Last week my parents hosted a family reunion.  Following the example of my mother's parents, my parents have held reunions every other year for quite a while as the family continues to grow.  We are now up to 85 counting all the in-laws and the great-grandchildren:  2 parents, 11 children, 9 in-laws, 52 grandchildren, 5 grandchildren-in-law, and 6 great-grandchildren.  An impressive number! Mom and Dad and 10 of the original 11 Those not attending the reunion were: my brother in St. George with his wife and 8 of his children and three of my sons with their spouses and babies. My sister's husband came for just one evening with their two youngest and another sister's working daughter came up for the three evenings. It was a group of about 60 for the reunion.  Considering the challenges of COVID-19 this year, it was a good representation. The biggest challenge for the reunion these days is finding a place that can accommodate us and that everyo...

We were so blessed to enjoy an abundant raspberry harvest this year!  We ate them on cereal, oatmeal, and made raspberry ice cream. I have frozen a lot of them and made lots of jam.  Now that the weather is pretty hot, the season is mostly over.  In the hot afternoon it smells a little like a raspberry cobbler out there as the few tiny raspberries left are cooking in the sun. We were also fortunate to get a few more blueberries than we have in previous years.  Blueberries do not grow well in Utah and I am a witness to that for sure.  But we have enjoyed the few we got. In my efforts to use up raspberries, I decided to look for a good raspberry syrup recipe.  I found one that I actually really like.  It has been really delicious on pancakes, ice cream, anything.  I followed it pretty closely except I replaced some of the raspberries with blueberries and left out the butter:   https://www.tastesoflizzyt.com/easy-raspberry-sauce-r...

Two weeks ago our little Camille had an ugly accident.  That afternoon  I wanted the girls to go on a bike ride with me but Camille had had a little bike accident and was feeling anti-bike.  So she insisted on going on her scooter.  It turns out scooters are less stable than bikes! She was going down a big hill on the trail and as she tried to slow down, she pitched off the scooter onto the pavement and knocked one tooth out significantly and the other tooth out a little bit.  Because of her braces, both teeth were still there and I wasn't quite sure what to do about it. I biked home and brought back the car to pick her up, then called the dentist.  It was 5:30pm but fortunately the dentist was still there and had me bring her down to fix her up.  He reinserted the teeth and put on a splint to hold them there. Last week, we went in for a check-up and then to an oral surgeon to get an MRI on the teeth to see if they were fractured.  Fortu...

Technically this year, we had 3 graduations.  Camille finished elementary school (after 25 years, we finally finished!).  Mindy finished junior high and Talmage finished high school. In place of the regular 6th grade graduation, they did a drive-by.  We drove up to the back of the elementary school where Camille's teacher met us and we got this picture: Also, that day I took Mindy to the junior high and we got this picture in the gym: Then we had the official graduation for Talmage.  We ate dinner from the Olive Garden at our house.  Then we watched the virtual graduation on TV.  First they showed pictures of each senior.  Then they showed the pictures from the "walk-through".  They had a few talks and a video at the end.  Shortly after the graduation ended they set off fireworks at each high school.  They were pretty short-less than 10 minutes--but it was a nice gesture. The other thing that happened was a float for al...