Summer is beginning to change. We've had a few mornings that hinted of fall and the temperatures have begun to drop slightly during the day. Many of the flowers are beginning to show signs of age. It will be nice to have a little less heat, but oh how we love those long summer nights and the freedom of a summer day. Pictured here is my new favorite flower-the hyssop. It is the tall purple one on the left. I prefer it in orange. It is very hardy and blooms all season-just constant tall color with a minty smell.












Tali loves to help me water. She is my best dead-header and also thrills to bring in tomatoes and squash which are starting to ripen in large amounts. I love the days when you have a tomatoe on every thing you possibly can. We've decided to keep Talia home this year. We just can't bear the thought of having the choice of letting her leave our home one year earlier. So she and I and Capri are going to have another year together. She is going to take a fun combo dance class, work on her violin, and do field trips with me. She is actually o.k. with the idea. She has spent so many hours playing with Landen and Capri this summer. SHe can transition really well between baby play and big kid play. At church today, the Primary president was telling a story about a young couple who were basically destitute, but paid their tithing instead of buying food. When the President asked what they were going to do, Tali called out, "hunt!" It was pretty funny. She has definitely been affected by Landen's affection for everything boy.







We took the kids camping this weekend with our ward campout. It was up Big Cottonwood canyon. It was not the kind of camping that the Petersen's are used to but the sights were pretty private and their were streams and hiking trails everywhere. THe kids immediately found friends and began exploring the mountains, trying to catch rodents, examining a baby bat, and running. After dinner during the ward's program Capriel ran into a BBQ and cut herself under her right eye. It was bad enough that it needed stitches, so Craig took her to Primary Children's Hospital and waited there with her all night to get her stitches. They ended up staying at home that night and then met up with us the next morning. It was my first night alone camping , but since we were with our ward, I was fine. We spent the evening roasting smores with friends, playing with the fire, and Breck even got some snipe hunting in. The next day we went on a hike up by Brighton ski resort. It was 1.4 miles with a pretty considerable elevation gain, but the kids did really well. It ended up at a gorgeous alpine lake called Lake Mary. Breck (true to her nature) fell into the water catching a minnow (she actually caught one in a snack bag) and carted the minnow home in a water bottle soaking wet . Landen accidentally left a special stick that he had been carving, burning, and sharpening for two days up at the lake. I let him go back and get it and he eventually returned crying. Apparently, someone had taken the stick and when he approached them and told them it was his, he wouldn't give it back. He cried the entire walk back. The other night I took the kids to the farmers market and gave them a couple of dollars to buy whatever they wanted for dinner. Landen ended up forgoing a fun dinner to by a varnished stick that a man was selling. He knows his priorities.

Twice this week, the kids have brought home ftwo ledgeling robins. We go through the drama of loving it and enjoying it's cuteness, chasing after it after it leaps from their hands, me screaming as is races around squaking that it had better not poop, and then the kids finally throw a towel over it's body and I tell them that we can not keep a baby bird. So then they sadly get back on their bikes and drive the squirming bird back to whereever they found it. We have also watched a baby bird grow up in a tree in our yard.
This is Brecklyn in her true form. She loves to be shoes off, dirty, and in the wild. Since, the ward had a potluck for dinner, the kids (mainly Breck) decided to have hotdogs for breakfast. People thought we were pretty strange roasting up those hotdogs while they ate their cereal, but we sure had a lot of kids come over and ask for one! Breck learned how to make potatoe salad and was thrilled to use her Grandma Winder's recipe. After we made it, she said, "it tastes just like Grandma's, Yum." I let the kids pack themselves for the camping trip which turned out to have some pretty interesting results. On the way back from our hike we experienced a mountain thundershower, which was pretty intense. It was hailing and then pouring rain. I thought it was exciting, but some of the kids thought it hurt to much. What a beautiful world we live in.