First Snow

Sorry, no pictures, but we got our first snow last night and this morning. Nothing stuck, but it came down pretty hard for a few hours. The children were all pretty excited. Heated blankets and warm clothes and coats were all pulled out. It is fun to transition into winter, but I am hoping we will have a few more days of Fall still. Looks like it is going to be below freezing every night this week and only reach the 40s and 50s as the highs.

Start of the School Year

We are now well into the school year. It has been going great. The children are all doing well in their classes. This is Agnes' first year and she loves it. Ethan also seems to really like middle school. Here are some of our back-to-school pictures.


Here are the elementary school children with their teachers.

Christian with Mrs. Price - she is amazing! So far, we have always got her for fourth grade.


Elliott with Mr. Crawford. This is our first time having him.


Agnes with Mrs. Dobson. She is the only kindergarten teacher at the school. Kindergarten is half day now, so we are getting used to picking Agnes up at 11 from the bus stop.










Asher wanted to make sure he got his picture in.




Ethan and Julia are doing cross country. They are both so amazing. They both have their days when they do not want to do it, but they are good sports and both improving a lot. In the first race, Julia got 16:09. Her fastest time for last year was 16:30 in her final race. In the second race, which is longer and has a lot of hills she got 19:45. That is still three full minutes faster than her best time on that course last year. Ethan got 14:30 on his first race and 16:20 on the second one. I have been running a lot with him. Just last Thursday though I did a 4 mile run with Ethan and it seemed like he might be as fast as me. I think I could still beat him if it was an actual race, but my pushing it running speed was the same as his. I am going to have to really work hard to try to keep ahead of him for another year or so. Although I am really proud of both of them for how well they are doing, I did think I would get in another decade or so before they would actually be faster than me.














And Agnes started a dance class. It is just a group of her friends (3 other girls) who enrolled and they have been having a fun time.

Summer Activities

Our last post before this one was back in November when Julia broke her arm. Now it is almost a year later. I know that may look like we had been making Julia do all our posts for us, but really we just got out of the habit. I am happy to report though that Julia's arm is now fully healed. I think it did cost us around $3000 out of pocket, two surgeries, and several months of recovery, but it is all better now.

Here are some other things that we did over the summer.

We mainly just spent our summer around Pocatello with a few camping trips around the area and a couple trips to Utah.

Here are the children given a baby goat a lot of attention at a local petting zoo.


At a couple library activities - they had a princess one and a star wars one this summer.





I did have a big trip down to Buenos Aires for a conference. It was four days of flying for three days in the country. It was a really cool city though. The architecture felt very European.




One of the coolest tourist things that I saw was their famous graveyard. The coffins are all in mausoleum above ground. Some of them are very old and falling apart and so the coffins are pretty exposed. Several presidents have been buried here as well as many other famous people.






These next two are for a teenage girl who had accidentally been buried alive - she was really in a coma. When her mom discovered what had happened, she carved this new elaborate stone coffin for her.





Here is the spot for Evita. The country really loves her. Her body had been stolen by political opponents at different times, so now I think her coffin is actually in concrete like 25 feet or so under ground.



This was my favorite restaurant there. They do a lot of meat. This restaurant was called The Secret. From the outside you would have no idea it is a restaurant. In fact, there were bars and everything in front of it except for a small door. You had to ring the bell and then they would open it up and let you in. Inside they had about 10 tables and so they would only serve 10 groups per night. It was all based on reservations, which I couldn't do because they only spoke Spanish. However, a friend of mine told me that if you go about 10 minutes before they open and if you can't really communicate with them for them to turn you away, they may let you sit at a table that isn't reserved until later in the evening. So that is what I did and it worked. I ordered a stake, salad, and sausages for maybe like $7 total. I think they kept telling me it was too much when I was ordering, but I didn't understand. When they brought out my food it was two huge very thick steaks. They were seasoned and cooked just right and very delicious.



Here are our children playing at a park in one of our trips down to Utah.










Here we are at our church's Father/child outing for the year.






At a community fair.








We had the Swift family reunion at our house this year. It was a lot of fun!

This is Niter cave, which was about 45 minutes away.





At Soda Springs which was not too far from the cave.





Playing games back at our house.







Tianna and Jim bought a rental in Pocatello. This awesome tree is in their front yard.




The three older boys, Rebecca, and I hiked Scout Mountain this summer. I think it was about a 10 mile, 5 hour hike. It was a hard one that I had done before and had on my list for us to do as a family. Somehow Julia talked her way out of it though by volunteering to watch Agnes and Asher.







We did a family camping trip to Massacre Rock State Park - only about 20 minutes from our house.








Everyone but Julia got in the water. It is the Snake River and it was really cold. We didn't let them swim - the water was going kind of fast - just hold onto the dock.


I am not sure if I am supposed to share this next one, but here they are in their underwear trying to dry off on the dock.

















I also took Ethan, Christian, and Elliott and two of their friends on an overnight camping trip. They had a blast on that. It was at a church camp site about 1.5 hours from us.











Another trip down to Utah for Amery's wedding.



At the Southeastern Idaho State Fair. It was fun to see all of the animals and submissions for the various baking, art, and other contests. Ethan got selected to be in a pie eating contest.






Christian worked hard to grow a cabbage all summer long. It got to just over 20 pounds. Our garden did pretty good this year. Lots of cucumbers, kale, peas, and tomatoes. We even got some broccoli. For our fruit trees I ended up taking out our three cherry trees because they were not producing and put in two more peach trees. We got a fair amount of peaches and apples (although our apples all had worms this year) and some nectarines and apricots. I have changed the watering pattern on some of them, and I am hoping next year we will finally get our pears too.