Surprise 40th Birthday Party!!!

So, the first great surprise of my 40th birthday was this awesome garage and driveway birthday message from some secretive friends! (Anath, Brooke!) What a fun treat to come home to after 3 crazy days at science camp!

Happy old lady!

So... my birthday was Thurs. and I got home Friday afternoon and I was SO TIRED! Sleep won out over a shower and I snoozed for a few hours. That night, Russ took me out to dinner at P.F. Changs and before our food got to the table, we both got a text from Brooke Sampson saying that Chloe had fallen on her long board at the church (they were supposedly setting up for the ward carnival which was sat. night) and she had hurt her knee pretty bad and would probably need stitches. Russ and I immediately felt the urge to leave and take care of Chloe right away. Russ was saying, "Dangit, poor Chloe. I don't want to have to stitch up my own daughter's knee." etc. He really had me going. I was stressed and told the waitress to please just package up our food to go because our daughter was hurt. 

We jumped in the truck and headed to the church. As we pulled up, we saw lights in the back where our new ramada was so we went that way. At first I thought it was where the kids were setting up for the carnival, but it was really full of people, adult people, so I figured there was another ward there having an activity, which is why I was so confused when I saw my political friends, Steve and Teri Johnson there. They are not LDS and NOT in another ward. Then I saw a few more friends and my DAD which also was a weird combo of people. Then I saw the red carpet (butcher paper) and Brooke Sampson standing there with a crown on a pillow and realized that I was the common denominator with all these people and they were here to see ME, for my BIRTHDAY, and it was a SURPRISE PARTY!!! Then I realized Chloe wasn't hurt and that my husband, with the help of my friends and family had pulled a fast one on me!

He wisely enlisted the help of my big sister, Maryjane (who enlisted her husband!) and my mom, Mary Anne, (who enlisted her husband, my dad) and my dear friend Brooke! 

Russ had sent an email to his cohorts with some very detailed plans for the food and then let the ladies take over decorations and games. It was soooo beautiful with table cloths, flowers in little pots and pictures of me when I was little on sticks, sticking out of the flower pots too. The food was some seriously delicious cheesecake and ice cream with LOTS of different kind of toppings (including a homemade caramel sauce you would want to take a bath in it was so good)!

Worlds collide as my political friends (Jeff Smith, former candidate for US Senate and current LD22 Chairman) and Art Eck, (former ward member and current friend). Funny thing was that these two guys grew up together back in Connecticut and were reunited at my party!

My parents, with some help from Russ, made a quiz all about Sarah and it was hilarious! The funnest part was how my dad got up on the table and went over all the answers with everyone, adding in more embarrassing details to the stories as he went.

THANKS YOU GUYS!!!!

Then came my favorite thing... GAMES!!! Brooke knows me soooo well! She planned a bunch of "minute-to-win-it" type games for us to play and they were a BLAST! 

Here we are playing the cookie game where you try and move the cookie from your forehead to your mouth without using your hands! Jared Meldrum (on the left) won in no time flat! 

Here is a little video clip of Jared winning.

Here we have the Murphy family (one of Russ's buffalo friends) playing the "Dizzy Dummy" game. 

Olivia and Mom at Science Camp!

On the first day of May, 2012, after a fun 2 and a half hour bus ride, Olivia and I arrived at Science Camp, along with her sixth grade buddies and roomies, Alexia and Whitney. One of our first activities was a Geo Cache treasure hunt using GPS devices. 

The girls were given coordinates and had to find small film canisters hidden at each spot. They had to record the letter on the top of each canister. Once we found all of them, they unscrambled the message to get their last and final coordinates and treasure! It wasn't exactly a treasure of gold, but it was a fun adventure!

 

On the way we saw these holes all over every single tree! What were they? They were made by woodpeckers and then little nuts were stored in there (or in the picture above you'll see, a plastic pony bead in storage). Apparently this keeps the squirrels from taking their stuff cuz they can't get at them. We tried to pull one out and they are in there snug!

Alexia found a walking stick!

Olivia is sporting a tattoo made by a cute stamp that my sister, Katie, sent me for my birthday! Oh yeah, I celebrated my 40th birthday at science camp!

Olivia and her friends were so sweet to me. They sang to me in the cabin as we were doing our hair in the morning, and they all sang to me at lunch in the cafeteria. I was spoiled!

Live loves her friends! Kira...

and Alexia...

and... she might not love em, but we had some fun boys in our group... Landon, Adam, and ?

Queen of the rock!

On our nature hike.

We hiked to a stream and these cool camouflage frogs were everywhere!

The next mountain to climb was the rock wall! Olivia mastered it in no time, racing me and her friends to the top! She beat her friends, but I had to make sure she knew that the old lady was still faster!

Next Olivia decided to tackle the super hard hanging chimes! She made it to the top! One of only a couple kids to successfully do that all week!

We had lots of fun classes inside too. Here Olivia and Landon are dissecting owl pellets (basically it's owl barf)! YUM!!

They found lots of bones from little critters in the barf and lined them up on their paper to recreate most of the Vole's skeleton. Cool.

We played TONS of fun games and of course, everyone's favorite, including mine, is Ninja! Olivia is a force to be reckoned with in this game!

Watch out!!!

Olivia's Talent is Showing

Olivia loves to sing and we love to listen to her! On her last week of elementary school she sang the song, "Beautiful" at the Sonoma Ranch talent show. You can watch it on Youtube at this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap9vz_jH608&feature=plcp

She's looking pretty relaxed before her turn came! 

Still having fun and smiling while she's singing.

I guess she's never heard of "Stage fright!"

So proud of our talented girl! You sounded WONDERFUL!

Wood Badge: Bears and Buffalos!

This spring, Russ was invited by our stake leaders to go to a 6 day, Boy Scout leadership training camp (seminar) called, "Wood Badge." Bishop Hatch asked me if I'd like to go along too (even though at the time I wasn't even a scout leader) and I said, "Sure!" I'd heard so many good things about Wood Badge, I just had to go, plus I thought it would be fun to go with Russ. I was right!

We were put into patrols and mine were the BEARS!!! I grew to love these fellow bears A LOT! There is me (Yogi), Robin Timmernamn (Winnie the Pooh), Bishop Larry Kirkpatrick (Smokey), our patrol leader Lynn Romney (yes, she is related to Mitt Romney), Bryce Wyler (Bear Grylls), Brandon Cotter (Baloo) and Ann Habecker (Kung-fu Panda, "Po"). 

Russ and his fellow BUFFALO patrol. We have ?, and Trent, Dave, James, Russ, ? , and Brother Bitter. Boy did these guys kick up a lot of dust everywhere they went!

Even though he wasn't a bear, I still love this guy.

We sure had fun pranking each other. Brandon got some real buffalo chips and everyone had to step over this nice morsel on the way into class one morning. It got quite the laughs. The last night we spread the rest around the buffalo's camp for them to find in the morning. Tee hee!

One night I almost got the whole camp shut down when I stole the keys from one of the four wheelers the leaders use to zoom around camp. They made an announcement over the loud speakers that they were going to close off all the water and electricity to the camp in 15 min. unless they got their keys back. Boy did people come running to use the bathroom and showers right before bed, just in case the keys didn't reappear! Some of our bears tried to stealthily return the keys to the cart, but everyone already assumed it was us anyway!

The leaders were always pranking each other too. Ted Morgan's cell phone got stolen when he left it on a table so he had to sing a song with this spoonful of strawberry ice cream on his forehead before he could get it back!

Pamela and Bishop Hatch sure got a kick out of that. I think it was revenge for previous pranks.

I can't remember why John Johnson had these bunny ears on, but we had fun laughing at him.

My favorite game of the whole time was this Zulu ball tossing game. The six of us had at least 6 balls going between us at one time. Very tricky but cool!

We watched "October Sky" and then made our own bottle rockets and launched them sky high for some VERY INTERESTING judges!

Darth Vader

Yosemite Sam

and our favorite was our bear patrol leader who turned into this playboy bunny momentarily.

Russ with the buffalo patrol's rocket. It went pretty high.

In fact, they won a pink flamingo as their reward. 

The pranks started pretty quickly and we had our flag stolen by the little Bob Whites right away. They made us go and sing "I'm a Little Tea-pot" in front of everyone at dinner time, to get it back. So us bears wrote this song and sang it to them the next night.

 The buffalos and bob-whites ganged up on us and sang this original song to us another night. Pretty clever, but not as good as ours!

We stole the service spade from the buffalos and I snapped this picture as soon as I had run far enough away with it tucked under my shirt. Unfortunately, we stole the shovel during an apparent "no stealing" time of the day. Right before we were to make the buffalos sing for it, they "counted coo" and thanked us for taking care of their shovel for them all day. Hahahaha! Everyone got quite a kick out of that (besides us). 

Wood Badge was a wonderful experience and it still continues as Russ and I work on our 5 goals each (he's done already) to complete our "ticket" and receive our Wood Badge beads in recognition of  successfully completing the entire course!

Go bears!!