May 2020

Although the days have seemed really long, the month of May has been going by really fast. The children all got into a pretty good routine with their school work. Rebecca has been helping the younger ones a lot, but Julia, Ethan, and Christian have been pretty much working on their own. Rebecca still checks in with them every day to make sure they have finished all of their assignments, but during the school time hours, they have been doing a good job focusing on their school work. This last week they received their final assignments. A few of them have small things to finish up next week, but for the most part, they are completely done for the year! Yay! Time for the summer break.

Besides our school routine, throughout May we were able to do several hikes. This is the perfect season for hiking in the Pocatello area where it is not too hot and not too cold. But we have had some extreme days here and there. For example, all yesterday morning it snowed. We probably got at least an inch that stuck to the grass. And it was funny to see the drooping branches that were weighed down with snow on all of the trees. But today it is supposed to hit 70 and by Thursday it is supposed to be in the 90s.

We also had a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Swift this month. I didn't get any pictures of them, but we had a fun time hanging out. We didn't do anything special while they were here, but they did get to join us on a walk and it was fun just playing games around the house with them. The children especially loved playing pickleball. 

We have been enjoying our fire pit. About once a week we have been doing dinners out there. Just hot dogs or tin foil dinners and of course smores. Agnes has been getting into telling ghost stories while we are out there.

And we sold our van and bought a new one. Our old van had just under 212,000 miles on it and we started to notice some major problems. I was just going to bring it to junk yard - they said they would give us $200 for it - but I ended up selling it to someone in the area for the same price. And now we have a new van - well new to us. It is a 2009 Honda Odyssey. It has a lot of luxuries that we didn't have any our old van, like a working air conditioner and heater. I guess those are necessities, but it does have cool luxuries too, like a navigation system and rear camera and heated seats and a dvd player. We are hoping to get some good use out of all of those things this summer.

Kinport Peak Hike - I think about 7 or 8 miles round trip. It was tough, a constant uphill all the way. But, it had lots of different terran. It started off with sagebrush and some wildflowers, then it got into a forested area, then above the treeline it was more grassy with more wildflowers.















We had to hike across huge patches of snow on a few parts. In this next picture you can kind of see Christian half-way across the snow part.








Getting closer to the top and looking back at Julia bringing up the rear. She is a really strong hiker, but she doesn't want to go hiking as much. Sometimes she puts up a stink about it and lags behind. We did see a few snakes on this trail, so that made it so she didn't get too far behind the rest of us.



At the top. The city is just down below on the left of the picture.






Ethan's 12th birthday. He didn't have a friend party given COVID-19 restrictions; however, once Idaho opened up some, he invited a couple friends over to hang out and celebrate some.

Last pictures of our old car. It lasted us 10 years and we drove it for over 100,000 miles. We bought it from Rebecca's parents when it already had 100,000 miles on it. Getting our new car was a little scary because this was our first time buying a car from a non-family member.




Out on a hike with Grandma and Grandpa.







We saw several rabbits in these bushes. Also lots of marmots on the hike that the children had a fun time chasing around and trying to catch.




This next hike was at the nearby ski slopes. It is the start of the trail up Bonneville Peak (the tallest peak in southeast Idaho). We were just scouting it out this time with the hopes of hiking to the peak sometime in the next couple of weeks.





You can't see Pocatello from this picture. But if you look close you can see the freeway that is just left of the middle of the picture. The freeway goes around to the left of the hills/mountains and then Pocatello is right behind them in the very center of the picture.