The Carnival

  It's time for the annual Faith Stock Show! Never heard of it? Well I've been assured it is very famous; cattle ranchers from all over come to celebrate. And it's so big that it warrants a rodeo, gun show, carnival, parade, and a host of other activities..even a beauty pageant. It's bigger than the fourth of July! (No really, there is no parade on the Fourth here.)
  While we don't attend all of the events, we do enjoy the parade and the carnival. At the parade my kids got about 10 pounds of candy all together, it was crazy!

We had been told that the fair didn't start until two, and the parade got over at eleven, so to kill time we had lunch and played a concentration game at the church. Later we learned the fair really did start at noon on the day we were there, but that's okay.

  For the carnival, we get enough tickets for the kids to do two rides, and for Joseph and I to each ride one. Josh and Jonah rode a small roller coaster for kids first.

This is gonna be great!

  Josh loved it while Jonah really didn't like it, but he put on a brave face. I was kind of annoyed at the operator though. About halfway through the ride, Jonah started yelling that he wanted off, and he was crying, but the guy was listening to music and wasn't watching them. No one else was on the ride, so he could've easily stopped it if he was paying attention. Oh well.

Make it stop!

  Jonah also got to ride the carousel. He loved it last year, but now he was scared to ride because the last ride had been too fast for him. I had to go with him because he was too small to ride alone.

Is it over yet mom?

  Josh kept insisting that he wanted to play one of the games, but we didn't want him to because they cost extra, and didn't accept tickets. Finally we relented and they got to play a water shooting game. Jonah won a prize, then Josh was upset so Joseph let him play again. He won that time, but cried forever because he couldn't have a giant prize or play again! Seriously, those two games cost us 12 dollars in all, it was ridiculous.

I win!

  Elora had been waiting since last year to ride the ferris wheel; Josh chose that ride too so I rode in between them. I had been waiting since last year too, since then I was pregnant and couldn't ride anything! We had fun looking out over the town, and down at daddy and Jonah, with Eli sleeping in daddy's arms.

Attack of the 50 ft woman!

  I love this shot of the street, it shows you how small the town really is. The ferris wheel is situated at roughly the center of town, and this is main street. See how you can see the edge of the town there? It's about that same distance in every direction!

downtown Faith.

  For her last ride Elora chose the Yo Yo, the swings that go up high in the air. Josh was still crying about the game he had played, so Joseph let him have his last tickets to go in a maze-type ride while the rest of us were watching Elora. Despite some tears, we had a pretty fun day.

Jonah's 3yr-old pictures

So I had been dragging my feet on taking new pictures of Jonah for the wall,since I loved his two-year-old prints so much. But then I bought him some new clothes and I was pretty excited about that. When we took these, it was spur of the moment and not very planned. Ideally, we should have gone out at least half an hour earlier, and pre-planned our locations based on how the light fell there..you know, like real photographers do?
Instead, we were running around from spot to spot as I saw them, trying to get a few nice pictures before the sun went down! I'm glad I did too, because the rest of the week after I took these were overcast or really windy, and it wouldn't have worked at all!

So, the first place we stopped was this cool rusty door; I was just thinking how the orange might look cool with the new shirt. I wasn't thinking about how it was in the direct path of the setting sun, and the light was waay to bright there for taking pictures at this hour. We shot a few that weren't that great, then ran on to the next spot.

This blue building is where I took some of Elora's five year pictures. Again the light was a little bright against the shiny wall, so I was messing around with different effects in photoshop on the wall to see if it looked good.

can't decide if I like the full color or the faded one of him looking right

One funny thing about this spot was how the sun was shining in Jonah's eyes. One was in direct sun, while the other was shaded by his nose, resulting in two different eye colors!

We ran on to our mail box shelter next. Here the light seemed really pretty, and I was sad that he never really smiled naturally at the camera. He was either too posing, or looking away most of the time.

Bottom left is my pick here.

 I drew his attention to an ant on the wall so he'd be facing my direction. After observing it for a minute, he took the rock in his hand and smashed it! Boys. Later he had to throw the rock in the "pond" before we moved on.

I love the two on the left, and I might regret which one I've now printed big!

The sun was setting quickly, so we ran up by the rodeo and powwow grounds, which are the highest point in the area and would hopefully still be swathed in sunlight. These we took by a post on the way, and I think they're some of my favorites.

I love the top left one!

This spot is by the white rodeo fence. It would have been ideal as well, but again, he was so wiggly and silly, and he just wouldn't look at me when he was standing in the right spots! He also kept moving slightly when I was snapping the picture, so the sun was on his face too many times.

I'd love the top left if his hands weren't in the way.

We went and sat in the grass right when the sun was touching the horizon. At this point, he was talking away like crazy (which Jonah does a lot) and it was hard to get him to focus on looking at me.  This could have looked nicer, but I guess they're really similar to the ones of Elora last year, so it's okay if I don't use them. (It's not like I have tons of options for locations around here)

We did try the red posts at the pow wow circle, but the sunlight was just getting too low.

What a sweet boy.

 I had to choose my big pictures before I did this post; now that I don't trust my mail man to deliver them without destroying them...I had to pick them up when we last went to the city. Now that I'm looking at all of these, I wonder if I should have spent more time deciding! Which one or two would you pick to hang?

birthday season

  Summer is the season of birthdays at our house! Joshua and I celebrate ours in June, Jonah's is in July, and Eli's is at the very end of August! Elora's isn't until October, so we always joke that if we had another baby, it would have to be born in September to fill in the gap.
Everyone had pretty good birthdays this year.
Joshua was the big five, and he's going to be a big kindergartener!




















A few weeks later, we had a low key birthday for mommy. Yes, we do reuse the same gift bags over and over.

Jonah turned a big three this year on his special day! He got some great presents, and loves playing superhero and playing with his Thundercats sword, when Eli isn't trying to steal it.

He says he's batman. Go figure.

I love this mischievous expression

Thundercats, ho!

We can't wait until Eli gets to celebrate his big day in a few weeks! Of course, the cake won't be anything special to him...he's already had birthday cake three times this summer.

This Means Something

Guess where we visited on our way home from our Utah vacation? I'll give you a hint. 

There are rocks,

and trees, 

and great views, along with a fun family hike. Well...fun for most of us.

Whenever you see a picture of it, you might have the strange idea that "This Means Something."

That's right!

I convinced Joseph we should go to Devil’s tower, since it was only about 50 miles out of our way, and we were already taking extra time getting home (which I may or may not explain later). The last time we went there was in the winter we were coming home from his brother’s house in Washington…2010 I believe.

Joseph was sure the hike took about two hours, but I assured him it was just 45 minutes.  Of course after applying sunblock, using the bathrooms, etc. it really was about two hours, especially with all the breaks Josh thought he needed to take. I was still glad we went, it’s so pretty there! 

 

When we got done it was lunch time again, and we went to one of the tourist restaurants there, even though we knew it would be expensive.  Yeah, that was Josh’s favorite part: another restaurant!

I loved the contrast of the hay fields in front of the towering monolith, so I got a picture, and later I had fun doing this cool marker drawing! I'd been wanting to do some kind of picture of the fields around where we live, but this was the perfect combination of agriculture and...extraterrestrial landing field.
ps- sorry the spacing is stupid on this post. Blogger had it out for me.