Johnson Family Dish

September

I have to start this post off by saying how much I LOVE general conferance! This is a twice yearly event where we, the LDS people, get to hear from our beloved prophet and his appostles and various other leaders of the church, in the comfort of our own home! Randon and I have got two mornings of sleeping in! This absolutely NEVER happens in our life! So besides being spiritually fed, we didn’t schedule any goings on because of conferance and so we have enjoyed indulging in some (much needed) extra sleep.

We started off the month with a trip to Idaho, just Randon and I. We left early on the day of my birthday and came home in the early evening on Labor day. This was a really fun trip. What a lovely state. Randon and I went to hang out with the locals of New Meadows and McCall Idaho. We went to their farmers market where we bought the biggest peaches I have ever seen, they were over a pound in weight each! We ate at the local resturaunts, and we toured thier little town the way good little tourists do. But the best culture we took in that weekend was a logging competition. The initial draw was not the logging, of course, it was a car show. They fed the whole lot of anybody who came to this event, FOR FREE! After we saw all of the antique cars we made our way over to the big crowd and the P.A. There we found a curious piece of culture. Men competing to throw their ax into the center of a HUGE log, set up like a bulls eye, with a hole drilled into the center and a can of beer stuck in there. If they popped the beer can they got 5 points, and they got points for where their ax landed in relation to the beer can. Even women competed in this! I have to say that it was amazing to see them wield that ax around and throw it with such presicion. And I would not want to cross those women! They had other competitive events which involved the daily chores of a logger but the funniest one involved a woman and two men working as a team in a race, which I cannot for the life of me remeber the strange name that they gave this event. But it began with one of the men and a woman laying in bed, fiegning sleep, when a buzzer goes off and they get up quickly and the man pushes the woman in a wheel barrell over to a huge log that she begins chopping into a minimum of 4 quarters then she races to wait for him while he completes various skills with his man partner, the men finish and race to the bulls eye (huge log) where the woman hands them both axes until they wedge them both deep into the bulls eye. It is a timed race so the team with the best time wins. It was so funny, I couldn’t believe that it was real. We also met a very friendly logger who was apparently drunk, and just chatted with us about everything that was on his mind apparently, including the bar room brawl that he had, much to his chagrin, missed the night before. Ahhh….Culture.

Kelcie made her first batch of chocolate chip cookies this month. All by herself and they were really tasty. All of the “watch and learn” and “just help” has paid off. My child can make cookies on her own now. Morgan is well on her way to cooking too. They are both so helpful to me. It is nice to have two daughters who are getting old enough for these things, I really get a lot of enjoyment from watching them become little women. I wouldn’t miss this for the world!

Charis turned three this month. What a fun companion she is for me during the day. She is such a social butterfly, she loves to chat with anyone who will listen. And she loves to comment on how ‘big’ she is. Unless you are asking her to clean up her mess or buckle herself in, then she is too little.

Addi has had many birthday parties to attend lately, which she loves! She is liking school very much and likes to be like her older sibblings when they are doing homework, she wants to do hers too.

Scott is also doing well. He is a happy boy. His best friend is moving and so he is very sad about that.

Randon is doing well. He was out of town last week in Las Vegas for a VERY LONG DAY! He hates Vegas anyway but ran into some problems there with not bringing cash with him, only plastic. Las Vegas is still behind the times a bit in this area, or maybe this is some strategy for them to get you be tempted to gamble there (just had to throw that in, my conspiracy theory, he, he, ha, ha). We were so thankful to have him back safely at home.

We lost our little dog Sakie this month in a very shocking way. You can read about it at our web site. The rooster has made an absolutley miraculous recovery, he is fine now. I am going to have to say right here that the faith of little children is a wonderous thing! I will forever be in awe of this.