Idaho: Part 1 - Fishing, Bowling, Chickens, and More

The Saturday after school got out, I took the kids to Idaho to see Grandma, Grandpa, and all the cousins to start a long summer travel season for the kids.  Because of flight issues, we wound up getting in to Idaho several hours after originally scheduled, but Grandma was still willing to give hugs before it was time for bed.

 

We had a Super Mario Brothers party with all the Idaho cousins to watch the new movie and the Bell boys (Dallin, Logan, and Ethan) came in their Mario Brothers costumes as it is one of their favorite movies.  While waiting for the movie to start, we had fun with spinning tops battling in a wooden arena (all the tops spin together, if your color gets knocked down or otherwise stops spinning, you are out).

 

One of the regular highlights of games we played together was 500.  One person calls out a point value, throws the ball toward the crowd, and if someone catches it, they get that number of points.  When someone reaches 500 points, they are the new thrower.  I remember playing it when I was a kid, and while the house rules may have changed (apparently calling "dead or alive" means you can get points after the ball hits the ground among other variations I wasn't familiar with), it was good to see that good games never go out of style.  Here's Miles being silly and throwing behind his head off the deck to the waiting crowd.

It was usually chaos as people scramble to catch.

Lydia and Tessa dug in the sandbox for a bit.

Ethan rode the tractor cart down the hill over and over.

We went to a park to let the cousins run around together.  Brenna attached herself to Karina starting the first Sunday we were there when we went to church with the Hickens.  Brenna saw where Karina was sitting, and walked all the way around the pew to plant herself next to Karina.  That pattern continued throughout the visit; Karina assured everyone she didn't mind at all.

At the park, the cousins played cops and robbers, and our kids learned a new way of picking teams.  The kids would all line up front to back, count to three, and then jump either to the left or the right.  Those that jumped to the right would be on one team, and those that jumped left on the other.  There was one time where Lydia bucked the trend and everyone but her jumped the same direction - they laughed, decided that was obviously unfair, and redid the jump.  I thought it was an innovative way to divide up.

 Brenna getting spun around by Karina and her brothers, Grant and Miles.

Derek was very proud of himself climbing up very high on this spider web climbing structure.  It was pretty tall and he did a great job.

Ethan climbing.

When Derek was going through a Transformers phase, he became very interested in all the different vehicles that the Transformers robots could turn into.  He particularly wanted to see a tank like Megatron since that was a vehicle he had never seen before and he was very excited to hear that I had been to a tank in Idaho that was sitting in a field at a park.  For weeks he was asking to make sure that we would go see the tank when we went to Idaho.  That's a big reason why we chose this particular park to visit.  When we got to the park and he saw the tank, it was interesting enough for him to spend a few minutes climbing around before he wanted to go back to the playground and play some more on the equipment there.  Here he is riding the tank.

Lydia, Miles, Dallin, and Logan eventually wanted to climb on the tank too.

Back at Grandma and Grandpa's, the kids were very eager to help build a fire to roast hot dogs and then marshmallows for s'mores.  Pyromania is alive and well with the younger generation.

The cousins had a lot of fun playing together in the yard just being kids.

Lydia and Tessa chilling in the hammock.

We went bowling one day with the cousins.  I think Karina and Derek had been bowling before at a birthday party or two, but I don't think Lydia had ever been.  We had the bumper lanes up and they had the option to roll the ball down a ramp, but after a few times of that, all our kids used their own power and unique styles to get the ball down the lane.

Karina with her traditional approach:

 

Derek's release was almost sidearm and honestly, he got a lot of power for his size out of it (and some of his stances/poses after releasing the ball were funny).

Lydia had a good approach...

 

 

...and a great reaction when she got a spare and knocked down all the pins (I just wish the picture were more in focus)!

 

We spent a night at the cabin near Yellowstone, and went to Big Springs where there are lots of very large trout swimming around eager for kids to throw them some food.

 

We obliged.

We used the cabin as a convenient halfway point as we drove to see my brother Aaron, his wife Allyson, and the former Alaska/now Montana cousins Russell, Courtney, and Maxwell in their new house in Montana.  It is very nice having them in the lower 48 making it easier for all of us to get together.

We stopped in Ennis, Montana so Derek and Lydia could go fishing with their fishing buddy Grandpa at a kids-only fishing pond.  Derek didn't seem to have enough patience to stay in one spot and circled his way over to the other side of the small pond and Grandpa followed him there.

 

 

While he was over there, Derek suddenly jumped up excited and started reeling his line in by himself; at first I didn't think he really had anything, but sure enough, he pulled a small sucker out of the pond that had hit his worm and he had reeled it in all by himself!

He was very proud of himself, especially when he learned that Grandpa was going to use his fish as bait to catch bigger fish on a future fishing trip.

 

Lydia was so incredibly focused on fishing, I think she might have been afraid to blink for fear her bobber would go down indicating a fish was biting in the split second she had her eyes closed.  I felt really bad that despite getting a few bites, she was unable to catch a fish at the pond that trip.  It didn't help that there was a boy next to her who was a few years older who kept whooping and hollering and catching fish after fish.

 

When we made it to the cousin's house in Montana for the night, Aaron commented that they could usually catch a fish in the creek that runs through their property if it was completely silent before the fish bites (and after one fish bites, the others get too scared to do it again for several hours).  So Lydia diligently got geared up to go fishing in the creek, including learning from Uncle Aaron how to cast with an open-face reel.

 

Unfortunately, after several minutes of silent persistence, it started to rain fairly hard, so the fishing was done for the day without a bite.  I was very proud of Lydia and how hard she was trying.

One of the biggest highlights of the Montana house were the free range chickens that Aaron and Allyson were raising in hopes of getting eggs (the hens were still too young to lay eggs when we were there).  The kids loved chasing the chickens around the property, and occasionally picking them up.

 

 

Here they are with Courtney, who showed them the ropes of herding chickens.

Derek found a golf club and tried his hand at hitting a ball; I think the previous owners had left a fair amount of stuff at the house that was now inherited.  I'm not sure if Derek is calling his shot here like Babe Ruth or what.

Derek also thought it was funny to push Karina on a swing.

They have a fairly long zip line there that was an immediate hit and the kids went on it repeatedly, but I didn't get the camera out in time.  Eventually, someone realized that the support braces on one end had broken free of the ground and with each trip down the zip line, the supports were wobbling a little more, so fortunately we had the good sense to stop using it before someone got hurt.

We spent the night with the cousins in Montana before bringing them back with us to Idaho so everyone could play together.  On the way back, Grandpa and Lydia wanted to try fishing one more time at the same pond for a few minutes, and I am very glad they did.  Lydia was the only one fishing there at the time and quickly was getting bites.  It wasn't long before she hooked a nice trout and managed to reel it in all the way to the bank before it broke the line because it was so big (around 14 inches I would guess)!  Grandpa was on his hands and knees reaching into the water trying to swat it up on the bank; if we had brought a net, we would have had it.  I watched it swim away and assured Lydia that it counted - her persistence paid off and she had the biggest smile!

More to come with all the cousins together.