Pain is part of all our lives, but suffering is optional.

So, all of you know that my dream that I have been working towards for the past two years has been flushed down the commode. Lesley and I have been trying to figure out our next move and why we are supposed to have this experience. There have been some very angry, spiteful, and rather un-Christlike thoughts running through my head as I have thought about our current situation and the factors involved.
Then I was sitting in the reading room and found a book that Lesley has been reading. I thought I would thumb through it to see what it was about. It just so happened that I opened to a page that had the title of this post in it. I read about how I cannot control the trials that God gives me in this life, but I can control my reaction to them. It was definitely one of those inspired reading moments, just like the kind that you often have when you flip open the scriptures to a random page and the exact answer to your prayers or pondering is revealed on the page. Can you say Liahona?
I had been pondering that answer to my pleas to my father as to why I am to pass through this valley and then went to an all hands meeting at work where this motivational speaker, Keith Harrell, spoke about attitudes relating to our jobs and experiences at work.

He was quite entertaining and again it seemed like I was getting another "message". So, even though I'm not the quickest I do finally catch on, and I have decided to change my attitude. I have decided not to talk or think negatively about our current situation. And I will not allow this current pain to cause me to suffer. I will look for the good and use this as a learning and building experience to get prepared for the joy that I will know for havinbg known this pain.

Family Vacation

We headed up to Lyman Lake State Park for our family vacation this summer. We actually didn't have one planned until the kids mentioned a few weeks ago that we hadn't gone on a vacation yet this summer. I had been saving up my time off from work for working on the house, but as we all know, that is no longer necessary.
We knew we wanted to go north because we wanted to go visit John & Robin and see their new house on this trip. I looked around at the lakes in the white mountains. They all had either just tent camping or expensive private cabins. Expensive private cabins are always out and, with Lesley in her present pregnant condition, tent camping was out. We didn't want to haul our travel trailer because we are trying to sell it and didn't want to haul it up the winding Coronado Trail Highway (I think you can understand that one Josh). Well to make a long story short (too late), I found Lyman Lake State Park which has cabins and yurts. Since yurting was one of our original options for temporary living we thought that waking up on the one year anniversary of our exodus from Tucson in a yurt would be a good commemoration.
There were very few people at the park, the water was cold and the hiking trails were gorgeous. We hiked a different trail each day and even got some geocaching in.
Here are few shots of the kids and I playing in the lake. Like I said, the water was pretty cold so Lesley and Parkin didn't spend a lot of time in the water.

Holman, Livvey, Bella, and I built a mud castle and then we buried each other in the mud.
Holman and Isabella each caught their first fish. And those were the only two fish caught on the trip. Needless to say, I am not a skilled fisherman. I like to do it but really have no clue what I am doing. Luckily, despite that, they were able to catch fish and see the fun of reeling in your catch.We went on several hikes and it was fun to see little Parkin hike almost the whole trail on each of our hikes. Here are a few shots and a quick video of Parkin.

You can see the rest of our vacation photos here.

Flowers in the Desert

I heard this song on the radio today on my drive home from work. I have heard it many times before but today I actually caught the lyrics and maybe it's because of the news we received this weekend that the words meant something to me.

Here are the lyrics:

I've never seen you look like this without a reason,
Another promise fallen through, another season passes by you.
I never took the smile away from anybody's face,
And that's a desperate way to look for someone who is still a child.

CHORUS:
And in a big country, dreams stay with you,
Like a lover's voice, fires the mountainside..
Stay alive..

(I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered)

I'm not expecting to grow flowers in the desert,
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime..

CHORUS

So take that look out of here, it doesn't fit you.
Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded.
Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming.
Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted.
I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered.

I'm not expecting to grow flowers in the desert,
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime..

CHORUS

The grow flowers in the desert part caught my attention and then when I looked up the lyrics at home I saw how fitting they are for us right now. As Lesley pointed out, we have learned some things in the last year and this will all work out for our good. We will always be able to talk about our year spent in a tent a travel trailer. We even commemorated our year anniversary of moving out to the land by spending the night in a yurt at Lyman Lake State Park. More on that in the next post.

Geocaching - Fun for the Whole Family

This week we started one of our favorite family activities that we had forgotten about in the crazy whirlwind year we have had. I hopped on www.geocaching.com to check for some caches in our area. I found a couple that are right off the freeway at our exit, so we loaded up the kids and did some quick caching before I had to leave for mutual on Wednesday. I also found several in Happy Valley that is just up Mescal Rd from where we live. We hit those Thursday after work. There is one that is right next to the waterfall in happy valley that we had heard about from friends but hadn't gotten any clear directions to. We were able to use the coordinates to locate the cache and the currently dry waterfall. Here are some pics:




This has been a great activity to get outside with the kids and have some fun as a family. The hikes are fun and the scenery is gorgeous.

Part of the geocaching game involves travel bugs. These travel bugs have identification tags that help their owners track their travels from one cache to another. One thing we like to do when we travel for family vacation is to collect some of them from caches near our home and then drop them off in caches in the places we visit. We collected three travel bugs to take with us up to Lyman Lake and Show Low on our family trip.

So if you have a GPS receiver and want a fun family activity that gets your kids outdoors hop onto www.geocaching.com, sign up for free, and start your adventure.

Chicken Coop

A month or so ago, the Andersons gave us one of their chicken coops that they no longer used. I had been looking to build one, but since they had one already made, I gratefully accepted their offer to let us have it. I decided to outfit it with an automatic feeder, so I cut a slot in the side, built a tray on the inside and a box with an angled bottom on the outside. I put a bomb shield over the tray so that when the ladies are roosting they don't turn their tray into a potty. This morning, when I went out to check on the chickens, I found a "bomb" on the shield, so it has already served its purpose.I plan on hinging the lid to the feeder box, but for now, setting the lid on top with a brick to hold it in place will have to do.

There was already a small doorway into the coop, but I had to build a little tunnel to bridge from the run to the coop. I had brainstormed ideas on how to connect the chain link fence to the tunnel but none of the ideas seemed to work. Then, as I was assembling the tunnel, I realized I could drill holes through the sides of the tunnel and use ties to attach the chain link. It isn't the prettiest setup but it works. The girls didn't quite know what to do with the doorway into the coop. It was dusk when I finished, so they had already started to roost outside. I put food in the tray and put each of them through the door. Most of them stayed inside for the night, but two of them decided they wanted to camp outside for the night.
Now the chickens have a dry place to go during the monsoons. We had a big storm hit on Friday that was blowing the rain sideways. The run is covered with tarps but there is nothing to keep sideways rain from going through chain link. The poor girls were huddled in a corner of the run trying to stay dry.

The best part is that I was able to do all this with all used materials. The only thing I had to purchase was caulk backing to seal up the bottom of the feeder box.

Small Town 4th of July

I love small towns. That's why I moved to Benson. One of the best part of small towns is that they go all out for their 4th of July celebrations. Unlike Tucson. Now Tucson did have their fireworks show, but only because the private sector stepped up and funded it. Sorry I digress.
Benson, true to small town form, had a great day planned to celebrate our great nation's birthday.

The parade started at 9:00 AM. The youth from our church had a "Southwestern Mardi Gras" float. "What is a Southwestern Mardi Gras float" you may ask? Well a Mardi Gras float throws beads, candy, doubloons, etc... to the crowd. Our float threw buckets of water on the parade goers. We threw a little candy too. We filled Shane Smith's side-dump trailer with water and the youth and I climbed in the thigh-deep water.

This is not a shot of Shane's but you get an idea of its size. I actually don't have an pics of our float. Anyway, we drove through the parade route and chucked water out of the back of the trailer like we were fighting a wild fire. It was too much fun. I think I had more fun than the youth did. A couple of the girls' leader were sitting on top of the cab (not the hood, on top of the cab) and threw the candy. The candy would draw the little kids into the street and then we would trounce them with water. After we finished the parade, we drove, still in the trailer with about a foot and a half of water, over to Lyons park. Now that we were no longer in the parade, Gary Weber, the driver of the rig, drove a bit faster and the water sloshed all around. The kids started riding the waves as they sloshed around.

After the parade, the festivities move to Lyons Park where the water fight begins. Here is a youtube video of the water fight from a few (or many) years back.

The local fire departments and districts have a "Push of War" with an empty barrel attached to a cable by a pulley. The water goes everywhere. For added measure, the Benson Fire Department had their 75 foot boom ladder with its 500 gallon/minutes spout parked on the side. Between heats and to beat the heat they open the valve and soak the crowd. They kids had a blast, but unfortunately our Mescal Fire District didn't fare so well in the tournament.

Later that night we went to Kartchner's Ponds for a barbecue and the kids went for a swim in the pond. This was the same place where we had the party after Bella's baptism. Then we went back to Lyons Park for the evening's fireworks display. They were on par with Sierra Vista's fireworks and we didn't have to drive over an hour to get home.

We had Lesley's whole family with us for the day and it was great to spend the day with family.

Our New Castle's Backyard

Lesley posted a few weeks ago about our new castle so I wanted to post about our new backyard. Now it's not nearly as big as the backyard that we just moved from but it does have some nice mesquite trees. The backyard is on the east side of the house so in the evening it gets nice and cool when it gets shaded by the house and the large pine trees across the street.
Two of the mesquites were perfectly spaced to hang our hammock between. I used ropes that I scavenged from the downed tent to tie it to the tree. The kids love swinging each other in the hammock. Their favorite thing to is for me to swing all four of them in the hammock at the same time. They wrap the sides completely around themselves and then dad swings them as high as he can. We have almost made it all the way around a couple times.(Who needs Disneyland?) Somehow all of our kids have gotten the monkey gene. I think it is recessive and that Lesley must have had it also cause these kids all love to be up in trees or on whatever gets them off the ground. Maybe it's because they have a tall dad and need to be up on something to be up at eye level with me. Who knows? Here's H-man posing all smiley, handsome-like for the camera.
Parkin's favorite pose shows his "good" side. I'm still not sure where he picked up this habit, but it surely didn't come from me. Honest.
Here's Livvey Jane relaxing royally in the hammock. She's definitely got to find herself a nobleman to marry, or at least someone who will treat her like a queen.
Bella Bear is our little panther. I won't be surprised if one morning I wake up to find her sleeping up in the tree.
On a completely side note, I finally got the boys' bunk bed set up. They were so excited that we played fort, tornado, and monster all afternoon and they had a "sleep over" on the top bunk last night. My main motivation for putting it up was to get Parkin in his own bed to see if it would help him stay out of our bed at night. After I snapped these photos, I moved Parkin down to the bottom bunk and he didn't come into our bed at all last night. Hopefully that will be the norm from now on.