Hello again! Well we had another wild week getting out and getting active for the Heart challenge. That isn’t quite right. We had another wild week getting out and getting active for us, BECAUSE of the Heart Challenge. This week all of the kids were home from school. That was hard to keep them limited to their 1 hour of screen time….They didn’t do as well this week as some of the others. But we are still not watching the TV or the computer even a third as much as they did last summer. It is a dramatic improvement. We are also getting out more of our board games, legos and even books! Leatha has always read like her life depended on it, but the others are really making it a point now.
Saturday was Cameron’s Birthday! He finally turned 13 and was a little bit crazy about it. We did a bunch of outdoor activities in between opening presents and doing our regular household chores. We started out in the morning, at the giant kick off party held by Salt Lake count libraries. They were kicking off the summer reading program. We do the program every year, one, because we like to read, and two, we get free passes to the Natural History Museum if we complete the program. It is a bunch of fun. So was the kick off party. 
The kids got to sit in fire trucks again and learn some fun things about DNA, as well as play in some bounce houses.
Cameron thought it would be fun to sit in the back of the police truck, and then close the door. I told the officer to go ahead and leave, he could take Cameron with him. What Cameron didn’t realize is that the rear handles of police cars are disabled and he couldn’t get out. We all had a good laugh at that.
Later that afternoon, we let Cameron open one of his presents, a large 3-D kite shaped like a fighter jet. Of course we had to go to the park and let him try and fly it. He didn’t realize just how much work it is to get a kite flying in very little wind, and then to keep them up in the air. But he had fun, and ran a lot.
The other kids watched him run as they were running through the splash pad at the park.
They had fun getting wet and cooling off, it was a hot day. When we finally got home and were making dinner, Cameron fell asleep, Tristan fell asleep, and Amelia was close. We wore them out.
Sunday we again went to the park for a couple of hours so that Cameron could play tennis with his new racquet. Now all of the kids except for Tristan have their own racquet and are learning to play tennis. That is a fun work out to run and try to hit the balls. 
Monday I was working in the garage, rearranging and organizing all of our camping stuff, so the kids just got to run in the sprinkler and squirt each other with industrial strength squirt guns. I got some weight lifting in without many steps to show for it.
and finally, we didn’t have a class this Tuesday, so Brenda and I went back over to the gym and lifted weights for an hour. It feels good to get some work done on the weight machines and realize that on some of those exercises, I had moved 1200 pounds through space. that is 100 pounds with 12 repetitions. doing that 3 times, I had moved 3600 pounds on that one exercise.
You think after that we would be too tired to do anything else, but no! We still went over to our church after dinner and hit baseballs until dark. Still no TV, and we were outside and active. And the kids are learning how to hit pretty well.
That is about all for this week, except we now have a feature on the IHC blog for the Heart Challenge. You can see it here: https://intermountainhealthcare.org/blogs/2016/06/meet-matthews-my-heart-challenge-family-edition-competitor
We are also supposed to be on the Intermountain Medical Center Facebook page and the Fox 13 Facebook page sometime this week. We are halfway done with the challenge now and are doing great!
Until Next Week,
-Justin