The Un-Road Trip

I can't even believe we are half way through July and starting the downhill slide to "back to school."  {And yes -- I'm using air quotes because who knows what that's even going to look like!}  Our summer thus far as continued on in much the same vein as the past 3 or 4 months, with one notable exception -- a trip out west to see family!  

Watching a beautiful sunrise was perhaps the only perk of leaving at 5 in the morning.

Since I wasn't able to go to my dad's graveside service this March (and neither was one other sibling), we decided months ago that we would all gather together this summer to have a little memorial in his honor.  With his birthday falling on July 1st, we figured that would be the perfect time for all of us to travel out there.  Even though we just did a road trip out to Utah last summer, no one was upset about making another one THIS summer.  And I think I have to call this year's adventure an UN-road trip, anyway, seeing as to how we weren't making any fun stops along our way.  The kids were seriously troopers because it was the worst.   We drove straight out to Utah in one fell swoop, only stopping a couple times for gas and food and we made record time.  Even if that record was just a little over 20 hours.  Hahahaha.  {Spoiler alert -- being in the car that long is not fun for anyone.}

Some people are lucky enough to be able to fall asleep anywhere.

Despite the fact that we had been planning for months now to make the drive, as we got closer and closer to July, I was starting to get a little concerned about the wisdom of traveling during a pandemic, when the number of Covid cases are spiking both where we live AND where we were going in Utah.  After counseling as a family and doing some praying and pondering, though, we all felt good about going and a week after we made that decision, we were on the road!

Playing outside at grandma and grandpa's house was so satisfying after being cooped up in a car.  ;)

Our stipulations for staying with grandma and grandpa were that we had to stay 6 feet away from them and wear masks entering and exiting the house until we were down in the basement.  I actually think this picture is pretty cute!  Perhaps this year's Christmas card option?  Hahahahahaha.

While we were in Utah, we split our time between Scott's parents' house (where we slept most of the nights) and Emily and Freddie's.  It was so much fun!  I think we ALL needed this break from real life.  The kids had a blast with their cousins, and honestly Utah is so beautiful.  I love seeing the mountains and the view of Utah lake from Saratoga Springs is gorgeous.  I could seriously just sit out on Emily's back deck and stare at the lake all day long! 

Poor Ethan -- his birthday is smack dab in the middle of summer and is therefore almost always shuffled in with vacation plans and/or moves.  Sophie and Pearce wanted to make him a cookie cake while we were at Emily's.  They came up with the caption all by themselves and it made me laugh out loud when I saw it.  Hahahaha.

"You are 16 Going on 17" (That's a Sound of Music reference for anyone not in the know. Hahaha.)

Not so gorgeous?  That would be the wildfires that were raging LITERALLY next door to where my brother and sister live.  We actually had to evacuate from my brother's house one Sunday because the fires were so close to their neighborhoods and we were thankfully able to grab ALL of our stuff and the kids and head back over to my in-law's house in Orem in record time. I can't even describe how apocalyptic the sky looked while we were trying to get out of there!  We were lucky in that we beat the rush to get out of dodge and the main road leaving town was completely clear when we left.  Ten or fifteen minutes later, when my mom and a couple of other siblings were leaving, it was bumper to bumper traffic.  

This was the view of Freddie's street as we were fleeing!

And Redwood Rd!

In a true miracle, the wind changed direction RIGHT before it got to any neighborhoods (although I think there was one house that was a casualty) and if you look at the aerial shots of the burn damage, the line stops RIGHT next to my brother's neighborhood.  Like seriously, RIGHT NEXT TO IT.  So crazy!  Thankfully that wind changed, and by the next day even, the air was so much better and the view so much clearer, that you wouldn't have known that anything happened.

For comparison's sake -- this is Freddie's street the next day.  Crazy difference!!!

Other than that big excitement/adventure, we stayed pretty low-key and as self-contained as possible.  The kids and I made one trip to BYU to eat at the Cougareat (and get some chocolate covered cinnamon bears from the bookstore) and Scott took the older kids to hike the Y one of the mornings while we were at his parent's house still.  I don't know that a picnic by ourselves in American Fork canyon counts as super exciting, but we all enjoyed it nonetheless.  It's amazing how much cooler the temperature is when you're up in the mountains!

Hahahahahahaha.  This picture just makes me LOL.

Alex and I were pretty impressed with this Lego master creation of the original Brigham Young Academy.

I love how it looks like the woman in the poster behind them is photobombing our picture.  Hahahaha.

When it came time for our family memorial on my dad's birthday, we made the 5 hour drive to Hiko for the day and were joined by Sarah and her family and Jacob, who had flown into Las Vegas and were driving from there.  It was a gorgeous, HOT, and windy day to be in the desert.  We ended up staying for a couple of hours -- leveling out the gravel on top of my dad's grave before placing the stone and letting the kids find a bunch of rocks to outline the space -- and once we were all gathered, we sang happy birthday and ate cupcakes.  My mom had the grandkids tell about their favorite memories with Papi (his candy packages, birthday money, and trips to Chuck E. Cheese were the big ones) and then she shared with them the story of her conversion.  

Hiko, NV

It was SO windy!

Schofield Family Cemetery

My cousin (or I guess technically he's my dad's cousin even though he's around my age) created this sculpture for his parent's grave.

This one huge tree provided the only shade and solace from the sun.  The only downfall was that it was located all way across the street from the cemetery.

All the grandkids!

The 2015 babies!  They're so cute together.  :)

The boys playing in the dirt

I asked Scott afterwards how his expectations of Hiko matched up to the reality.  His response?  "I was expecting it to be in the middle of nowhere, but this is even more middle of nowhere than I was thinking."

My little family

We took a lot of pictures.

The view driving into Hiko.

Mom plus kids

{Mom's Story:  My mom grew up in a large Catholic family in southern Louisiana and one day when she was a little girl she asked her mom if they'd all be together up in heaven when they died.  My grandma answered that no, they wouldn't, but they'd be so happy to be with God that it wouldn't matter.  My mom had to hide the tears that came to her eyes after her mother answered and from that night on, when she finished saying her Hail Marys at bedtime, she'd add her own little prayer that she'd be able to be with her family in heaven. Almost a decade later, she met with missionaries who shared the gospel with her and taught her that families CAN be together forever!  She was baptized on February 28, 1978 and a few months later, she met my dad who had come down for the summer to work in the oil fields off-shore.  Because of their temple marriage we are all sealed together and we WILL be together up in heaven as a family.  It's true that in the here and now life certainly took some twists and turns that my mom wouldn't ever have anticipated (or wanted), but the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that all that is wrong and unfair and tragic in the world can be healed and made whole through the Savior's Atonement.}

  

We made the 5 hour drive back to Utah after we finished our memorial and since we were all having so much fun together and didn't want to leave yet, we ended up staying an extra couple of days.  It was wonderful.  The drive back wasn't quite as wonderful, but at least we had the excitement of watching fireworks for a big chunk of our late night drive thanks to traveling on the 4th of July!  As fun as we all had, I think we were all happy to finally be home and sleep in our own beds.  :)  Now we've just got to figure out a way to make the rest of this summer bearable...

Just Dance is Isaac's new favorite activity.

Moments before our evacuation.

We were all excited to finally meet baby Lucy!

One of our tasks while we were all out there was to sort through my dad's library.  He had a LOT of books.  Each of these bins were filled to the brim.

We tried to organize them by category.  History and Government/Politics were the biggest sections.

(These 4 overflowing bins are the Government/Politics collection.)

Our last day with cousins.

How fun does this look??  843 miles on I-80 alone!

One other task while going through my dad's stuff was dividing up his fountain pen collection.  He loved fountain pens and even though he didn't collect quite as many pens as he did books, he still had a big enough for collection for each of my siblings and I to take home a couple.  Ethan actually got first dibs on choosing one for his birthday.  He was actually pretty stoked about it and really enjoyed his maiden run using real ink.  :)

Groundhog Day Part 2

WOW!  It has been almost a month since I last blogged.  Time flies when it's all blurring together, I guess.  Hahaha.  I figured now is as good a time as any to document more of our life during Covid-19.  My brain is too tired to write a compelling narrative here, so bullet points are going to have to suffice.

• Summer Reading

We'll start with our 2020 Summer Reading Challenge.  This year, we're going extra tech-y and instead of filling out a banner (mostly because we're all out of banner paper and I don't want to go to the store) we're using Google Classroom.  Hahahahahaha.  I think this will really help to sell some of the kids on it.  After all, Grace has been giving assignments to Sophie and Jane all summer long in a Google classroom she created for THEM.

Mom's Summer Reading Challenge 2020 Categories:

History * Mystery * Dystopian * Non-Fiction * Written before you were born * Memoir * Book that's been turned into a movie * Sci-Fi/Fantasy * Free Choice * African-American author * Caldecott Winner * Graphic Novel

• Avatar

Grace's Google Classroom leads me right into their newest obsession -- Avatar: The Last Airbender.  The vast majority of Grace's assignments (if not all of them) have to do with Avatar stuff:  you know, like making collages of pictures from the show and creating video clips with scenes from the show, that kind of stuff.  Outside of their little summer school, they have also modified our Guess Who game to have Avatar characters.  It's a mood.  I have no earthly idea why this show has gripped ALL of their fancy (minus Ethan), but it has.  And I have to hear about it non-stop.

They like to go all in when they do something.

• Yearbook

I forgot to include Sophie's article in the last-days-of-school post that she wrote for her school yearbook.  She's a good little writer.

"Finding Hope"

    The shouts of the crowd echoed through the large gymnasium.  A single shred of hope lingered in the eyes of worried fans.  The Cowboys were down by only two points.  The fate of the game would be decided by a free throw.   

    "We were down our best defender, and that hurt us a lot" [so-and-so] said.  "We really just cracked under pressure, which resulted in us losing the game."

    The Cowboys were ahead during the first half of the game, but not by a lot.  "I feel like parts of the game we did the best we could, but we may have been a little over confident because of the score difference," [a different so-and-so] said.

    During the third quarter, the team's score rose more than 10 points above the Indians.  "We communicated a lot more during the first three quarters, so it wasn't really surprising that our score was a lot higher during that time," [another so-and-so] said.  "We were so sure that we were going to win the game."

    The Cowboys were both aggravated and sad, but many were hopeful for the next time they would play against their rivals.

    "We definitely didn't play our absolute best, but we did spend a lot of time practicing for it," [a final so-and-so] said.  "It was really disappointing, but I feel like the next time we play against the Indians, we can beat them."

    Although the Indians went home with the win, the Cowboys went home with faith and hope for the future ahead of them.

* I clearly wasn't going to include the actual 7th graders' names who were quoted in the article.

** Yes -- the rival mascots are Cowboys and Indians, and yes -- those names are being changed this year.

• New Movie 

While we're speaking of Sophie the yearbook writer, we should move sideways and talk about Sophie the screenwriter.  Hahahaha.  The kids created a new movie at the start of summer.  Sophie wrote the script, Ethan directed and edited, and all 6 kids starred in"Get a Clue," -- a loose mash-up of the real movie "Knives Out" and the game "Clue."  It was hilarious.  Not gonna lie.  It's too bad I can't include full on video clips in here.  Or maybe I could, but it's probably way too long.

.

Some still frames from the movie -- Colonel Mustard (played by Isaac) is dead

• Baking

I'm starting to feel like this post is all about Sophie, but it is what it is.  Hahaha.  Sophie has become a baker extraordinaire over the last several months and she and Ethan have collaborated on a few different projects this summer that have resulted in some delicious treats.  In addition to treats, Sophie has also learned how to make bread all by herself -- which I was LOVING, and then we ran out of yeast and can't find any at the store.  Doh!  For a week or so, though, she was whipping out the Kitchenaid mixer almost every day.  Hopefully the yeast I finally broke down and ordered off of Amazon will be here sooner rather than later.

We've been using the bread recipe from iheartnaptime and it's really good.

• Deck

Meanwhile, one of my projects during corona-cation was to stain the deck.  I rented a power washer to get it clean first, and I have to say that pressure washing the deck and seeing the immediate results was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done.  Not even joking.  Hahahaha.  Seriously, though.  It was so fun.  Ethan was my helper here and there, and when it came time to do the actual staining, Ethan was my right-hand man until Scott was finished working for the day and came out to take his place.  Even though my back (and hands from holding a paint brush for so long) was KILLING me by the end, it was totally worth it for how amazing the deck now looks.  

See that satisfying line??

I ran out of gas in the pressure washer with THIS much left that needed to be done.  DOH!  It necessitated a trip to the gas station and extra rental time from the hardware store.

Post-Pressure-Washing, Pre-Staining

And the after!  We used the color "Cordovan Brown" from the Home Depot in their Behr Premium Semi-Transparent line.  We ended up using almost the whole 5-gallon bucket that we got.

• Book of Mormon

We've been supplementing our family reading of the Book of Mormon for "Come, Follow Me" this year with as many "fun" activities as I can come up with.  Hahahaha.  One way we've been doing this is to make a themed cake representing each book as we finish it.  So, for 1 Nephi, we made a Liahona cake; for 2 Nephi, we made "the Lion and the Lamb" cupcakes; Jacob was represented with an olive oil cake to pay tribute to the Allegory of the Olive Tree; I don't think we actually ended up making anything to cover Enos, Jarom, Omni, or Words of Mormon, but Sophie and Ethan created this masterpiece of a King Benjamin's Address cake.  Hahaha.

"King Benjamin" on his tower, giving his address.

Lamb and Lion cupcakes

Olive oil cake -- it looks kind of gross, but it was actually quite good, and more kids liked it than I expected.

We've also turned our Sunday school portion of home church into a competition each week.  We've done scripture Pictionary (with people, places, things, and scripture quotes from the Book of Mormon up to the point we've read); we've played the "celebrity" game with the same set of cards that I made for Pictionary; we tried a Family Feud -- but that resulted in actual family feuding; and my personal favorite was when we had them recreate our whiteboard outline of the people of Mosiah versus the people of Zeniff, or as I liked to call it, "A Tale of Two Cities."  Hahahaha.  You can color me pink, because I had NO idea any of these ideas would actually land with the kids.  It's been a lot of fun, though, and I'm hoping all these positive associations with the scriptures will stay with them for life.

Here's our outline we added to as a family while reading Mosiah...

And here they are completing it to fill it back out after I erased the board.

The teams were big kids v. little kids and they both did astoundingly well.  It was really more like two on two, though, because Isaac obviously wasn't going to be able to help much and Grace has retained an astonishingly minute amount of scriptural knowledge.

The big kids had the Zarahemla side and the little kids had the Lehi-Nephi side.  I was pretty impressed to see how well they filled it out.

• A Tribute

So, 2020 has been quite the year.  About a month after my dad passed away in March, HIS dad passed away as well.  He had lived a good, long life, so it wasn't unexpected.  However, after he died, I realized that I had never paid tribute to my Grandma (his wife) who passed away last fall.  Growing up in New Orleans, we didn't see my Hansen grandparents very often since they lived in California.  It's sad to realize that I don't have nearly as many memories with them as I do with my Bourgeois grandparents who only lived an hour away from us.  What I can remember, however, is the love I felt from them whenever we DID see them.  Especially from my Grandma.  I remember one visit we made to their house in California when I was maybe 8 or 9 and my grandma patiently tried to teach me and my sisters how to make Barbie clothes on her sewing machine.  There was a rubber tire swing in the backyard that everyone always wanted a turn on, and my Grandpa would dry fruit leather on the roof of his house.  My grandma would send care packages at Christmas time when we were younger and it was something we looked forward to every year.  {They're also the inspiration behind the packages my dad would send for my kids' birthdays.} We would do our best to make it to the big Family Reunions every couple of years that were usually held in Hiko, NV and being with the huge extended family and playing with all these cousins that I rarely ever saw were some of the the best memories of my childhood.

My cousin created these picture books about our grandparents so that her kids would be able to know them even if they didn't get to see them very often.

My Grandpa and Grandma  -- as well as my dad -- were laid to rest in the Schofield Family Cemetary in Hiko.  I wasn't able to be there for any of their funerals, but I am so happy that we will be driving out to Utah next week, to spend time with my family and then drive out to Hiko to gather at my dad's graveside and put the engraved stone marker on it for his birthday -- July 1st.  

• Life Histories

That leads me to my next bullet point.  I was inspired by the awesome little books that my cousin made for her kids about OUR grandparents and decided I wanted to make something similar for my children -- especially Isaac, who will never remember his Papi.  I have always loved family history, but over the last few weeks as I've been working to complete a Life History of my dad, I have felt the spirit of Elijah more strongly than I ever have before.  As I've been poring over every single document I can find to fill in the gaps of knowledge I have, I have felt like my dad is still here.  It has been a tender mercy.  Familysearch.org has been an awesome resource as well.  I've learned so much that I never knew about my Grandma's side of the family.  My Grandpa's side has been well-documented in an awesome family history book that was compiled by my dad's Aunts several years ago and I have really enjoyed re-reading through it this past month.  People are so interesting and life stories are fascinating to me.  I love knowing where I came from.

That big book in the center is the family history compilation for my dad's side of the family.  I've been able to get a lot of info from it for MY family history compilation.

• My Book

And that brings me to my final stopping point -- my book.  I have felt like a family history sleuth the last few weeks as I've been trying to capture everything about my dad's early life!  It has been so fun and satisfying.  I'm pretty sure my dad's life purpose was to keep a record/archive his life, so it has been EXTREMELY helpful in getting a glimpse into his younger life.  My brother Freddie has a memory like an elephant and has helped me a TON with remembering stories my dad used to tell us about his life growing up.  He's also the keeper of all my dad's old stuff at the moment, so he's been texting me pictures left and right of the traces my dad left behind.  {And spoiler alert -- he left a LOT behind.  He kept just about everything; old birthday cards from his grandparents, invitations to parties, graded papers -- both A's and F's, momentos such as his Boy Scout troop card from 1967; and a collection of old magazines and comic books from when he was a kid.}

An "A" on an English paper...

...and an "F" on a Geometry paper.

This from his very own scrapbook.

I'm using Shutterfly to make the book and print it out and it's going to be a real tour de force, let me tell you! Hahahaha.  Along with the narrative of his story, I'm inserting little "fun facts" into the layout and as an homage to my dad's love of vocabulary, I'm including vocab boxes on each page to define words that the kids might not necessarily know.  There will be lots of pictures, of course, and plenty of actual quotes from my dad.  All-all-all, it's going to be awesome.  I have loved putting everything together and writing it up.  {Although, I'm not quite finished with the writing -- I've got the rest of high school and beyond to go.  And I still haven't decided where my stopping point will be.  I'll definitely go through his mission and getting married, but after that, I think life becomes too complicated and I don't think it will be of interest to kids anyway.}

A little sneak peak at a couple of the pages in his book.

Well, that's all I've got folks!  Until next time...