Weekend in Midway

We spent a weekend at my parent's home in Midway last week. Lots of good times although the weather turned bad Saturday afternoon. Friday evening we had a short bike ride around the neighborhood. Sorry no photos. Saturday morning we went on a family hike in the Wasatch State Park. Here are some of the happy hikers.

Here is Benjamin taking a break in a secret spot along the way.

We stopped for snacks in this nice little field.

After our hike we drove up to the top of memorial hill. Looks like we've got some fine soilders in the making.

Family Olympics

Helen organized a family olympics while her family was visiting from the U.K.
This is my new favorite photo of Mary.

Benjamin was intense on the bouncy ball.

Hannah intense at soccer (a.k.a. football).

That's actually my cowboy hat -- I was just letting her borrow it.

Helen dominated on the pogo stick.

Baseball

We signed Matthew and Benjamin up for baseball this spring. They loved it, but games twice each week turned out to be a lot.

Adam's Canyon

We had a fun Saturday afternoon in Adam's Canyon. The fall colors were fantastic.

Helen and Mary taking a rest.

I just liked the light on these leaves in a shady spot on the trail.

Looking up. It was a perfect fall day.

Good little hikers.

Soccer

It was freezing cold, but the rain stopped so the soccer match was on -- the first of the day. Our side was down two players, so Matthew and Benjamin played the entire game.

Things looked good during warm-ups.

We were even able to find the back of the net a few times (still during warm ups).

Once the game started, things got ugly. The black team was good.

The other team brought a ringer. If I had a hair sample and the right equipment, I'm pretty sure I could have proved that the curly haired kid below is Valderrama's offspring.

We brought our A-game and our best moves.

But at the end of the day, we mostly just had fun.

Our teammates brought it today as well.

Farmington Bay

I've been hearing lots of people talk about Farmington Bay recently and how may cool birds there are out there to photograph. So, last Saturday while the younger kids were napping and Helen was working on her lesson for Sunday, I took Matthew and Benjamin and we drove out to Farmington Bay to take some photos of bald eagles snatching fish out of the water.

I let the boys bring some binoculars so they wouldn't get too bored. After a few minutes, the boys figured out that staring at the empty blue sky, even through binoculars, ain't that great.

After awhile, the boy's ditched the binoculars. Benjamin kept himself entertained by playing with bones that he found (no doubt full of rabies and other dangerous germs) and climbing on the gates.

I kept myself entertained by photographing the plant life. I liked the golden glow on these backlit beauties.



Here are a few more. I just couldn't bring myself to take photographs of seagulls.





Eventually, Matthew had had enough and annouced that he was going back to the car.

As we were driving away, a hawk or at least a hawk-looking bird swooped down close enough to the car to allow me to get some photos. Image quality isn't great, because he was still a long way away, and I had to crop rather drastically in my image editing software, but at least I got a bird.

One more.

We drove a little farther, and I spotted a black and white speck sitting on a rock about a mile away. I stopped the car and took approximately fifty photos of the only bald eagle in the area that day. However, the eagle was just too far away, so unfortunately nothing post-worthy. (I even threw rocks in the water to try and get the eagle to take flight (don't worry he was well out of striking distance and probably hearing distance as well); if I'd had a fish or hot dog or anything, I would have waived it above my head to get the eagle to swoop in closer and attack me -- a few talon wounds would have been worth it for a great photo, but alas, I didn't even have that much luck).

As we were driving away we came across these bulldozers. It must have been all that thinking about birds and then seeing these bulldozers that reminded me of my all time favorite children's story Are You My Mother. I loved that story as a kid.