Lots of love

So another girl in the Davis household took the plunge and donated her hair for locks of love. Brooklyn chopped off 15 inches ! Look how old she looks now.

To be a Pioneer

Brooklyn singing her solo in the play. Her voice is changing from a little girl to a young lady. You could really hear the difference and she even tried her hand at singing the Alto part of a duet with another girl.


Brigham was one of 5 boys and the oldest of them all. He played a few different roles and even sang a solo!



Emmelyne was so excited about her part that she had all her lines that they gave her memorized on the first night and then asked for more. This is the new costume since her was lost on the day of the performance.

The play was done outside at the Florence's outdoor theater. All of the families brought picnic dinners and ate and enjoyed the show at the same time. At the end of the show Aurora, the fabulous camp director, gave all the kids their own "buffalo chips" - super yummy giant cookies. What fun!

Oh what a Day!!

Kids always help to add a whole new element of stress to an already busy day. On Monday night my kids had a play that they were performing in. They had been to a week long theater camp the week before and now we were going to go to see the play that they had been practicing all week. It was a darling play about pioneer children and their journal entries along the trek west. Anyway......it was a pretty typical Monday that included running to the grocery store and COSTCO. Yuck. That is enough to wear you out right there. I had to get groceries for the week and stuff for our "Project Noah" Emergency preparation/Food Storage program at church. It is an exhausting job just to plan the menu and do the shopping. Well this time I had to add to the list for this month:
1 gallon of bleach per person (7)
24 cans of meat or fish per person (168 cans!)
Laundry Detergent
Let me tell you that you get some pretty weird looks with 75 can of tuna in my cart - even at Costco. I think that I had 5 people ask me what it was for. I just smiled and said we have a big family and I was working on my food storage. "Food Storage?" they would ask. "Yes - food storage"
Anyway....back to home to put all of this away and find room for all this food storage. Here is what I still needed to get done in the next 3 hours before I left.
Put away groceries
Label the Food storage stuff (so I would know how long I had been storing that stinkin tuna)
Make burritos and a picnic dinner to take with us to the play (ended up cutting up some fruit and stopping at Taco Bell)
Wash the kids costumes (Brigham went with pants that were still damp and Emme showed up without her costume)
Make rice krisipie treats
Lead Brooklyn thru the process of cleaning up her mess from making chocolate chip cookies while I was gone (that had no chocolate chips in them - hense the trip to the store)
Review the kids lines with them and go over their songs
Charge both of the camera for the play
Pick up the house
Did I mention that I had 9 kids kids running around under my feet the whole time too? (the smoke here from all the fires was so bad that we had to keep them in the house.
Let me revise that.......it was NOT 9 it was 8. The 9th one was doing this:



I guess that bathing the baby just got on the list too! Oh what a day.

Making pickles

So I tried my hand at making bread and butter pickles the other night. I just found a recipe off the Internet since I have no idea where my Great Aunt Theda's recipe is. I sure hope that they turn out. All of the recipes looked pretty much the same online so I went with what was easy. I am going to have to do a bunch of small batches since the cucumbers get wrinkly in about a day if I do not get to them. I guess that they do not have the same waxy protective junk on them that the ones in the grocery store have so they turn fast. I did these late on Saturday night after getting home from a swim party that our family was invited to. My sweet sisters in law had cleaned the kitchen and house while I was gone and even vacuumed for me. That is LOVE. If they had not done that for me I would have been up until 2am making pickles. What was really funny was in church the next morning the speaker was basing his talk on Elder Bednar's talk on "the Parable of the Pickle". My kids thought that it was so cool because they knew all about the process that we had done the night before.

Dancing Queens

We had a crazy...let me repeat CRAZY week last week. One of the many fun things that we had going on was the girl's annual dance performance at Del Oro. The theme this year was Let's Go to the Movies. The songs and the dances were all from movies. It was so fun. Emmelyne did Good Ship Lollipop, Wells Fargo Wagon and the Chef song from Little Mermaid. Brooklyn did a country song Marry Me (by Dolly Parton - this was NOT her favorite) , Wells Fargo Wagon and Eye of the Tiger. I was able to watch the whole show all 3 nights. I think that in the 5 years of being with this dance company this has been our favorite show hands down. They even did the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars and Harry Potter. Now how can you mess that up?

Do you know what this is?

Hudson is one funny boy as I have pointed out in a blog or two. Well he has an obsession with making his own food (the 5 items that he eats) Can you tell what this is a picture of or what he did?

First fruits of our labors

Just a few days ago I went out our garden, that has been decimated by deer, and what did I spy with my little eye? Yummy vegetables to pick! I picked some squash, pickling cucumbers (for Shannon and I) and 1 - yes I said ONE - string bean. I guess that the deer love my peas and beans. They are going to town and having themselves a FEAST on my dime and hard work. How dare they. Now my kiddos are done eating squash and it has only been 2 days. It will be a long summer. Know any good recipes for crookneck yellow squash?