Labor Day Weekend & Birthdays

On Labor Day weekend, we got together with my brother and his wife Katie to raft down the Weber River. We tried to start from the point explained online that was further up the river, but it turns out that it had been fenced off with signs posted that only fishers were allowed in there. No tubing or boating was allowed. We started from the lower point instead, which turned out to be just as well. Austin spent a lot of the ride in panic mode, afraid of...some danger not understood by anyone else there. It didn't help that we were terrible at steering the raft. There were also a number of rocks just below the surface of the water or just barely exposed above the water that we kept hitting. As we drove up, I had been concerned about our raft upon observing these rocky sections, and I suppose I had good cause to be concerned. Part way through our ride, the raft was obviously becoming full of water at the bottom. We stopped to check things out and found a number of large tears underneath. We were hardly in danger of sinking, but there was also no keeping the inside of the boat dry. I was pretty disappointed at the damage caused to our boat.

Other than that though, we had fun. Austin enjoyed sucking up water and squirting it out with our water toy, and the rest of us were getting better at steering by the end of the float.

We also celebrated Nate's birthday that weekend. We invited his family over for a BBQ at our house. As it turned out, his sister and most of her family didn't make it since they found out the night before that her husband had a brain tumor. (Since then, doctors were able to surgically remove it, thank goodness!) We ended up inviting my brother and his family over too to help us eat all our food.

Nate with his Boston Cream Pie Poke Cake

We celebrated Nate's birthday, as well as other September birthdays in my family the weekend before last at Allan's place. It was Abbie's first birthday, and Katie's family has a tradition of presenting one year old children with their own personal cake to rip apart. This was interesting to watch...Abbie started with carefully pulling off some sprinkles to eat, then some frosting, and finally actually dug into the cake itself, stuffing it into her mouth.

By the end it looked like she had a large brown smile painted on her face, much like a clown's white smile around his mouth. We decided though that we will definitely stick to a single cupcake with our kids...

I also made another cake. This time it was a Butterfingers Poke Cake. It was poked and then covered with caramel before being covered with cool whip and chopped Butterfingers. However, we unfortunately realized that the seal on our jar of caramel we had just purchased was already broken. Since it was Sunday, and we couldn't run to the store, I ended up making caramel for the cake too.

After cake there were some gifts. Abbie loved the Mother Goose toy she got that could talk and sing.

Nate was excited to get a mini deep fryer.

The way Austin is trying to imitate Nate in this
picture just makes me laugh!

My brother Nathan got some new music and DVDs to enjoy.

So, we were all able to go home happy and full afterward.

10/1/17 Update: This evening we gave Abbie one more gift for her birthday that I was not able to finish in time for the party. It took her awhile to be interested enough to look into the gift bag, but Austin volunteered to help her with the process. Once she got the gift out, she seemed happy with it.