Valley Uprising

Emily's first quarter of middle school has ended. Three weeks ago, she brought home her progress report and she was doing really good. Since then, she has obviously learned that she can communicate with her friends via e-mail or something because she started seriously slacking off. It would take her forever to do her homework and she started getting bad marks in her quizzes and assignments, along with work turned in late. She lost a lot of points and was barely passing some classes that she was acing just a few weeks prior.

She got some serious talking to and she made a last ditch effort to pull up her grades. She pulled off getting B's in those classes at least but we are not thrilled about her behavior. She has never gotten below a B in her life (or whatever the current equivalent they keep changing it to). Hopefully the experience has shocked her into a bit of reality. I guess time will only tell when we see what she does in this next quarter.

Emily had the day off at the last day of her quarter though for grading or some such nonsense. I swear those teachers take any opportunity to take more time off. I spent most of the day with her and working on a picnic for our dinner. After we picked up Caitlyn from school, we picked up Christian as well. We came back to get dressed and head out to Orange County.

It was the premier of the new Reel Rock 9 movie: Valley Uprising. Christian thought that it would be fun to take the kids and since Emily is doing a History Day project on one of the original "stone masters," that it would be educational as well.

There was a costume contest, so we collected some garb from second hand shops and dressed up for the occasion. We were supposed to dress up as seventies dirt bag climbers to pay homage to the stone masters of the time. We got there early to get good seats and hardly anyone was dressed. We got lots of compliments on our outfits though so it was a lot of fun. The event was sponsored by North Face and their rep actually came over to compliment us on our family costumes and hand out some freebies.

One of the famous climbers of the time, Jim Bridwell, came and signed autographed posters. They had some other contests and events going on throughout the evening. Before the movies started, more people came dressed up. The movie itself was fairly disappointing and somewhat inappropriate for the kids. It focused very little on the climbing and very much on the bad habits of the climbers of the times. The person Emily is doing her report on was mentioned a couple of times and they had him making a few comments throughout the movie, but very little was told about him.

During the intermission, they had the costume contest and did drawings for some of the raffle tickets they sold. We had to go up in front of everybody in our costumes. There were only about 15 of us. They announced the prizes for dressing up and we were somewhat astonished. We made the first cut of the eliminations pretty easily but we ended up winning the competition which was a complete shock to us as some of the other contestants were more popular. In the end, I think that they just wanted the little family to win (or at least the sponsor did). I have no complaints about that as we won a $200 gift certificate from Gear CoOp for North Face gear.

The kids were pretty excited. We finished the movie and left while they finished off the raffles for the remaining prizes. We did not purchase any raffle tickets and didn't know a whole lot about it to tell the truth, although, they did have some pretty nice prizes. But it was late, the movie was disappointing and the kids were tired so we headed home.

The next evening, we had a Halloween party to attend to. We slept in. The kids had to do their chores and I baked some goodies for the party in the afternoon. We dressed up again in our Valley Uprising costumes and headed to the party after Christian took a nap.

We ended up leaving the party a little earlier than usual because one of the overzealous, overindulged and over-sugared children there rammed into Christian with their cycle...on purpose. He was in a great deal of pain and pretty upset about the whole thing, so we headed home for some distance and rest.

We had our primary program this past weekend. It was Emily's last primary program as she will be graduating from primary in a few more months. She and another boy from her class did most of the narration and she had to sing part of a song with a few other girls. She was not too thrilled to have to go up in front of everybody to do anything extra but she ended up doing a really great job.

Our Weekend

In an effort to tighten our budget and keep costs down, we have not been traveling around on weekends to go rock climbing. It's been difficult, to say the least. We've spent more time locally, hiking back up to Sugarloaf Mtn., we hiked up to the northern crest of the Box Springs Mtn. another time to do some climbing and when we were done, we hiked along the crest line to the ranger station. The weather still hasn't cooled down that much so it was still pretty warm out.

We went back up again this past weekend to do some jumar practice.

It's definitely not as easy as it looks. We all went up several times. While Emily was taking one of her turns up, Christian was practicing on another anchor and Caitlyn decided to free solo up to her sister.

She was not on any rope and there was quite a bit of exposure there so when Christian turned around and saw her climbing up, he got a little freaked out. Caitlyn is not normally one to take any chances though and since she was climbing next to her sister's rope at the crux, we let her continue. We figured that she could grab onto the rope if she had any problems. It's weird since she had been so reluctant to climb before. I guess she has mostly gotten over her fear of heights, that's for sure.

After we finished, we all climbed back up a steep face with really thin holds. Caitlyn was always too timid to try anything like this before, but I think I was more scared going up than she was this time!

Afterwards, we had a sealing reception to go to, so we had to get back to get cleaned up so that we could get dressed and go. It was for an old friend that used to be in our ward, so we went to support them. They did a really great job decorating the park in back of the church. I've never seen the place look so nice. It was so nice to see everyone so happy. For the dinner, they had the Tommy's truck out there to serve dinner, so we were pretty stoked to get a good 'ole burger and fries after all the climbing we did!

Marian sent the girls a halloween surprise that she wanted them to open early. Apparently she sent them new costumes to use so the girls are pretty stoked that they have new costumes to choose from. We stopped buying them costumes some time ago and they just normally pick out something out of their dress up box (which Marian also has mostly filled as they are starting to get a bit old for dress up these days). I don't know how much longer we are going to let Emily trick or treat. She still really enjoys it though and since she has lost the egg hunts for Easter, I suppose she can trick or treat for a little while longer.

Break

After about two years, due to unforeseen circumstances, we have decided to take a break from the girls' Polynesian dance lessons. We had one last performance that came up unexpectedly last week. They performed at a Fitness Fair at the Riverside Plaza this past weekend.

Unfortunately, it was a sad little event. Not a whole lot of people there. The people that were there, barely paid attention. Some could not pull their attention away from their phones for more than a second or two. It is not just me who noticed. The girls noticed while they were dancing. Not a lot of the girls made it out to dance either. 

Christian's mom did make it out to see our girls dance for the first time though, so that was pretty exciting. It is really one of the biggest reasons we agreed to do the performance. That and the fact that there would have been only one other little girl dancing for the keiki's otherwise.

After the performance, we carved pumpkins. Christian's mom brought a bunch for everyone to do. The girls had fun...although there was a bit more whining than we would have liked. In the end, they all turned out great. Unfortunately, it is still quite warm out and the pumpkins didn't last a week. So there will be no jack-o-lanterns left by Halloween.

Christian and I went to try out the other climbing gym in Riverside (since we now have membership, albeit temporarily). It is a lot farther, but it is also a lot bigger. So there are a lot more routes that everyone can try. We decided to take a break today and took the girls after school since it is a minimum day. We were there for many hours but the girls had a lot of fun and we got a lot of practice and exercise in.

San Diego

Last weekend, we took some time to go visit Christian's family in San Diego. We went down Friday night. In the morning, we took off with Christian's sister and niece to Mt. Woodson again. This time, we wanted to try climbing on some of the many boulders there. We had some trouble identifying some of the published routes. What routes we found seemed like they were sand bagged.

They were a lot harder than they indicated and it was pretty frustrating and disappointing for everyone. As the weather is still quite hot, we called it quits by lunchtime and returned to get something to eat. 

We gathered up some of the other people and headed out to Cabrillo National Monument after lunch.

They were having some rededication ceremony that day. So although it was free to get into the park, it also made it extremely crowded.

We took the kids to the Old Point Loma Lighthouse next.

And then we were off to see the tide pools...or what's left of them anyway.

We saw one sea anemone and two little crabs. Several of us slipped on some of the algae on the rocks though and our older nephews got to get wet so they had a good time.

Despite the destruction of the tide pools and the crowds, it was beautiful there. Unfortunately, the tide comes in pretty early so that part of the park closes at 4:30.

We returned to Christian's sister's house and more of the family gathered for dinner. We spent another night and got up in the morning to attend church with their family. Our brother in law is now one of the counselors in the bishopric there and they were having their Primary Program that day. We stayed to watch our niece play the violin. She will be graduating out of Primary shortly as she turns 12 in November.