Hello everyone! As you can see, it has been a busy month and we have not gotten a blog up for a while. But, fear not! We will have a great recap!
Like I said, this has been a crazy month. Let’s go back to June 9th. After finding out that we were not going to move, we decided to remake our entire house. We moved everything, cleaned all of the carpets, and rearranged all of the furniture to make everything seem new. That has been a ton of work, and we still are not quite finished with everything. Sometimes I think it would be easier to move. But, through all of it, we have been moving and active as well as lifting all of the stuff in the house. We have slacked on the formal “exercise” time, but we are still moving! Our increased activity is really showing up, not only in our waistlines, but in our endurance as well.
On Saturday the 11th, we started out at the Riverton Hospital health fair. It is fun to go around those events and learn some more healthy things, but we were really there to get new bike helmets for everyone. We are going to get our bikes out and fixed up after we get home from vacation, and we all needed new helmets. We learned a bunch more about being healthy. And then we raided the fruit box. It was great that they had fruit available for snacking.
After the health fair, and before the rain, we headed out to the Lee Kay Shooting center for the Outdoor Fair put on by the Department of Natural Resources. We had fun seeing some of the outdoor activities available in Utah, like hunting and fishing. We got another potload of loot to go through, with all of the vendors there. The kids got to go out on kayaks in a huge pond that they had made. I went out with Tristan while Cameron, Leatha, and Amelia puttered around by themselves.
We then got to do what they called 5-shot. That is using a shotgun to shoot 5 moving targets that come from different places. It was fun to do, I had never shot at moving targets like that and I got 3 out of 5. All of the kids got to shoot, including Tristan! The guy at the range just laughed when it was Tristan’s turn, but he let him shoot. It was only 1 shot and Tristan was done. The other kids did just fine.
We also got to shoot at the archery range, even though it started to rain pretty good. There is nothing like sodden archery practice. We still had fun. We then made our way back to the covered ranges and shot .22 rifles, Brenda hit 6 targets with 5 rounds…not bad. I jut hit 5 out of 5, and so did Cameron. The other kids didn’t come with us for that. The final stop before we had to nearly swim home, was the .22 pistol range, where we all hit everything we shot at again. It was nice to be able to shoot for free!
The next week, we spent a lot of time fixing, cleaning and rearranging the house again, until the weekend came, and I took Leatha and Amelia camping! Cameron, Tristan and Brenda stayed home and played on Friday, and Cameron went to Youth Conference on Saturday (see the microblog) Tristan and Brenda went on a park tour and played all day long.
Amelia was in charge of most of our camping activities. We did go fishing in the river and Leatha got the fly fishing bug (get it?) and now she wants to go fly fishing with me more. We went on a good hike on Saturday around the campground. They have a great little “discovery trail” that winds for over a mile and a half that has several displays of the plants and wildlife drawn by kids in the area. There were some fun benches shaped like insects as well as a tipi and a beaver dam. After our hike, Amelia made lunch and we went out hiking down the same trail to try fishing in the river again. I ended up with almost 19,000 steps that day.
The next week, we decided that we needed a garden. We just went small with 3 squash plants and 2 tomato plants, but it was a lot of hot work to dig out a bed, loosen all of the soil, and get it ready to plant. I counted it as cardio, I was breathing hard for the whole thing. Later last week, I took the 11 year old Scouts up to Camp Tracy. While a lot of fun, it is a bunch of walking. I ended up with 12000 steps that day, but I was very excited to realize that I was not worn out or winded walking up all of the hills.
Thursday night, we went to the park for Taylorsville Dayzz and to watch the Utah Symphony perform. We do this every year because they finish up with the 1812 overture and the Wasatch Cannoneers punctuate it. It is so much fun to watch the people jump when the cannons go off.
Friday, was back to Camp Tracy for an overnighter. Brenda got to come up with us (she is the other Scoutmaster with me) for half of the day and see what the boys get to do. There was still a bunch of walking and then camping, I ended up with over 15000 steps on Friday. Saturday we had part of the day at Camp, and then home. At home, we were all working on cleaning and rearranging the garage to get close to finishing up the house. We worked for quite a while and then headed back to Taylorsville Dayzz for their big fireworks show. It is the 20th anniversary of Taylorsville, so they had a HUGE show. Tristan said it was the best day ever! It was a long day though, I ended up 138 steps short of 20,000 that day. Yes I am bragging, I got almost 47000 steps last weekend!
And now we get to the craziness of this week. Appointment after appointment and our last nutrition class. The kids got to make big posters of the My Plate and we got to talk about keeping our habits going. We now only have 1 more class to attend and the 5k next Friday! It is hard to believe that we are nearly done with this 100 day challenge. We are doing so much better with our endurance, our eating, and our overall health. I was looking at some pictures that we took the first of April, and I was wearing the same shirt yesterday. The shirt is much bigger now, and not tight like it was in April. Something is working, we like it and are excited to keep doing the same things!