The Farnsworth Family: September Stuff

September has been full of activities for our family. Here are just a few of the things we have been doing.

First, Russell and I are the activity days leaders for the boys Colby's age. We like to do fun activities for the boys so when our primary president told us we were not going to be able to do the pinewood derby this year, we knew we had to find something just as exciting to take it's place. So we decided to do a Cardboard Boat Regatta!

This was such a fun activity! The boys seemed to love it. Like the pinewood derby, we gave each boy a large cardboard box and a few rules and told them to build a boat. We said they could build the boat as big or small as they wanted as long as they were able to fit inside it and float. It was fun to see all of the different designs and creative ideas the boys came up with.

For the Regatta, we all met at First Dam in Logan because the water is pretty shallow there and it is free. The boys were all excited to get out in the water and try out their boats. Many of the boats floated really well and the riders just paddled along.

Quinn (pictured above) was so relaxed in his boat he almost took a nap! Other boats however had epic Titanic-like sinks! Those were fun to watch too. Thankfully everyone was a pretty good sport about the whole thing.

In the end we gave out three awards for the Regatta.

Colby won the award for Best Ship Design for having the best looking boat. Jace won the Titanic Award for the best sink. Andrew won the Speed Boat Award for having the boat that floated the longest. Everyone cheered for the winners and we finished the evening off with desserts.

Colby's really wanted to save his best designed ship but it was pretty waterlogged and just king of fell apart at the end. Sadly, Logan's boat didn't last very long either. He was one of the first ones to sink. Logan was pretty sad about that but we told him it was just for fun and everyone else was going to sink eventually as well so just go have fun in the water. Despite the few tears shed over Logan's sunken ship, we had a really good night. I think this activity might just become a tradition.

Some other things we have been doing this month is playing Barbies:

I'm not really sure what is going on in this picture. I think the Barbies are having a picnic and hanging out. The best part of the whole picture to me is Brooklyn's face. She is just standing there so innocently with this little smirk smile on her face. It's like she is so proud of what she is doing. I just have to laugh at it.

We have also been doing a lot of canning and gardening.

During Peach Days in Brigham City, we drove down and got a couple cases of peaches. We drove from stand to stand trying to find the best deal for the best peaches. We finally stopped at a little truck and trailer on the side of the road and they had the biggest and best looking peaches I have ever seen. We bought two cases from them! When we got home, we tasted the peaches and we about died they were so good!! My mouth is watering now just thinking about it. Since then I have canned peaches and made jam as well as froze some of the deliciousness.

The second picture is of our pumpkins we grew! We have never been able to grow pumpkins but this year our plant survived and we were able to get three pumpkins off of it. Logan was so proud of his little plant and so was I.

This girls continued to be in the parades in September. They were in the Wellsville Founder's Day parade over Labor Day weekend.

This parade was one of the longer parades so it was fun to watch. Like usual the boys collected a ton of parade candy. We even got bombarded with string cheese. The Schreiber's float always throws cheese and this time they threw a couple giant handfuls right to us. Half of it landing right in Brooklyn's stroller. It was great.

Emily is continuing to enjoy mountain biking with the team especially when they have GRiT (girls only) rides.

Sadly the season ended for her and the JR Devo riders this month. The High School riders go until the end of October. She has really enjoyed riding, discovering new trails, and making new friends.

Speaking of friends, Hahna has been a great friend for Emily. These two do a lot together. They especially like going to the temple to do Baptisms for the Dead.

The final parade of year for the Hyrum Royalty was the Mountain Crest Homecoming parade.

The girls have loved being involved with the Hyrum Royalty this year. They have really liked being in all of the parades and waving to everyone. Emily thought there should have been more to the Royalty than just parades but she still had fun and was happy to be the princess. You both made a beautiful royalty!

One weekend we took a hike to see if we could find some geocaches. Emily has planned a YW activity to take the girls to find a geocache so we decided we had better go find one before taking the girls. We searched the geocache site and thought we could hike to one near the MC really quickly.

Well, we made it to the MC but the pin leading us to the cache was taking us every which way but right and we finally decided that the cache was actually in a cave or something accessible from the other side of the mountain. So we finally gave up and drove to the Blacksmith Fork trail to find some caches there. These caches were much easier to find and we were able to find 3-4 with in a little while. One cache that was hard to find was one that was inside the mouth of a rubber snake wrapped in a tree. We thought this cache was mismarked as well until we looked up and found the snake (which was kind of creepy).

The next week, Emily was able to take her YW group geocaching and they were able to find the few caches we found a long the Blacksmith Fork trail. They even found the snake... Emily said the girls has a good time and even swapped out a few things in the caches for things they had brought along.

Finally, Charlotte has been enjoying her Let's Play Music class. She is learning the piano this year.