The Wilson Family: September

Oakes family at the cabin. They taught us how to play Monopoly Deal and now my kids are obsessed. I think we've play a few rounds every day since.

Good luck when you boat under the bridge when the train is coming along the tracks too.

Noah's getting the hang of surfing.

YM activity at our house.

On one of our 'P.E.' walks thru the creek we saw a coyote, a skunk, turtles, ducks, way too many turkeys, way too many squirrels, birds, fish......it was a very eventful nature sighting walk.

EVERY SINGLE NIGHT Noah comes down to the couch to sleep (usually around midnight). My boys have the weirdest sleeping rituals. Grant sleeps on the floor every night. He says he likes the hard ground.

My big boy turned 13!! We have an official teenager. CRAZY!! I feel like time is just racing past me and I can't stop it. He got a metal detector, a backpacking chair and a knife sharpener.

No candles, so a match had to work for his breakfast song.

Took Noah to Bruchi's for lunch (benefits of being home schooled).

Then we went to Folsom to metal detect. Mainly found bottle caps, but he did find an old spike of some sort.

I gave him the day off of school. Another benefit of home school. :)

Noah had an etiquette dinner that night, so we didn't do a family party.

Activity days this month we made these super cute family 'tree' boards and the second activity was a family ancestor story night (the girls brought something representative of their story and told us about one of their ancestors). Ava told a story about grandpa Arthur Old and handed out butter mints.

Pie in the park to celebrate one of our friends birthdays.

Third camping trip of the year - Mt. Lassen. Our campground was at Manzanita lake (pictured above).

We hiked to Bumpass Hell - a hydrothermal field and pools.

It smelled horrible, but looked really cool - otherworldly really.

My kids LOVE camping. They play for hours and get pretty creative with their games. They play kick-the-can, slingshot wars, climb trees, hide and seek......

Our greatest accomplishment this trip was hiking Mt. Lassen peak. The hike to Bumpass Hell the day before was 3 miles total and the kids whined most of the way, so Adam told all of them if they could do the peak hike without one complaint he would let them spend $5 each at the gift shop. It was a full on miracle. Not one complaint from any of them!! It was way harder than the previous days hike too. 5 miles round trip, pretty much straight up the whole time. We started at 8500 feet and the summit is 10,457 feet. Of course, we made sure to reiterate how attitude makes all the difference. We'll see if this lesson set it.

To truly summit you have to hike a little past the base of the mountain to the peak past the snow.

Mount Lassen peak!!

It was perfect weather too (high 60's). The nights and mornings were a bit chilly (low 40's), but doable.

Come Follow Me video on a tiny screen. :)

Tried to sneak a picture of Noah at his small engine repair class. He is loving this class. They take apart lawn mowers and next semester they put them back together. He's brought home all sorts of crap from this class.

The boys found some scrap wood and made this perch. They decided it need to be hoisted into the tree. It's very precariously hanging there with lots of ropes and who knows what kind of knots. :) They love being up there.

P.E. casualty. Noah was swimming for P.E. one day and was running from the grass to a piece of wood in the pool, thinking he could surf (eye roll), and his toe got sliced on one of the tiles. He got out and said that kind of hurt my toe and then when he looked at it and realized a thick flap of skin was hanging off and he got really pale (notice his white face :) ). It was quite deep, but the skin was already dying, so I just clipped it off and bandaged it up really well and took him to cello lessons. :)