The Brandleys

8.22.2017

First Day of First Grade

Avery is now through with her second day of first grade and so far everything has been good! She was so excited about school, mostly excited about having two recesses and getting to walk out to the car instead of me coming in to pick her up. Her first day was a little different than it normally would be because of the eclipse. They got to watch a live stream of it as well as go look through some pin hole viewers. She also didn't have any homework on the first day! She came running out of the school and jumped into my arms and we talked all about how her first day went. Her favorite part of the day ended up being her two recesses.
I'm looking forward for her school year and the growth she will make.

8.21.2017

Back to School Feast 2017

We have a tradition in our little family of doing a back to school feast before the school year starts. This is our third year doing it and it was once again a wonderful night! This year our theme came from a quote by Gordon B. Hinckley,

"Believe in yourself. Believe in your capacity to do great things. You are a child of God of infinite capacity."

During dinner we talked about our theme. We talked about how we do lots of new things in school, and sometimes it's a little scary, but we need to remember who we are and believe in ourselves. If we are scared it's okay, we can always pray for help and Heavenly Father can help us. We went around and talked about what we were excited about for school or what we were feeling nervous about.

After dinner we had dessert. I need to explain this part a bit. We have a fun Primary CD titled "Scripture Power" and there's a song on there called "I Want to be a Mother" it's a cute song, but there's the most ridiculous line in it! The song is all about how this little girl wants to be a mother when she grows up and what she's going to do as a mother. Part of it says that she's going to give her kids cookies and milk and yellow balloons. What mother does that??? Cookies and milk, okay. But the yellow balloon part? Come on. Click here for a video of the song on YouTube. Anyway, moving on, I thought it would be fun for the party to decorate with yellow balloons and then have cookies and milk for dessert that night. So that's what we did!

After dinner Louis gave the girls a Father's blessing. They were wonderful and the best part of the night. After Mary and Avery got their blessings Ethan said it was his turn and went and sat on the chair folding his arms. Louis decided to give Ethan a blessing too since he was asking, the blessing was beautiful! Ethan sat there the whole time with his eyes closed and his arms folded, it was beautiful.

After the blessings, I gave the girls each a new school outfit. They both loved them and wanted to try them on right away. When the girls started changing Ethan got so excited that he ran upstairs and grabbed some pajamas so he could change too! He also needed his picture taken once he saw me take one of the girls. He's just the cutest!

It was a fun night together. We are excited for our girls. We're excited for them to grow and learn.
We're excited for them to make new friends and stretch themselves in new ways.
I hope they can remember to believe in themselves and to rely on our Heavenly Father for anything.

8 Years!

Over the weekend Louis and I celebrated our 8 year anniversary! It was such a wonderful celebration together. A few months ago I got the idea to go camping for our anniversary this year. If you know me, you know I do not like camping. But I do love Louis and I knew it would be something he would love. I brought up the idea to him and he was surprised that I was even suggesting it! It ended up being one of our best anniversary celebrations.

Thursday night we headed up into the mountains to the camping spot Louis had set up earlier in the morning. We finished setting up the camp and had dinner (we got pizza on the way up). Louis made a fire and we sat there talking, roasting marshmallows and looking at the stars. It had been a long time since I'd seen the stars like that. It is still one of my favorite sights. I wish I had the capability to take a picture of how wondrous it was. When the fire was almost out we stood up and were watching the stars when a shooting star passed by! It was such a nice night just sitting together with the sound of the stream in the background.

It was so cold that night! We had two blankets, but I was still cold and did not sleep very well. Louis woke up just after 6 and I woke up just before 7. A few minutes after I woke up I heard someone ask Louis if he had jumper cables and could come help them. Apparently this girl's friend had gotten drunk, then got scared and turned her car headlights on all night long!

We ate breakfast and searched for deer. Not to brag, actually yes I'm bragging, Louis spotted 0 deer and I spotted 3! He said he's always going to take me hunting with him now. We took a nap since it was a little warmer and we could comfortably sleep, then packed up and headed out on a little hike.

We then headed home to shower and get ready for the temple and dinner. We like to do sealings on our anniversary and this year was extra sweet because of the couple we ended up being with. I'm going to share here what I already shared on Facebook. We were in the sealing room with two other couples. One of them was celebrating their 33rd anniversary and that day they'd done baptisms, confirmations, initiatory, an endowment session, and sealings. They also said that they had not been to the temple together in 5 years because they have a highly special needs boy, and until recently they weren't living by family. The other couple we were with had been married for 62 years! It was sweet to see the love they had for each other and how the husband took care of his wife. It was nice to share our anniversary celebration with them.

We had a gift card to Chili's so we went their for dinner and afterwards got a Redbox movie to take back home. It was such a great anniversary together, we both loved it!

I am so blessed to have Louis as my husband.

He is patient, funny, kind, strong, hard working, can figure anything out, spiritual, and so accepting of everything that I am. I'm grateful I have him for eternity.

8.13.2017

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.