fhe this week (well a week ago)

This week we decided to pull out the finger paints and do those as a family. This is only the second time that Mathias has used them and is still figuring out that it is ok to get dirty.

This is his first masterpiece.

When he started on this one he realized that what he painted looked like a "J". He said, "Look momma, a J!" I was completely surprised that he picked that out.

I then showed him that he should step on the paint plate so we could make foot prints. It took him a minute, but once he saw his foot prints he wanted to walk all over the place.

I think that Mathias thinks that the plate is where he is supposed to color. He is completely happy just swirling the paint around on the plate rather than on the paper and we have to keep reminding him that is what the paper is for.

Here is daddy showing him how to clean off some of the paint off of his feet. What a fun daddy.

fhe last week

Dev found this place called NPS in Salt Lake a few weeks ago were they sell things for pretty cheap. He found out that they had a few wagons there, and we have been wanting to get a wagon for some time now. So we went to check it out and sure enough, there was the wagon that Dev wanted, and for half of the original price! So for family home evening last week, we took it for a ride and tried to do some geo caching by our house. Mathias loved the wagon ride and playing with the Garmin GPS receiver and pointing out everything that we passed. We never found the geo cache though. It was a pretty fun little walk and I have a feeling we are going to get a lot of use out of this little red wagon.

Dev's note: every little boy is entitled to owning a Radio Flyer wagon. I remember when we'd set up ramps at the bottom of a hill by my house to see how far we could jump them. Of course we'd eat it hard, someone would get hurt and go running home crying, but it was all part of growing up being a boy. I can't wait for the day when I see Mathias pulling the same stunts. Of course his mom will be freaked out, thinking he's going to kill himself, but I'll be chuckling to myself, silently wishing him to push the limits and jump it a little further.

kid friendly church books

So since I have been talking about FHE and our goal of doing this every week I went on the hunt for toddler, or at least kid friendly, church books. I have heard that Seagull Book has great prices and I have never been there, as I usually go to Deseret Book. I think that this is one of my new favorite stores! Almost everything there is discounted at least 20 % and they have Down East Clothing - who knew? Anyways, I came back with these four books and a few coloring books, and when all was said and done I got the whole purchase for almost half off. Not too shabby! I know that he is too young to understand the books, but they learn so fast at this age that I thought we had better jump on it. So if anyone is on the same quest I would recommend these books, they are great.

Battle Creek Canyon

For our second week of family home evening, we decided to pack a little dinner and go for a quick hike up Battle Creek. It was a pretty day although it was pretty hot still.

Mathias showing me his messy cheetos hands and asking for a wipe. Which, of course, we forgot.

So we did the next best thing and wiped them on the grass.

Not very far into the hike, Mathias found this little grate and heard the water running under it. So we had to stop and listen and then that turned into shoving rocks into the tiny holes on the corners.

Mathias was kinda funny about the rocks. He had to walk where it had the most rocks and he made sure that we followed on that same path. He also made sure to pick up a few rocks on the way.

I would try to run ahead of him to get a picture from the front (since most of them are from behind him) but when I did this he would try to chase me and catch me. Needless to say this did not work very well for pictures.

And here is Mathias on his path of rocks, running way ahead of us. The only way I could get him to slow down or to look at me was to tell him to look for bugs or butterflies.

I told him to watch out for the horse poop and not to step in it, so every time we passed some he made sure to stop and point it out to us.

After running up hill for a while Mathias finally started to wear out and daddy got to carry him for a second.

Mathias thought this "waterfall" (where the water went into the pipe) was pretty cool.

This is where we attempted to turn around since it was getting close to bedtime.

As you can see, Mathias was not to thrilled by this idea. Next time we will have to start earlier and wear better shoes (we all had flip flops on) so that we can hike a bit further.

bike ride up the canyon

Dev and I have decided we should probably start doing family home evenings and get in that routine while Mathias is still young. Since he is so young we don't really have a lesson and do all that just yet but we just spend time together doing something active and fun. So for our first one, we decided to take a bike ride up Provo Canyon. We started at the bottom by the gas station and rode up to Bridal Veil Falls.

Once we got up to Bridal Veil Falls we were greeted by a forest ranger. He told us that the helicopters where bringing up cargo to where they were fighting the fire and then there were some hauling water to dump on the fire. He told us that the fire was about 30-35 % contained and about 180 acres were burned at that time. We could not see a ton because it was on the other side of the mountain from us. Mathias was in pure heaven because not only did the ranger give him his own little Smokey the Bear star-shaped pin but he got to see helicopter after helicopter fly over us. However, on the way back down the Burly (the trailer Mathias sits in that Devin pulls) got a flat tire so we stopped at a park while Dev rode down and got the truck. It was not too bad because we got to stop and run around and play for a bit.

When Devin came back to pick us up, we drove further up the canyon to see if we could see any of the fire. We drove for a bit, but didn't see any fire. But what we DID see was a helicopter dip its bucket into the Provo River to go dump on the fire. We all thought it was pretty cool, especially Mathias who loves pretty much anything with an engine, especially helicopters and airplanes.

Hopefully we can keep this FHE thing going, it's good for us to get out as a family, have fun together, and watch Mathias discover new things.