotten out of our last house without help from my mom and grandma. They were there helping almost every day: holding the baby making food, packing boxes, etc. And I'm also so grateful to my dad, and friends from Grand View and Twin Falls, who helped us load and unload the truck (multiple times), clean the house and even brought meals too.

We are still staying at my parents house while Joel and I finish getting the house ready. It's taking some prep work because as many of you know, this new house is less than half the size of our last one. It's smaller than our CJ Strike/Grand View house and smaller than our little house we owned in Twin Falls 5 years ago. I seriously didn't know how we would fit the beds and dressers into the bedrooms, let alone any of my sewing stuff and bookshelves and we have LOTS of books. Even if we didn't homeschool we would have tons of books- but homeschooling just adds a whole new dimension to our book owning tendencies. To help with the space issues, I am planning to turn the coat closet into a homeschool closet, Joel carpeted and I painted the storage room off of the garage to make a bedroom for the boys (it's actually turning out to be the best room in the house!), Mom and I turned part of the garage into a walk-in pantry/ storage room to house the crock pots, Bosch, Vita-Mix, micro-wave, griddle and bulk food, etc. My new kitchen doesn't have a dishwasher and it doesn't even fit my fridge either. Okay, I take that back. The fridge fits the spot as long as you don't need to open the doors. Sounds like a great way to help me shed that excess baby weight, doesn't it? But the kids insisted that our new house have a working fridge, so for now it is pulled out a foot or so into my 4X4 foot kitchen and continues to remind me of the beautiful, well designed, spacious kitchen I left behind.

I may be telling you a sob story but don't worry, I'm over the crying. Cried buckets and bucket the last few weeks and I'm pretty much all cried out. I'm even done crying about the fact that the previous tenants had 3 huge dogs that urinated all over the carpets and gave the house a horrible smell. Now everything seems strangely funny. A few months ago I never would have guessed our family would be living in a tiny stinky house in Hagerman and that I would get over it and that life would go on. Life has a way of doing that.

Pictures

The last week it's been packing and boxes, trips to D.I. and back to packing some more......

Getting ready to leave our private little paradise....


The deer can enjoy their grapes in peace now.....
I was having one of those sleepless nights, so now I'm up looking through pictures of how gorgeous this place is in the summer......you know, just torturing myself. Luckily, it's currently gray, muddy and bleak. Otherwise I don't think they could drag me away......

And while I'm in the nostalgia mood......

Here's a picture of the view from the last house we lived in at CJ Strike Dam. And the living room--
Most you haven't seen this house because I didn't blog then and we lived so far out in the middle-of-no-where that it was quite a trip to visit us. The nearest town was about 7 or 8 miles away with a population in the vicinity of 4 or 5 hundred. Joel's sister Ammanda, Grandpa Pearson, Emily, the Johnsons, and all my family braved the horrific mosquitos, gnats, and wind to see us that year. I think Ammanda and Chop thought it was pretty horrible (the gnats were insane when they came) but even with the out of control insect population, I actually loved living there. Loved it. So maybe there's hope that I'll fall in love with Hagerman too!