Hoot Hoot! Orem Owlz Baseball Game

Last Friday we decided to head out and go to an Orem Owlz Game. They are a local baseball team that plays not too far from us. Jeremiah got some free tickets from work, so we decided to go and have some fun. Taylor was down staying for the weekend, so we talked him into going with us.

Here's the Owlz warming up


Our tickets were free for the general admission section, which is sitting on the lawn. It's actually pretty comfortable.


This is a picture of the kids with Hootz and Holly, the Owlz team mascots. Hailey is fascinated with them and always wanted to know where they were through the entire game. Of course, she didn't want to get too close, so I had to hold her during the picture.


Zach had to dress up in all of his Owlz gear - shirt and hat so that he completely supported the team. He loves to yell "Let's go Owlz!" - it was so cute!


Hailey loves the games too, although I'm sure she has no idea what's going on. She also yells and cheers the players on, just like her brother and we just smile and laugh every time because she's so darling!


We sure love watching the Owlz, they've become a family favorite!

Swimming at Roy Aquatic Center

What's the best thing to do on a hot day? Why, go swimming of course! And that's just what we did last Wednesday. I'm a little behind on my posts, so I'm going to try and catch up the next few days.

My sister used to rent a house right down the road from this Aquatic Center and her boys (as well as my kids) have always wanted to go swimming there, so we were sure to make it this summer on one of our Wednesday play days.

Here's a picture of the kids chilling on their towels. They all love to be together!


Hailey and Nana


The best part about this swimming pool was that it was completely geared towards little kids. Branson and Hailey loved this little slide - they thought it was so neat to slide down the frog's tongue!


It feels so nice to relax in the water on a hot day!


Hailey and Branson played together all day long. In fact, most of the time they were holding hands as they would walk from the front of the slide to the back. It was so cute! I got a few pictures, but they were all blurry, so I didn't post them. They are such good friends, I love it!


Zach has been so anxious to use his pool noodle in a bigger pool than the blow-up one we have played in out back. This was perfect and he loved every second of it.


Zach and Ashton loved the fire hydrant water squirters and spent a ton of time trying to squirt each other and any one else that came by.


My kids have turned into little daredevils and both went down the waterslide with Jeremiah. I tried to get pictures, but in order to see them I had to stand so far back that you couldn't see anything in the picture. So I guess you'll have to use your imagination, but they had a blast! They both went down the curvy slide at least 3 or 4 times each! Zach even went down by himself twice! They would have gone more if we had let them, but we were tired and wanted them to play on the other water toys too!

We had a blast and can't wait to go back again next year. We've decided it's really the perfect pool for little kids!

The First Harvest of the Year

I know I really can't take credit for "creating" the vegetables from my garden, but I like the fact that my watering, weeding, and care contributing into a creation. Our meager little garden only contains one tomato and one cucumber plant - mostly due to the fact that my little family doesn't really eat many other vegetables, but also due to the fact that the road construction behind us require them to be on the last 10 feet of our property to set the sound wall at some point. That 10 feet is a good portion of our garden, so we opted to keep it small this year instead of losing plants mid-season. I enjoyed fresh tomatoes and cucumbers with dinner tonight and I was reminded of how much different fresh vegetables taste - SO YUMMY!

Farm Country

Another post on another fun Wednesday get-together. This week we went to Farm Country at Thanksgiving Point. We had some free passes, so it made the trip extremely inexpensive. I think we ended up paying $7 for our family of 4 - not too shabby.

The entrance to Farm Country has a bunch of informational items - the kids absolutely love the display where it shows how they process milk and bottle it. Their favorite part though, is the big plastic cow - we always seem to come home with a picture of them in front of this cow.


Here's another of the few pictures we got of all of them together. It's hard to see, but those are llamas behind them.


Hailey was bit afraid of some of the smaller animals (go figure), but she did think this little goat was really cute.


The kids loved feeding the ducks and I think Nana went broke giving them quarters to buy more food with. Zach was fearless and touched every animal he could. He really has become brave the past little while.


I love these little buildings they have set up for the kids to play in. They don't seem to "fit in" with everything else, but the kids absolutely love them.


The jail was fitting for our 4 little rugrats - they were too cute behind bars!


I think one of the favorite things to see was this little horse. It was a baby of a little shetlan pony and the kids loved feeding it. Hailey even got brave and actually let the horse eat from her hand.



This is a picture of the kids on the hayride/tractor ride. Since each admission had a ticket to ride one thing (the hayride or the pony ride) and we had enough adults that didn't mind giving up theirs, the kids were able to ride the hayride and the pony ride one time each without us purchasing additional ride tickets.


Here they both are on the pony rides. They absolutely love horses, thanks to my sister and brother-in-law who let them get close to their horses whenever we're able. I had to laugh that Hailey was afraid of the goats, chickens, and even the sheep, but walked right up to these horses without even batting an eye.




We were lucky to hit Farm Country in the morning when it was cool and before a bunch of people were there. Thanks everyone for coming with us, it's so much more fun to go together with family!

A Fun Trip to SLC!

We had a really fun time on our get together this week. We decided we were going to head into Salt Lake City and either see the Clarke Planetarium or the Kids Discovery Gateway Museum.

For some added fun, we decided to take the kids into SL on the Front Runner Train - a commuter train that runs from Ogden to SL at the present time. The kids have been looking forward to this all week.


It's a double decker type train, so we sat on the upper level and the kids had a blast! I think if this is all we had done, they would have been completely happy.


As if that wasn't exciting enough, once we got into the Front Runner Station, we switched to the TRAX - the lite rail commuter train to take us closer to the Gateway. There we had lunch and the decided to go to the Clarke Planetarium.

There were so many interesting things to see - telescopes, pendulums, lenses, and much more. Some of the favorites that the kids liked were:

1. Newton's Gravity Display - this was a display of balls rolling along a bunch of different paths to show that they kept going based on the pull of gravity. Other than the motor that would take them back to the top, they moved all on their own. The kids loved watching the balls and moving the little handles at the bottom to send them in all different directions.


2. The Weight Scale - this was so fun. Once you stood on the scale it would tell your weight and then when you clicked a different planet, it would tell you how much you would weigh there. Since different planets have different gravity pulls, it was fun to see the differences - Zach weighed over 700 lbs on Jupiter - wow!


3. The Channel 2 Weather Screen - the kids just loved standing in front of the weather screen, then looking into the monitors on either side to see themselves. We had to find Utah and Idaho, then pretend to do a forecast. They had so much fun. The best part was when Branson was so insistent that he lived in the hurricane off the coast of Florida. So cute!


4. The Moon Landscape - this was so neat! They had a little landscape set up to look just like the moon. The kids could walk through it and even sit on the rocks. It looked very realistic and we spent most of our time here.




5. The Mars Landscape - just like the Moon one next door, they had a Mars Landscape set up for the kids to explore. It was really neat to stand there and watch the kids walk around. With the colors and the light set as it was, it really seemed like we were on Mars!


6. The Rocket and Shuttle Section - the boys loved this place because it had scaled down models of all of the rockets, space shuttle, and even the International Space Station. Each of the scaled down model had a little miniature person next to it so that you could really see the scale based on a regular person. The kids didn't really understand this and thought those little people were really funny!


7. The Planet Area - this was my favorite place. They had each of the planets sized to scale and so much information on each of them. It was interesting to realize how small the earth really is compared to some of the other planets. I also liked the section that talked about the Hubble Telescope and showed a bunch of pictures it has taken of the universe. It really is amazing to realize we are one tiny little speck out there - the whole "worlds without number" thing really starts to make sense and yet hurts my mind at the same time!


The best part of the whole Planetarium was that everything we were able to see was absolutely free! If you live close and haven't been to the Planetarium in a while, it's definitely worth the trip.

After another fun ride on TRAX and Front Runner and some yummy ice cream, we headed to Nana and Papa's house to play for a bit. When we eventually headed home, the kids were exhausted and fell right to sleep in the car. Aren't they cute?




We had a wonderful day in Salt Lake and the kids keep asking when we're going to go again.

Let's Play Some Baseball

That's right, it's baseball season! And our little resident sports buff (notice I said little to distinguish him from the other sports buff at our house) has been having a blast playing baseball this year. A few of the games have been during slight sprinkling of rain, so I wasn't able to take my camera until this last Thursday.

This is his little team. They are all so cute in their little green shirts and hats.

He's always all smiles when he plays, it's great to see him having such a fun time!

Here he is getting ready to throw the ball. He's a really good infielder and can pretty much stop anything hit in his direction.

Here he is batting. He looks so grown up standing there holding that bat. He has gotten a hit every time he's been up - which I think is impressive for a 6 year old!

And here he is on first base after getting another great hit. He always looks towards where we are sitting to be sure we saw his hit. He's always so excited and we just love seeing him so happy.


Of course I can't help but put a little video on here of him hitting. He's so cute! As proud as I am of him, I still have a hard time realizing that little boy out there is my baby - he's just growing up so fast!



He really has some great natural talent in the sports area and even more, he really enjoys playing. He's just so much fun to watch! Thanks to all the family who have taken time out to come and watch him play, it really has meant a lot to him and to us.

Fish

This post is all about fish - seeing fish and being fish. I"m sure you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about right? Well, I'll explain.

First the seeing fish part. On Wednesday we took the kids to the Living Planet Aquarium in Salt Lake. We've been there a few times before, but the kids love it each and every time.

There were so many times when the kids just got so excited to see something. Half of the time I don't think they had any idea what they were actually looking at, but they were exited none-the-less. Hailey's pose in this picture was how they all were pretty much the whole time. I think I heard "Mom, look at this!" about a hundred times.

This is all 4 of the kids on the "boat. They have a boat set up where you can go in and drive on the open water (well, the tv screen in front of you makes you feel that way). It's fun and the kids love it. It was quite the effort getting them all to look at the camera at the same time, but we did it.


I seemed to get a bunch of pictures with just the backs of their heads. But in a way that's good because it meant they were really enjoying what they were looking at (they are cute heads though aren't they?).


One of the favorite spots to stop is the fish petting pool. They have all kids of fish and stingrays that you can actually touch. The kids always thing this is fascinating, but I don't think one of them has been brave enough to touch anything yet. Jeremiah was the only brave soul this trip and touched a stingray as it swam by. Hailey and Zach actually put their hands in the water, but neither came anywhere near to touching anything and they were perfectly fine with that!


The boys absolutely love the shark tank. The sharks are very small, probably only 3-4 feet long, but scary enough to make them jump a few times when they swam by.


I think my favorite thing about the aquarium is the tropical fish tanks. All the brightly colored fish are so beautiful. Of course Nemo and Dori were the favorites to spot for the kids.


And the trip to the aquarium wouldn't be complete without playing in the coral - a little area where the kids can go around the coral and play in the tunnels and caves. We actually got all of them to stop for a picture - it was a miracle!



We had a blast at the aquarium and can't wait to go back again next year!

Ok, so that's the seeing fish part, so what about the being fish part? Well, that comes after we left the aquarium and went to Nana's house for lunch and playing in the pool. Yes, our kids are literally fish when it comes to playing in the water. They are in and out, jumping, laughing, and playing - they just can't get enough.

This time we had a slip 'n slide to play with too. Boy did the kids have fun running and sliding on the wet plastic. Hailey and Branson were practially unseparable as they wanted to go together down the slip 'n slide every time!


Zach had a perma-grin the whole afternoon as he went from the pool to the slip 'n slide and back again. He really is my little fish!


As as if the pool and slip 'n slide wasn't enough, we pulled out the squirt guns too.



So in all, it was a pretty fun day of seeing and being fish. We all were tired, but it was definitely worth it. We can't wait to do it again.