Farewell

We were able to go to Henderson, Nevada this past weekend for my nephew's farewell before his mission to Jamaica. His mission will cover Jamaica, part of the Bahamas, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We're very excited for him. He is a great example to my kids. He is the first missionary to go out on either side of the family.
Bruce loves his cousins, Sayre and Brodey. He had so much fun hanging out with them this weekend and staying up all night watching videos and playing games. 

The girls love Brodey too. :)

We had a fun trip. The kids loved staying at a hotel. We swam, ate good food, and hung out with the Davis family and my mom. We're excited to start hearing about Brodey's mission once he's out. He goes in to the MTC on September 9th! We will miss him.

Elly and Linda picked out fabric and spent all Friday evening making themselves dresses. Super cute.

First Day of School 2015

Well the kids are already back to school! They started yesterday. Our house was unbelievably quiet when I got home from dropping everyone off. 

 My elementary school kids!

Jane - 4th Grade         Claire- 2nd Grade

Claire was so excited for school to start back up. She had a very happy morning up until when she had to put socks and shoes on. She's trying her best to smile through her tears. :) She cheered up when she got to school and saw her friends, teacher, and classroom. She loved it and was excited to go back today.

Claire and her teacher, Mrs. Cinque

Jane was excited that this year she rotates between two classes. Her teacher is Mrs. Olavide and she also goes to Mrs. Smith's class for part of the day. Her day couldn't have gone better. She was very excited about everything. She had a lot of friends and loved that everyone asked her about her braces. :)

My middle school kids!

Linda - 6th Grade         Bruce - 7th Grade

Linda was not nervous to go to middle school at all. She found her classes easily and knew many kids from her elementary school and church. When she got home she said her day was good and that she liked it in middle school. Her favorite was the classes and her least favorite was lunch time because there were long lines. I can't believe how grown up she is looking!

Bruce was happy to be one of the older kids on campus now. He picked up with his buddies playing sports before school and during lunch. He had a good day. It was a little boring for his taste, but no major complaints. He even stopped by Linda's classroom to say hi to her. What a good brother. :) 

Overall it was a great day for everyone. I hope all of these happy attitudes continue even after the homework starts rolling in. :) 

Bruce's Ordination

Bruce was ordained a Deacon yesterday and received the Aaronic Priesthood. It was such a neat experience to witness. Having one boy makes these moments even more special to me because each one with Bruce is my only one. There was a strong spirit in the room when the great men in Bruce's life surrounded him and with the power of the priesthood placed their hands on his head. You could feel them surrounding Bruce with God's strength and protection. Robert did a great job on the blessing. Bruce has a good spirit and a strong testimony. He will do great in his priesthood duties. A week ago he attended primary for the last time. I am grateful to have been serving in primary when Bruce started primary and on his last day. It really made me teary. 
We love our baby boy.

3 generations
Bruce Charles Thompson
Robert Bruce Thompson
Bruce John Thompson

Jane's 9th Birthday!

Jane turned 9 years old on the 16th! Jane is a very focused person that loves to learn new things. 

She is confident and has a good heart. 
We celebrated on Friday by going to Knott's Soak City all day. 

 Jane and Linda in the middle getting drenched.

On her real birthday day we had a lot of family in town for Bruce's ordination so we celebrated after church with family. 

She was especially excited to get a bike!! 

We are so happy that Jane has brightened our lives for the last 9 years. 

Happy12th Birthday Bruce!

Our first baby is 12 years old today! We love Bruce. 

He keeps us laughing and keeps his sisters on their toes. 

He is a very capable and good. 

He chose two friends to spend the day with at Wave Water Park. They had so much fun.

After the water park he came home for his favorites. Root beer, cookies, and ramen noodles. :)

We love our 12 year old.

Jane's New Smile

Jane got braces on this afternoon. She only has a few on the top and on the bottom. She has a pretty big overbite. The Orthodontist says that her bottom jaw is set back a little bit. Jane can fit her index finger behind her front teeth when her jaws are closed. She also has a cross bite and needs to widen her jaws a little bit. This is a first phase thing. She may have to have full braces in the future. She'll have them on about 12 months. In a couple weeks we go back for the expander. 

Here are her before pictures.

Claire photo bombing :)

At the Orthodontist ready to get them on.

Here's what her braces look like.

Her smile. She has clear brackets on top and regular ones on bottom. 

Alaska Last Day

We had beautiful warm weather and clear skies up until the last day in Alaska. We had some cloud cover and rain. Another thing to mention about Alaska is that is never got dark when we were there. Even in the middle of the night it only looked like sunset outside. It made it hard to sleep. We flew in around 1:30am and on the way to the hotel there were people walking around, riding their bikes and acting like it's the middle of the day.

We spent the last morning shopping on 4th Street to get some gifts for the kids. 4th Street is the touristy street. 

Next we headed up to a look out point that we'd been told about. It was chilly up there! It was worth the drive and cold though because we saw a baby moose and a big moose grazing in the field down below us! They only look like dots in the pictures we got. We were pretty happy about the sighting. (the brown dot in the middle of the picture :) ) Trust me, it's a big moose!

 A few more picutres from the look out point.

 Anchorage is in the distance, but there's some fog.

 That night we had great seafood at Glacier BrewHouse. We finally got our fresh salmon and halibut. We wish we could go back to try even more dishes. :)

Another food place we loved In Anchorage is Moose's Tooth. Great pizza and crazy good peanut butter pie. We went here twice. :) It was packed every night.

We had such a fun trip. We only got to see a little part of Alaska and we hope we'll be able to go back some day and explore more of the cities. 

Alaskan Vacation Part 4

The next day we drove to Whittier, Alaska. Another amazingly beautiful drive. You can even really capture the size and magnificence of everything with a camera. Whittier is really just a port. There are no houses there. There is a large hotel, one building of condos and a few little gift shops and food places. To get to Whittier you have to drive through a tunnel through the bottom of a mountain. It's 2.5 miles long and one way. It's the only way in for cars or trains. You have to get there at the correct time to get through.

How the tunnel looks from the outside.

 ...and from the inside. Water was dripping off the rock surrounding us. Later that day we learned that Alaska experiences a lot of earthquakes so I was a little nervous on the ride back through. 

We got there a little early so we decided to do a hike that some guy told us about. We had been warned about mosquitos in Alaska but we had no idea until we started up this trail. Robert and I were literally surrounded by thousands of mosquitos. I wore my jacket even though I was hot, to protect my arms. I'm sure my hair was loaded. That, and the fact that I started getting nervous about bears, made us turn around half way up. Here are a couple pictures. Beautiful scenery. 

Robert ate some berries off the side on the trail on the way up.

 Trying to swipe away bugs!

After we escaped the bugs we headed to our day cruise boat.

Robert saved the day by getting me a headband to cover my sensitive ears. The wind was COLD! 

Here are some pictures of the some of what we saw. We also saw a sea otter, bald eagles, salmon swimming below us and a lot of jelly fish.

 It's hard to see in pictures but the glaciers are a pretty shade of blue.

 Robert's favorite part of the boat ride was feeling the chunks of ice hitting our boat as we rode through.

 If you look close you'll see that this cliff has white spots on it, which are actually thousands of birds. They lay there eggs there, and they are really loud.

It was a nice day.