Savannah made it through her second week of the college semester and the good news is, she enjoyed it! She likes her classes and still likes her job and even got to work at the temple on Saturday morning. Her friend told her there were 100 days until Christmas, so she did some Christmas shopping, too!

Mariah attended the Senior Sunrise this week. We've been having fires on Nebo all week which is the mountain framing our valley to the south and we can see out our window. Sometimes the wind clears us out, but our mornings especially are like sitting in a bowl of smoke. So . . . it was a different kind of sunrise for the SHS class of 2019! They still made the best of it and had a good time together.

This was on a good day.

On Saturday Mariah, Chey, and Cali ran in the BYU Invitational for cross country. Usually that meet is in Provo but because of the smoke, they changed it last minute to USU's course in Logan (two hours north). Kevin had a free day so he decided to drive up and watch them and visit a friend of his while there. Mariah had a great race, placed 23rd, and got one of the t-shirts given to the top 30 finishers. Chey and Cali are worn down by doing two sports but still managed to have good attitudes and a fun day!

Bethany and Ben had karate on Tuesday and Thursday, Beth had activity days on Monday, Ben had Cub Scouts on Wednesday while Beth had piano, Ben had flag football on Monday and Wednesday evening, and Ben had guitar on Saturday. In between it all, they managed to invite the neighborhood friends over to play pretty regularly and draw an entire city on our driveway with sidewalk chalk (that was before the smoke got too bad to play outside). Ben also was given some Pokémon cards at school, and he has been crazy about that for the last few days. We like how he is trying to earn money to buy more!

We finished our second week of having family breakfast instead of family dinner and it has worked out well! We manage to meet around the table at 7am and I make sure everyone has their fruits and vegetables (green beans with breakfast!). The first week I tried to do mostly breakfast foods, but this week we did have chicken enchiladas for breakfast one day. Guess what? It's good in the morning, too. It's taken a lot of the stress out of the evenings and keeps people free to stay late at school (Savannah) or go to team night dinners (Mariah, Cali, Chey) or even be at flag football practice (Ben) and we still have a meal together every day! More of the leftovers get eaten, too, since kids don't know what to have for dinner. Bonus!