An "Adios" to Arizona......

Vietnamese Night

We went to my brother Michael's house for dinner on our last night in AZ. It was really fun because we got to hang out and eat amazing food! We made some of Michael's recipes from his mission......Spring Rolls and Viet Fried Rice. Yummy! We all sat around and rolled together after I had squished and mushed all of the pork mixture together. It was fun and it tasted great!

Marble Magnets

We wanted to do a fun craft and so we decided to make Marble Magnets. It was SUPER easy and they turned out really great. Here is a sneak peak of what all we made..... The magnets before we got going......
A few of the magnets that I made.....
Here are all of the magnets that my mom, Alice, and I made....what do you think?

Playing games....

We played some intense games last night....Uno, Skipbo, Jenga, and Mancala. I LOVE Skipbo but my favorite game from last night was surprisingly Jenga. The tower got so tall and we were all tense and anxious as to when the blocks would fall. It was fun!And it all came tumbling down.......

Spruce Mountain Ranger Station

We hiked up a bit of Spruce Mountain the other day so that we could picnic and then go to the Ranger station and look out at the 360 degree views. I posted about this place when I went there last year too....you can click HERE if you want to read that post.We had to hike up these narrow and steep stairs to get to the watch tower....Here is what the tower looks like.....Mom and the Ranger lady......we saw her there last year tooMapping tools.....Mom hiking down the mountain....Beautiful view....
It was really fun! It is cool to learn about how the Ranger looks for fires and what types of information that she has to report pertaining to the weather, etc. We even got a Smokey the Bear badge.....ha!

Apron for Alice

I was packing away my sewing machine and decided to make one last apron. Alice is going to be having a birthday soon and so I made her an apron real quick so I can give it to her before we leave for NYC tomorrow. Here it is......

Campfire Fun....

We went to a campground near my parents house for a "weenie & marshmallow roast" and to cook in the Dutch oven.Dad chopping the wood for the fireAlice getting ready to roast some hot dogsMom and Alice roasting away.....Mom getting ready to chomp....Mom and Dad roasting their hot dogs........Alice stoking the fire.....she was the official "fire stoker" for the night....This huge toad jumped up to the fire pit and seemed to want to warm up a bit. He almost jumped in the fire a few times....we finally kind got him to hop away so he wouldn't be in danger. Interesting!Yours truly roasting some marshmallows.....Alice eating her first campfire Smore.........Alice stargazing..... we ended up stargazing at a lookout point above my parents house after the cookout.....we could see the Milky Way VERY clearly and we saw a few shooting stars. It was pretty exciting to see this with Alice since she had never seen a falling star before.Dutch oven Cherry Cake.....YUM!We had a great night.....Alice said that this experience was right up there with our visit to the Grand Canyon. She really liked the campfire and stargazing.

Beautiful Lake

Isn't this lake awesome? I think it is so neat.....I haven't seen too many lakes like this one. The boulders seem to shoot out of the water in random places and the water can be electric blue in the right light. It is breathtaking!

Picnic @ Lynx Lake

Alice and I packed up a picnic lunch and headed out for Lynx Lake on Saturday afternoon. We found the perfect set-up and we played Mancala (a super fun game) for an hour or so.We busted out the sandwiches that we had packed and started to hear some thunder......The clouds started to roll in and seemed to hang DIRECTLY above us. We had joked about it NOT raining earlier in the day and so I guess karma was coming full circle.We started to smell the rain and all of a sudden it POURED and the drops were HUGE. We had to run so fast to the car that we didn't have time to put the basket and table cloth in the trunk. It was a fun day! We played our games.....chomped....and then got to cool off in the rain. We ended up going to the mall to shop and listen to the rain as it POURED on the metal roof at the mall. It sounded like the roof was going to fall in. We needed that rain