New Family Pictures

We got new family pictures...yay!!

Love, Love, Love my family...

 

Family Resemblances

That's Kimberly to the right. Do you see the family resemblance? 

She is working at a local haunted house this fall to earn money for her orchestra's trip to Disneyland.

John and I decided to support her work venture by visiting her haunted house one night. As luck would have it, we ran into her! 

Mind you, haunted houses are not my most favorite thing, but thankfully I had John by my side to get me through it.

In other news, John and I recently went on a hike just up the street from where we live. These two gals tagged along while their two older sisters were stuck at home doing homework. 

We live in a beautiful area and I love the views!

Now that Megan is back to being home with just me in the afternoons, she has made a new friend who lives two doors away. 

The two of them spend hours together going back and forth between the two houses playing dolls, dress up, play dough, building forts, playing on the tramp...you name it, they do it. I am glad she has a friend who lives so close by. 

School has begun

School has begun around here, and I was a little sad to have Megan, my sweet companion, start kindergarten. The morning of their first day, Megan realized I was sad and told me I could use her stuffed bear to cuddle with while she was gone. So cute!

We have quite the day - Kim is up at 6 a.m. and takes the bus to high school at 7 a.m. Alicia is usually up around 6:45 a.m. so she can make it out to her bus to junior high by 7:30 a.m. and the younger two girls are up and going by 7:45 a.m. so they can catch their bus at 8:30 a.m. Then Megan is home by 11:45 a.m., Kim is home at 2:30 p.m., Alicia at 3:15, and Natalie at 4 p.m.

So, I only have a couple of hours to myself, but I make the most of it! I usually go for my hour-long walk, then get some work in before Megan gets home. I am getting settled into my new resume-writing gig while also still writing religion and stories for Hill AFB. I love what I do and am glad I get to do it from home.

Let me tell you what we have been up to as a family. Sorry, there aren't any pictures! We keep forgetting to take snapshots of our different activities. Kimberly started up with a local Scout Venturing Crew (which allows girls), but they are their own charter - or something like that - so they rely entirely on parent help, so John attends as one of the leaders. They recently had a weekend camping trip, which included a bunch of different activities in Salt Lake.

We then headed up to Lava Hot Springs on Labor Day to retry our tubing adventure - remember we got rained out back in August? It was fun, though a little chilly.

Kim is working at Lagoon right now for their Frightmares. She is a zombie in one of the haunted houses. Sadly, I will not see her in action because I absolutely hate haunted houses. John and Alicia will have to go inside and see her.

I think that's it for now - just wanted to make sure you knew we were still alive :)

Change is Good, Right?

One hard and fast rule about journalism I have become all-too-familiar with is that change is inevitable. Since working as a correspondent for the Standard Examiner five years ago, I have worked for nearly a dozen different editors, waded through hundreds of stories that have gone to print, and battled the chronic ups and downs of a newspaper budget, but things always got better, things always improved, and things were great.

I loved my job and it was the perfect gig for me while I stayed at home with our kids.

The time has come that things are changing again, but this time I cannot weather it out with the newspaper. With some changes that have been made at the paper and the stories written by correspondents cut back by 75 percent, it was time for me to look at other options. 

When I learned of this, I was depressed, sad, deflated, in shock, worried, and then the cycle started all over again - depressed, sad, deflated, in shock, and worried some more...

I began sending out my resume a few weeks ago and have found another freelance writer position working from home. I will still do what few stories I can do for the paper, but this new position will be the bulk of my time. 

Some things I learned during the process:

I am very aware that Heavenly Father knows me, knows my desire to write, and also knows of my desire to be home with our girls. I felt at peace when I prayed, but then my fears and sadness would creep back in, so I would pray some more.

John has been telling me for a long time now that there are better opportunities out there for me - I just didn't have the courage to look for them. I was forced to forge forward and I believe this opportunity will be great - and probably even better. I don't have to cover any more boring meetings!  

The End is Near...

The air is changing, night is falling upon us sooner, and we've begun pulling out the school backpacks and making lists of school supplies that need to be purchased before school starts on Monday.

Aahhh!! Does the summer really have to come to an end? It has been a blissful summer and I've enjoyed having older kids as we enjoyed nice lazy summer mornings and then playing until we dropped late into the night.

We did enjoy August to it's fullest, with our usual Bear Lake fun with the Rimington Clan and then a family camping trip the weekend after, though that turned into an adventure. We had planned to meet up with friends in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho to go camping and tubing down the river, but it was supposed to rain all weekend, so while our friends braved the rain (well, in truth, they got rained out and came home early), we opted to camp up Ogden Canyon where it was sunny. We had a lovely time and enjoyed all things camping, including my famous Dutch oven chocolate cake and the small river by our campsite.

We still have some fun plans in the upcoming weekends - and we are determined to make it back up to Lava for a day of tubing. However, we will have to be a little more creative in our getaways as I have been asked to work in the newsroom on Saturday afternoons paginating some of the pages for the Sunday newspaper.

It isn't the most ideal of days to be working, but as things are kind of up in the air with a new editor who doesn't seem to be utilizing us correspondents like the past editors have done, I see it as an opportunity to fill in that gap of fewer stories and building up my work experience from a new angle.

Besides, I LOVE doing page layouts - it was one of my favorite classes in college and I've loved putting together newsletters and such, so this is really right up my alley.

I haven't taken a ton of pictures this month, but here are a few:

Natalie adores kitties - wherever we go. 

We went to the Davis County Fair where the younger girls of course enjoyed the princess show and pony rides. The older girls, not so much, but we did all enjoy the elephant show. It is really hard sometimes with a family of "olders" and "youngers" to try and find something for everybody to enjoy!

One of my dear friends from high school was in town for business and she and I got together for dinner. It was lovely catching up. 

Now I'm off to enjoy our last few days of summer....

Epic Road Trip

It was the Meldrum Family Reunion this July, again up in Lincoln City, Oregon, but it was the "off" year, meaning you don't have to go to great lengths to bring your entire family. As such, in years past, I have just flown up by myself, but this year I decided since my girls are all older, we could handle the long road trip on our own since John didn't have enough vacation days to spend away from work. Besides, the girls and I decided it was an excellent way to enjoy summer break, right? 

So we set out on our trek in July and covered 1,890 miles through four states (Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) over an 11-day period. It was truly an epic road trip. I didn't want to do the long drive (approximately 14 hours) by myself up to the Oregon Coast, so we cut it down by stopping at a few of my Meldrum cousins and siblings along the way. It was a riot and I can hardly wait to do it again. 

Here were some of the highlights: 

Kim got to relive her glory days riding a horse at my cousin Sam's house. All of the girls got to ride the horse, but only Kimberly got to go off and ride it on her own because of the two years of riding lessons she had under her belt. She was in heaven. 

We also got to feed her alpacas and in return, they gave my girls alpaca kisses. So cute. 

Then we visited another cousin who has a yard full of goats. The girls were again in farm heaven. 

We finally made our way over to the beach and made some new discoveries in the tide pools:

The weather was beautiful all four of the days we were at the rented beach house, which mind you is incredible for the area since many of our vacations up there have included sitting on the beach with our coats on and umbrellas overhead, determined to enjoy the beach during our stay. 

In the sun, we enjoyed bogey boarding: 

the beach: 

...especially beach campfires:

We loved piling in the car after spending time at the beach to head back to the house when we didn't want to walk up the gazillion stairs:

and hopping into the warm hot tub:

We missed John though, and wished he had been able to join us. 

We celebrated Alicia's 13th birthday while we were up there:

One of the memories I will treasure most from the trip was staying up late two of the nights playing our traditional Mormon Bridge game with my mom, brother and sisters. 

We laughed so hard I'm surprised I didn't pee my pants. The empty chair we left in honor of our dad, and it was fun as we laughed and joked about some of our fond memories with dad too. We felt like he was there with us. 

After the beach stay, we headed up to my brother's house in Washington where the girls had fun playing with the massive amount of frogs in their yard (they even spent time making froggie homes for them. so cute) 

We rented kayaks at a lake near their house:

We found a waterfall at the end of our journey and took time cliff jumping:

When we left his house, we took the scenic route past Mt. Rainier: 

It was such a fun, fun trip - truly epic. 

Girls Camp

I got to be the ward girls camp leader this year. The best part? It was stake girls camp year, so I only had to worry about one meal and getting all of our ward stuff together. Sounds simple, right? Well, so did I, until last week when I was getting all of the last minute things together and I was thinking, why the heck did I say yes to this!

Anyway, we had a lovely time and even better, I got to witness these two share in a few tender moments:

We really did have a lovely time. Good bonding experiences, fun games, great food. 

We did have some challenges too, like setting our tents up in the rain, being unprepared for the cold weather at night, and several leaking tents. We survived though, especially when this beauty appeared after one of the rain showers:

Photo courtesy of Kimberly

I didn't take a ton of pictures, but here are a few: