Crystal Hot Springs

I’m not quite sure why it has taken me so long to go up to the hot springs. I haven’t been there since we moved here. The only other time I was there was when I was a kid for a family reunion.

We went with my sister and a bunch of kids and everyone enjoyed it. Henry was sobbing when it was time to get out. He did not want to go.

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Indoor Camping

My sister came to visit. We wanted to go camping, but the weather was colder and my oldest is still in school. Instead, the tent was pitched in the spare room and we made a campfire over the fire pit in the backyard to roast hot dogs and marshmallows.

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Either the kids were extremly tired, or the tent was a good idea, or a bit of both. Usually when the cousins get together, trying to get them all to sleep is a nightmare. But the two nights they were here it was no harder than normal.

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Garden Planted

Over the weekend I planted more of my garden. Most people talk about planting the garden as a one time event. It really shouldn’t be. I planted my peas back in March, and I’ve been planting stuff on and off since then. Different plants like different temperatures, and spreading out planting times also helps spread out the harvest. I still have sunflowers and melons to plant, plus I’ll come in during late July and plant fall crops. If I remember. I’m not very good about remembering fall crops.

This is the shot of part of the garden where we have tomatoes, cucurbits and beans. My veggie crops are spread out all over the yard, so it’s nearly impossible to get a shot of all of it at once. garden planted.jpg

Fruit trees and strawberries! One peach doesn’t seem to want to grow. Oh well, it’s my only bare root plant that failed to thrive.

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This is after I mowed down all the weeds today. I’ve been mowing and taking note of weeds for a while, and it is interesting to see the weeds in the yard change. I started out with traditional annual weeds. They are still there, but there are also happy weeds. Agastache, sunflowers, cucurbits, yarrow, lettuce, radish, and chamomile have all started to reseed in the yard.

The plan is to seed out clover over about all of it tomorrow, continuing our clover patch we already started. If it all goes well, we should get bees.

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It’s not in full bloom yet, but I’m enjoying this flower. Any guesses to what it is? ……..

It’s a carrot flower. I left a few carrots in the ground to see what would happen. The grew about three to four feet tall and started blooming.

Runner

I am often Joe’s motivator to go running. If it’s raining, I’ll tell him to go anyway. If he doesn’t run, I’ll ask him about it, remind him and convince him to go. Sometimes I feel annoying, but he usually thanks me.

His friend convinced him to sign up for a half marathon. Early one Saturday, he set off to go run. I met him a few hours later. We had planned to get out and wander around a bit, but it was pouring rain and we made it there after he finished. So I illegally parked and found my freezing husband and we left.

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He did just as well as he wanted to, and better than I expected him to. He finished just under two hours. Peter asked, “Is Daddy going to win the race?” He didn’t.

Chin

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I had slipped out of Primary to go check on Henry who isn’t technically supposed to be in nursery, but goes anyway because the nursery leaders are pretty awesome. While in there, the primary leaders came and found me and I knew that something had made Curtis upset. “Curtis fell and he needs his mom.” Yep.

I walked over and came upon a sobbing, bleeding boy. At first it looked like his mouth was bleeding, but I didn’t really see anything cut. Then I realized that he had gashed his chin. I felt a connection with him right then. I have personally gashed my chin open around four times and have quite a lovely scar there.

His cut wasn’t that bad. I found a band-aid, and cleaned him up. Curtis was still pretty shaken up. Instead of trying to go back to primary, we went to nursery and had fruit snacks. Fruit snacks can cheer up just about any small child.

Toddler

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Peter started kids club at the garden. We just got through planting everyone’s plants when the wind really started up and soon after the rain.

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Mindfulness

Today I was stressed about being stressed. And as soon as I realized that, I was fine. My mind can get quite silly.

I’ve really enjoyed studying mindfulness. It helps me be more aware that what is going on in my head is just in my head. I might think for a moment that my life is awful and I hate it, but I can look at my actual life and see a lot of goodness. All the negative isn’t real.

Sometimes my feelings help me to see areas of my life that I need to change. I feel overwhelmed and realize I don’t want to get too busy. I want time to spend with my children and doing the the things I enjoy. But others times my feelings are feeling stressed about stress. They don’t mean anything at all.

Worth

Let every man esteem his brother as himself, and practice virtue and holiness before me. D&C 38: 24

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. Matthew 7: 12

Recently I realized that I needed to apply the golden rule to myself. I can treat others better if I start to also treat myself better.

Hard Work

The tomatoes, eggplant, beans, and most of the peppers are now planted. I still have all my cucurbits to plant (fancy word for plants including squash, melons and cucumbers). They happily turned on the irrigation water to flush the system out. It gave us the opportunity to adjust it, and we will also be able to more easily water everything. And the kids got all wet and muddy.

I’m also watching far too many videos on youtube. The kids have been watching lots of mincecraft videos on there, so we played minecraft last night too. I usually hate video games, but minecraft is just pretty cool. I even attempted to play. I’m horrible.