Planks, Fartleks, and Family Fun: In One Week.....

We will be a houseful of giddy peeps!! We are so excited for our first Disneyland trip in 4+ years....I kinda can't wait!!!

In the meantime, life continues on. Nothing super exciting going on here, which is a good thing. Lots of little things, though. One sort of exciting thing is that I get to go to Alcatraz with the middle school's 6th grade class. Growing up in WA, this would have been the field trip of a life time!! We've been here over 16 years now, and I've still never been, so I'm excited! I'm also getting to work a lot in Myles class on art and science days (weekly), and sometimes in the library checking books out to the kids, and also spend an hour or two a week in the office making copies for his teacher. This is our 3rd year at what I still call the "new" school, and it's finally starting to feel like home.

Brian and Emma took the bikes out for a ride on the mountain. This was a first, and they both had a blast. Trail conditions are super dry and loose, so ups and downs they both said were kind of scary....but I suspect they were equally fun because of the scariness. They stuck to the grasslands, in the picture below. There's plenty of steep hills in those rolling grasslands.

Looks like a town that needs rain.

We had a thunder and lightning storm come through over the weekend with a tiny bit of sprinkles. I bet this old guy was struck by lightning at some point in his life.

When Back Creek is actually flowing...this is one of my favorite sections because it actually flows higher than the trail....and those stairs are always pretty.

I've gotten some trail time in. More trees are down. We had a bought of wind Saturday that brought some trees down around town, and I'd guess lots on the mountain, although there was just one down out of Mitchel Canyon across the trail.

Turkey's are the only animal life I've seen this week.

What a 90 degree, humid Fall day looks like.

This is the inside of the downed tree. It's just dried out, brittle, crumbly wood.

The girls are adjusting to having set chores that rotate every week. : ) This caused growing pains at first, but they are starting to except their new reality. They are 11 and 13....it was time.

We found a really nice, solid wood, heavy, heavy, heavy desk with a hutch top for free in a driveway Saturday morning. One of the benefits of the volunteer work our family does on the weekends is that it takes us into a variety of neighborhoods in our town. We happened to be in a really nice part of town when we made this find. The guy came home as Brian and I were attempting to move it, and jumped right in and helped. It took all 3 of us to lift it....but then he says he better follow us home and help unload it. Normally, this would have freaked me out....but taking in where we were, the fact he was an older, clean cut guy, and the nature of why we were in the area to begin with.....we were ok with it.

What the hutch looked like before we got it all pretty in Emma's room.

Of course, that meant the rest of Saturday was spent cleaning Emma's room, rearranging things, moving her old desk into Myles room, getting the new one set up and the decor just right....I love my kids rooms. They are not fancy at all, but they all 3 have their own spaces that reflect their own personalities.

Emma's room, before it got cleaned. She'd love that I posted this, I'm sure.


After it was cleaned and rearranged. She left half way through the process to go play football with some friends....So I really got in there and tossed multiple bags of stuff.

This is the hutch!! It's really pretty!

Emma's old desk re-homed into Myles room. He had wanted a space to work on his legos, and a shelf to display them, so this worked out great for him.

So if you've been around the blog for a few years.....you may notice I have a knack for somehow falling into really nice pieces of furniture for free in peoples driveways. So far - a sofa, love seat, two dressers, a roll-top desk, and now this desk/hutch. All nice, solid furniture that would have been way out of our price range. I don't know how...but I'll take it. Plus, man its nice to have the truck and be able to load it easily.