The Phillips Cousins Are Here!

Wow! It's exhausting having this much fun! For 10 days we've played and played! Becky was going to girls camp and Dave had to work, so we got to spend some time together! Here's a recap of major events!

Saturday the 11th was Charlie the Grizzly Bear's 34th birthday party at the zoo. The kids got their faces painted, watched the bears eat their cake (frozen fish and fruit), and got to eat some human birthday cake! Mmmmm!

Anna had an adorable lime green caterpillar painted on her face that last about 2 minutes. Then she just looked bruised! John learned all about tortoises. Did you know they can go a whole year without drinking anything?

They also had a birthday card-making contest that the girls entered and Emma and Megan won! Now they get a behind the scenes tour in August! They even get to help feed the bears! They were both so excited to get the news!

Next, we went swimming at Jensen's Grove in Blackfoot. It's a fun little spot where people can boat, jet-ski, swim, or just hang out on the beach. The kids had a great time having seaweed fights and burying each other!
After that we celebrated Pioneer Day with a parade (Devin and Chris were carrying flags in it) and activities at the fairgrounds. It was incredibly hot (we think it hit 100 degrees!), but we managed to stay cool and have fun!

During our week, we also went swimming at Dave's hotel and Ross Park, saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and a really dumb cartoon called "Igor", and had sleepovers with grandma that included staying up late and shopping sprees at DI for every child. They brought home lots of "grandma treasures"! She's too good to them! We had a great time together, and my kids are already asking me when they're coming again! I'm thinking that next time mine will go to Boise! It's only fair that Becky and Dave get to enjoy some of the excitement, too!

Pioneer Trek

Clean and fresh before we started. Don't we look authentic? I sewed my pioneer outfit myself! There was so much preparation that went into our trek to Martin's Cove, and it was a wonderful experience! Here's a synopsis that is about as brief as I can make it.

We all had to learn to square dance. Devin got pretty good at it. Here he is doing a good job of doe-see-doeing (how do you spell that?!) his partner, Kayla Payne! Del and I tried, but we never did get it down. In fact, we were pretty lousy and often crashed into other people! The youth were each given a harmonica and lessons by Matt Wadsworth. They were taught Come, Come Ye Saints, and I loved hearing my boys practice at home! Devin got pretty good at some that he learned on his own, like Come Thou Fount. I love that hymn!

Here we are at 4:00 in the morning, ready to start our 7 hour drive on school buses, which actually took 9 hours because of 4 extra bathroom stops! All for one girl who had a peanut bladder and kept secretly guzzling Pepsi! Doesn't Del look excited? I just look sleepy! 4 am is not my favorite time of the day! We didn't spend much time with Devin and Chris during the trip because they were assigned to different families and we pretty much stayed with our new families. This was ours:From the left is Kyle Kener, Jarom Denton, Jovani Hoskins, Del, me, Sophie Hofman, Amber Stiffler, and Courtney Gunter. They were great kids who got along, helped each other, and didn't complain! We heard from some of their real parents later that this is not always the case, but they sure were great on our Trek!

Here is Chris' family.

His parents were our good friends, Marty and Tawny Calder, who are wonderful people. I overheard Chris ask Devin after camp if he missed his trek family and then said that he sure did! I thought it was really sweet.

Here is Devin's family:

His parents were Merrell and Mindy Quayle, who are also wonderful people. Devin really enjoyed his family, too, since he got put with girls who wanted to do most of the handcart pushing. Most of the time I saw him, he was just sauntering casually along! The scenery was beautiful, but I have never been in a windier place in my life! It constantly blows hard, and the sand gets in your teeth, eyes, and mouth if you're not careful. These are the boys of Princeton Ward: Blake Bluemell, Patrick Riley, Tanner Teichert, Andrew Bringhurst, Pioneer Ofisa, Devin Symons, Aaron Geurts, Chris Symons, and Colin Jorgenson.

Below is the entire Princeton Ward group. I love them all, but there are too many to mention. The one in all black is Heather Winward, the one who did my handwriting analysis.

Here's a picture of me and my 3 girls doing the women's pull---definitely the hardest part of the whole week! It represents the time that the men and teenage boys were called to join the Mormon Battalion, and the women were left to do all of the work alone. Notice our family name---McPhail! What an ominous name! We wrote on our flag "We're not McPhailures!" because we did great! The hill was incredibly steep, rocky and sandy, but we did it! When we got to the top my legs were jelly! I looked around and saw all of the men and boys with their hats off in a show of respect to the women. It was really touching.

Another highlight of the week was the Sweetwater Crossing, representing the time the 3 young men from the rescue party carried the weakened pioneers across the frozen river. I love that story! Those young men had terrific mothers waiting for them back in Salt Lake who had raised them right! Here is a picture of my terrific young men crossing the Sweetwater. Not quite as dramatic, but they enjoyed it!

This is a sight I wasn't planning to see but I'm so glad I did! I don't like heights, and so I was just going to stay at the bottom and take pictures. Kayla was disgusted that I would settle for that, and so she basically pulled me up Independence Rock! I thought it would be scary coming down, but the granite rock is really grippy, so as long as you're careful, you can't fall.

Thanks Kayla!

The wind was so strong up there that it felt like we'd fly away!

Here is Del doing an incredibly impressive jump over a crack!

Chris and Devin kept climbing around like monkeys and jumping over big gaps! I couldn't watch!

One of the highlights of the trek (strangely enough) was when one of the elderly missionaries (in the picture here he was playing the part of Ephraim Hanks) had a heart attack. Fortunately, our Trek Master, Ben Call, is a cardiologist and was able to help him immediately. It was quite exciting to see a helicopter land right next to our picnic tables to take him to the hospital.

While we waited, we sang hymns, and then when they had taken him away, our whole stake knelt and prayed for his health. We heard later that he had come back to work 2 days later with a pacemaker. He sent our stake a letter the next week and expressed his appreciation and how powerfully he had felt our prayers for him. It was a wonderful lesson for us all about the power of prayer.

This tiny bag holds 8 oz. of flour, which was a full days ration in the beginning of the trail but enough for a mother and 2 children by the end. It is an absolute miracle that any of the pioneers survived. Although they went through incredible trials, the Lord truly blessed them for their sacrifices.

We had a wonderful time being pioneers for four days, and I definitely have an even greater appreciation for them and what they experienced. We walked 31 miles. They walked around 1300 miles. It was beautiful weather for us (other than an amazing thunderstorm!), while they experienced the harshest of winter weather. Our stake will be doing it again in 2013, and I'm excited that Maren will get to go next time. Maybe we will, too. Who knows?

June16th-19th

My Favorite "New" Movie!

I can't believe this movie has been out for 2 years and I just heard about it a couple of months ago (Thank You, Holly! And BBC!). I love it! I just watched it with my parents last night and they loved it, too! It wasn't as much fun watching it with them, though, because I couldn't skip back and watch the closing scene 3 times like I did before! Wow, that is a wonderful, romantic scene! The acting is great, and the plot is like Jane Austen meets Charles Dickens.

I just finished the book (it's by Elizabeth Gaskell) and I thought it was great, but the movie definitely makes it more romantic! We're reading it for Book Club in September, so I downloaded it to an mp3 player so I could listen to it while I did housework. It was so good that I didn't want to stop listening to it, so a couple of times, I tucked all of the cords into my shirt and took it grocery shopping with me! Ugh! I've always thought it was pathetic and antisocial when I've seen teenagers in public with earphones stuck in their ears, ignoring everyone around them. I guess I'm one of them now!