Visit from the Littles!

Last week my brother Trenton and his sweet little family came up for a visit!  Trenton comes up on business sometimes, but this was the first time we got to have his whole family up.  We had so much fun, but it made me wish we didn't live so far so we could get together all the time.  While they were here, we mostly hung out and let the kids play, and after the kids went to bed we played games and talked.  It was such a great time!

 Cousin Brooklin and Elliott

 Playing on the stairs

Our kids always fought for spots on Trenton's lap.

Julia's first day of School

Julia started school a couple of weeks ago at a charter school here for half-day Kindergarten!  We are so excited for her and proud of her.   She was a little anxious about it all summer, wondering if she would like it, and now she just loves it!  She has a great teacher and looks forward to every school day.  I have dreaded this day for a long time--it means she is growing up--and we miss her at home (Ethan feels a bit left behind), but I am glad she is so happy experiencing new things and learning so much and so that makes me happy.  Plus Ethan gets to be the man of the house for a few hours, which I think he is starting to enjoy.

The school's open house is this week, and we are all really looking forward to attending and seeing more into what her day and her classmates are like!

Summer Fun

We didn't end up going anywhere this summer (outside of Alaska that is), but we enjoyed our time here.  We spent it exploring local hike areas and the back yard, growing a garden, doing a little camping, and spending as much time outside as possible to stock up on Vitamin D before the long winter.  Towards the end of summer, we did a lot of raspberry picking, and the kids got a lot of practice riding their bikes or scooters to and from our secret raspberry patch.  Julia is now a pro at riding without training wheels!

 Christian would wear this shirt or his Spiderman shirt every day if we let him.  

New favorite pastime:  climbing the tree in the front yard to keep a lookout for Dad riding home on his bike or to play pirates. 

I love Elliott's smile and sweet little spirit! 

The kids snuggling up for a movie/blanket eat-a-thon.

This was our first year we were eligible to dip-net as Alaska residents, so Joshua went out in July for a go at it.  The rule is you have to be an Alaska resident and buy a fishing license, and then there are a couple of locations you can go with a big net and catch salmon.  You have a limit according to your family's size, but it is very generous.  Joshua went down with a friend from Church to the Kenai Peninsula, one of the approved spots, and started fishing right after they arrived around 11:30pm.  They put on chest waders and took turns heading out with a dip-net, which is a five foot diameter net with often a thirty foot pole.  Depending on whether the salmon are running or not (it seems they come in waves, depending on the tide and other things), it can take five minutes or hours to catch a fish.  As soon as they caught one, they would come back in and kill and gut the fish while the other went back out.  There were hundreds of people camped out there, all doing the same thing.  We thought about going as a family, but figured it would be hard to keep track of the kids and they would probably get bored after a while anyway.  We would like to go as a family sometime in the future though.

The mouth of the river at the Kenai Peninsula

Lots of people there, gutting the fish and whatnot.