Lehi Mini Vacation

A few weeks ago Louis and I were talking about the idea of doing some sort of local overnight vacation as a family.  We decided to go to Lehi, UT and go to the Museum of Natural Curiosity! 
We started out the day by stopping at a park and playing after a long two hours in the car.

Logan got to have his first ride in a swing and he enjoyed it!

After the park we headed to the museum, and had a quick picnic on the lawn before heading in.

We spent over three hours at the museum and I didn't take a single picture!  We were having too much fun!  I was uncertain if we should spend the money to go to the museum, I hate that parents have to pay to go in when it is a place clearly for children.  It ended up being worth it though, the kids all had so much fun!  We would definitely go back again.

This is after the museum, can you tell the kids were worn out?

After the museum we went and walked around Cabela's then got Chick-Fil-A to bring back to the hotel.  After eating we went swimming!  It was my favorite part of the whole weekend.  We had the whole pool to ourselves for an hour and it was a blast! 

At the end of the night when all of the kids were in bed Louis and I enjoyed some hot chocolate.  It's a tradition of ours to drink hot chocolate every time we stay at a hotel.

Sunday morning we decided to surprise Louis' brother's family at church.  We went to church with them and spent a few hours at their house afterwards.

This is Lydia and Logan, they are just over 2 months apart.

I think the most fun thing about the trip was that we kept everything a surprise from the kids!  In the morning we just said we were going to go to a park, they just didn't know it was going to be two hours away.  Then we told them we were going to the museum.  After we got Chick-Fil-A Louis said it was getting late so maybe we should just go to a hotel for the night.  The kids got so excited!  That night at the hotel Mary said to me "Thank you for this fun day!"

Surprise Trip

This has seemed like the year of travel!  When really I didn't travel that much, but it was a lot for me.  We went to visit my Grandpa twice, Louis and I went on our big trip to England, and then early in December I went to North Carolina for a sister's trip.  A few weeks before my trip to North Carolina I got a text from my sister Jessica asking that if the flight was covered if I could swing coming out for a sister's weekend.  Um.  Yeah!  We quickly figured out babysitting for the couple of days we would need it while I would be gone and Louis would be at work and I packed my bags and headed out with Megan on a red eye flight! 
We enjoyed a weekend of pedicures, movies, food, and being together.  It was a good weekend getting away from my normal responsibilities.

Escape Room Sibling Supper

Every six months in Louis' family we have a sibling supper.  We all take turns being in charge of it and we've had some really fun ones!  It was our turn to plan the sibling supper and Louis said he wanted to try to do an escape room.  He didn't say much after that, but as the day of the sibling supper was getting closer I kept asking if Louis needed help or what we needed to get for the party, and he just kept saying he had things figured out and we had everything we needed for the night.  He did indeed have it figured out and we all had a great time!

Louis did a church themed escape room and we had clues about prophets, the scriptures, the primary song book etc.  I was in the room with both teams to make sure the game went smoothly and help out a bit if needed.  As each team came into the room they saw the sign above, on the other side of the chalkboard there were pictures of three latter day prophets.

On the back of each picture was a sticky note with a plus sign and a number.  For example +3.  They had to figure out what number each prophet was then add the number from the back of the picture to that number.  So Lorenzo Snow is the sixth prophet, and let's say that the number of the back of the picture said +12 so that number wold be 18.  This clue was to help them figure out the combination to a lock in the room that would lead to their next clue.  First they had to put the prophets in the correct order though!  The combination opened a toolbox that was filled with a bunch keys.

Each key had either a number or a letter on it.  What they had to figure out was that some letter and numbers were written in black and some were written in blue.  If you pull out just the black numbers and letters you would be able to spell out James 1:5.  This part of the game was thought through way too much by everyone!  There were some fun ideas that people put out there when they were trying to figure out what the keys meant!  

James 1:5 is in the Bible and it says "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him."  With this clue they had to figure out that all they had to do was ask me for the next key!  It took a lot of thinking and a lot of clues from me for them to figure that out!

The key opened up a large gray bin that had a locked backpack and a strip of paper with a clue leading them to Moses.  Now Moses can lead you to a lot of different places, the scriptures, a picture of Moses on the wall somewhere, etc.  This particular clue was supposed to lead them to the primary children's songbook to the song "Follow the Prophet" where there was a key.  This one took a surprisingly long time.  There were several primary songbooks in the room for one, but we also put the one with the key inside the piano bench.  What was the funniest was when Phillip was sitting on the piano bench while they were looking through all the other songbooks!  He sat there for a good 10 minutes!  I think I ended up having to tell him to stand up!

Once they found the key they had to go open a second smaller box that had two pieces of paper, one with a bunch of holes in it, and one with a bunch of holes as well as weird symbols on it.  Now this is where Louis was way too smart for me and I honestly didn't quite understand what was supposed to happen this next section of the game.  Neither did anyone else.  Even when they kind of figured out what they were supposed to do, they still didn't fully figure it out.  Jonathan luckily guessed what they were supposed to figure out.  So to try to explain it, we had a copy of The Family Proclamation to the World and The Living Christ and they had to put the papers that were in the box on top of them and write down the letters that showed through the holes.  And blah blah blah (I was confused!) that gave them a clue to go find the book Jesus the Christ.

In the book Jesus the Christ we had underlined 7 page numbers and they had to find those pages with the numbers underlined, on that page there was a letter circled.  Once they had gotten every letter they had to un-jumble the letters to spell out Rebecca.
That was their clue for the combination to unlock the backpack from earlier.

The code was my birthday, once they figured that out the opened up the backpack and inside was a slip of paper that had the clue for the combination to unlock the door to exit the room!  The clue was, "Something the Brandley kids never had"  Both teams pretty quickly figured out that it was pets and were out of the room!

It seemed like everyone had a good time and everyone worked together really well!
Louis did a great job, it was a fun night!

Summer Games

In the spring I had the idea to have a fun "Summer Games" day over the summer break.  Seeing as we only have just over a week before school starts, it was about time that we did it!  I have been thinking about different things we could do, but hadn't really made a plan for the day.  So this morning Louis and I sat down and came up with a list of games we could do with the kids, then we went around the house gathering the things we'd need for the day.

We let the girls pick which parent they wanted on their team.  Mary picked me, and Avery picked Louis.  Our first game was the football throw!  We hung a hula hoop on a branch of a tree and we had three throws of the football each.  Each time you made it through you earned your team 5 points. 

For our second game we had 6 cups and some plastic golf balls.  Each person got 6 balls and got to try and get their balls into the cups.  For each ball they got in they got 5 points for their team.  

Our next game was one of my favorites of the day.  We had a big cooler full of water and two ice cream buckets sitting about 20 feet away from the cooler.  As a team we had to take turns filling a cup with water and transferring it to the bucket.  Avery and Mary took the first run down to the ice cream buckets and Mary put her cup of water into Avery and Louis' bucket!  We cleared up her confusion and started again!

Thinking back about it, this next game actually might have been my favorite!  It was also Avery's favorite.  Sack races!  The kids had never done it before and they did great!  Ethan even tried it out.  Which was adorable.  

Then it was onto 3-legged races!  We talked out our strategy and then hobbled along around the trees!

Mary and I won, but Louis may have let us.

Ethan wanted a turn after our race was done

After the three-legged race it was onto an obstacle course!  What we did was we timed how long it took for one team member to go through the course, slap their partners hand, and for their partner to go through the course.   Step one was to walk with a ball in between your legs making your way over to a piece of PVC pipe.  Once you got to the pipe, you dropped the ball and hopped back and forth over the pipe.  Then you walked across a balance beam, did 5 jumping jacks, and ran around both trees.  After that you went and grabbed a balloon from your partner and had to pop it either by stepping/jumping on it or by sitting on it.  The obstacle course was also a lot of fun and we all enjoyed it.  

Our next game was hopscotch.  During this game I learned something new about Louis, in elementary school (1st grade I think) Louis won a hopscotch competition!  What we did for this game was throw a Frisbee onto the hopscotch and wherever it landed we had to skip that square.  If you fell off you didn't get your 5 points, but if you stayed on until the end you earned 5 points for your team.  

We were almost done with the day, our next competition was a spoon race.  

Mary surprised us by doing really well with this one!  

This next one was Louis' favorite of  the day, cup flipping.  He liked it because the kids had to keep trying until they succeeded, not just throwing something and either they got it or they didn't.  We each had an upside down cup hanging off the table a bit, we had to flip it with one hand until it landed up right side up.  

Our last game was the Frisbee toss!  We had four mats on the ground, if you get your Frisbee on the first 

mat you earn 5 points, 10 points for the second mat, 15 for the third, and 20 for the fourth.

In the end Louis was very sweet and played the Frisbee toss game in a way that made it so the teams tied!

Everyone ended the summer games happy!  It was such a fun day of playing around!  

Possibly a new summer tradition.  

Chalk Adventures

We like playing outside with chalk.  I can't remember when I started doing chalk scenes for my kids to be in, 

but they love it and they are so fun!  Here are a few that we've done through out the years.

This one is Ethan

How we announced Wyatt's name

This one is Wyatt