The Barney Family

It is wonderful to have my parents home.

With the temple mission done and the Mongolian Mission behind them, they have lots of time to spend with all of us. It also helps that their home still has renters. :) They are our captives.

We love it.

Mom and Dad gave a wonderful fireside for the stake about their mission in Mongolia.

The kiddos sat on the back row. I hope they didn't disrupt too much.

They are enthralled with the presentation obviously. :)

We got to spend a week with the Burdge girls. They were delightful as usual.

Elena got her face painted at JUMP camp.

A game of "Mushroom Ball"

When the mushrooms show up, it's time for Alec and Maren to head outside for some Mushroom Ball. The mushrooms fly into hundred of pieces. It's kind of gross actually. They come inside with mushroom bits in their hair.

Alec loves his dog.

The garden is growing!

I hang out in the garden every morning pulling the little weeds.

I love it.

We took a few days off for a little family vacation at the Great Wolf Lodge. We have been wanting to come here since the Farmer's went last summer and had such a great time. We happened to find a Groupon which made it a little less expensive (still very spendy though) so we went for it. It was great to have the family together for some fun. The younger kids loved it. The older kids liked it as well, but for them two days of Great Lodge was more than enough. We stocked our hotel room with lots of tasty stuff that we normally don't get, and the kids swam and ate and swam some more. There was some T.V. watching in there too. They discovered the novelty of having channels, and they clicked through them repeatedly. The first night they found Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and watched that. (not my favorite- Geoff teases me about this one because Blueberry Girl gave me nightmares when I was a child)
We also brought some board games. That part didn't go as well. These kids don't enjoy board games as well as my generation. I think video games have helped to ruin that. They don't seem to have much patience in the learning of new board games. Yatzee was a dismal failure, which ended with me giving up and kicking them out of my room for a while while I steamed. Geoff tried again with Rummikub and had better success. He was determined that the kids participate in my dream of family game time. I sometimes feel like giving up that tradition, but I haven't let go quite yet. I have too many great memories of playing games with my own siblings, my grandmother, and sometimes my dad. The extended Barney family always enjoyed a good game of Hearts, Settlers, and now Dominion. Good times.

Anyway, this was a nice getaway. I'm glad we did it. After the hotel, we visited a couple of Church sites, the temple site in Independence and Liberty Jail. I'd been both places before, but Geoff hadn't. He enjoyed the little tour.

The hot tub for families was a popular place to hang out.

Annalisa has started to make some progress in learning how to swim. She just started to put her head under the water. Finally! We will keep working on this, and hopefully by the end of summer, she'll be a little swimmer.