Church summer fun

Our kids had some pretty rockin' adventures with our church youth group this summer! I only have a handful of photos since the kids were asked not to bring phones to any of these. So just photos here and there that parents were texted as proof of life, haha!

Above is Isaac leading the PaddleShip at the end of their whitewater rafting high adventure for the young men's group (they were in actual rafts for the whitewater part, this was just playing around afterwards). He went on a 3-day trip to New River Gorge National Park and had a blast!!

And he used some of the cash we sent with him to buy a sticker for our cartop carrier, which is our family tradition whenever we visit a new national park. I loved that he thought to do this!!!

The day after we got home from 2 weeks of camping, the girls headed out to girls' camp with the young women in our stake! This was Abigail's second year as a youth counselor. 

Color fight aftermath!

Youth conference--this was our year for trek!! Juliet made the aprons that both our girls wore. And more camping!! I was seriously SO worried about trek before they left (and did my usual annoying thing where I email everyone in charge, I'm sure they love hearing from me). But it was crazy hot, heat warnings up the wazoo, humidity was insane, etc. We loaded them up with cooling towels, liquid IV packets, battery-powered fans, Camelbaks...everything we could think of! The leaders made some pretty significant modifications the week of (I think they had a LOT of concerned parents reaching out) and so it turned out to be a really good experience. 

I was just about to publish this post and Abigail said WAIT!!!! I have more trek pictures!! So while I took Luke to his soccer practice I put Abigail in charge of sorting through the Google drive folder of photos. 



These are all brand-new to me but I love Juliet's hair in this one!



And I suddenly understand how Juliet came home with bajillion mosquito bites (she said she didn't spray her legs with bug spray bc they were covered by her skirt...)





One of Abigail's big takeaways from trek is that she did a lot of the work along with the guys in her "family" and the other girls did...not so much. So here is Abigail working away with the guys!



Soooo much mud. And if I recall correctly it was 90 the first day.




River crossing with Abigail having a serious power moment!!!

Juliet provided Abigail with a sunbonnet and Abigail was like nope I am going for the ninja sweatband look.



And apparently Juliet adopted it too, haha. 



They had such a fun time at trek and I'm so glad they were able to go!! They also convinced a friend in Idaho to fly out and go AND they convinced a friend who was visiting from Utah to sign up for trek just days in advance and go with our stake. They are very persuasive girls and honestly, why would you not go if those two cute fun girls were asking you to? ;-) 

Both our girls received their patriarchal blessings at different points throughout the summer. Patriarch Monn was one of the counselors in our stake in Lafayette (their ward was moved into our current stake a couple years ago) and it was really neat to reconnect with the Monns.  

Both blessings were so beautiful and SO specific to each individual girl--they literally could not have been more different and more unique to each of our daughters. 

Pics from the girls' high adventure to Mammoth Cave (they went on the cave tour and canoeing!) and more camping!!! Abigail and I counted up and they were camping for NINE WEEKENDS STRAIGHT this summer. 

And so much paddleboarding fun this summer!! Isaac and Emma made so many good memories together this year. 

I laughed out loud when I saw this pic of Juliet just floating down the river with her Gatorade...

And this is kind of out of place, but here is Juliet as the first recipient of our library's high school reading award. It's supposed to take 4 years...she did it in about six months. 

 

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

In the week between Christmas and New Year's, we decided to get an AirBnb in Cleveland and go visit Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This was a fun trip that lent itself to lots of other little forays rather than our usual hiking-and-camping-centric national parks trips!

We opted to drive through Dayton so that we could visit the US Air Force museum. It had a lot of really cool planes and rockets to see, and the members of our family who love that sort of thing were in total heaven (and everyone else was very patient). 



The first hike we did in Cuyahoga was Brandywine Falls. The interesting thing about this park is that it was established so late that the towns within it were already fully developed, and unlike, say, Great Smoky Mountains, the government didn't make people move out of the park. So the park encompasses a lot of existing infrastructure and you can basically drive anywhere in this very long stretched-out park that threads along the Cuyahoga River. 

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that we opted to hike 5 miles to see a waterfall that we could have driven right up to and parked 20 feet away, but...we were there to see more of the park. ;-)



We parked at the visitor's center and hiked along the Towpath Trail for awhile before hopping on the connector that went to the falls. In summer the Towpath is hopping (42 miles of crushed gravel, lots of bikers, runners, and pedestrians), but it was very quiet when we were there and I think we maybe saw 3 bikers and 10 runners the whole time we were in the park. 


And here are the falls!! My photo crops out the road at the top of the falls. It's very urban!

The trails around the gorge are pretty, but the rest of it was pretty blah. Mud and brown trees. 

I took a grand total of 3 pictures in five miles, if that tells you anything! But these kids are pretty cute. 

It started to rain pretty heavily just as we got back to the car, so it was the perfect time to drive to historic Kirtland and visit some of the sites that are key to the early history of our church. We last visited in 2010 (post here) so it was fun to go back with older children and more children!

One thing that was really fun was to look up our ancestors who lived in Kirtland: James Henry Rollins, Isaac Decker, and Harriet Page Wheeler Decker Young. 



The next day we headed out for more hiking--this was the hike that I was expecting to be the best, so we saved it for our second day. 



This hike is called Ledges and it's fairly short (we added on some loops and spurs so it was about 4 miles) but it was SO fun. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. 

I took a ton of pictures in this specific area because the kids found an interconnecting system of tunnels and spent a loooong time exploring around and crawling to see where the tunnels all went. 

Case in point: there is a tunnel that begins by Abigail and ends by Neil. 

You just have to climb down here to get in. Which to be honest I had zero interest in doing. I was happy to take pictures. 

Always nice to get a sibling assist, haha. 

I really love this pic!

The kids would happily have spent a week on the Ledges trail, but we had a few more sites we really wanted to see, so we went looking for a covered bridge (where we spent a long time skipping rocks--so many good ones!), the beaver pond (we saw a beaver's trail as he slipped under the water but he never resurfaced no matter how long we waited) and a lot of old locks and the cute town of Peninsula. 

The AirBnb pickings were pretty slim near to the park, so while we ended up with a place that had nice soft comfy beds and plenty of space, it was weirdly lacking in some amenities (towels! blinds! kitchen stuff!)

So while we had a great time playing games, we also did weird stuff like make salad in a trash bag. Oh well. 

Note: everyone was also super patient with me cramming workouts in trying to finish my holiday challenge (every Peloton holiday-themed class in every discipline from 2020 and 2021, which challenge I thought of sometime in the first week of December, so I fit in 79 classes in 27 days). More about that later, but I was pretty creative trying to smash them in, which led to things like yoga while also cooking breakfast. And HIIT cardio sessions after a day of hiking, which was the very absolute low point of the whole holiday challenge. 

On our last day after checking out of our AirBnb, we stopped in Columbus to visit COSI, which I remembered fondly from my childhood growing up in Ohio! It looked very very different, but we had a great time and again, could have spent many more hours there!

 All in all, it was a really fun four days with lots of different fun stuff to keep us occupied while we waited for New Year's Eve!