the four-day 4th

Salmon River Days is the biggest celebration in Salmon each year, usually on or around July 4th. Because July 4th was on a Monday this year, the festivities began the Friday before--thus making the July 4th celebrations last 4 days!!! It was the longest July 4th I ever remember celebrating. It seemed like late nights due to noisy fireworks would never end! For four days, we played all day, and stayed up late at night. It felt like the true beginning of summer! Here's a recap of our 4 days' worth of celebrations:

Friday, July 1:

THE PARADE
There were a lot of entries this year, and the parade on Main Street lasted nearly an hour!

The boys lined up with buckets in hands waiting for candy to be thrown their way.

 It's a mad dash for the candy!

The fire truck sprays everyone about half-way through the parade line-up.

It was a hot day, and the cool water felt good. Ammon got soaked!

Near the end of the parade, the entries were some of the demolition derby cars.

The boys were so excited to see them and hear their noisy engines! 

Saturday, July 2:

PLAYING WITH COUSINS

The Entrikin cousins and Beesley cousins were here on Saturday, and the kids all spent the morning and afternoon riding 4-wheelers on the driveway and road, riding horses in the yard, boating in the ditch, and playing outside together.

The ditch was so full of water that it overflowed onto the grass,

and the kids rafted down the overflow in the yard about 50 feet!

Then it got stuck, and they tried to move it manually. First they tried with the oars...

 ...then they all decided to lift and it budged a little!

They took turns between riding the two older horses around the yard and

riding the smaller 4-wheelers on the gravel road

(until Aysha crashed the 4-wheeler, and nobody wanted to ride after that!).

THE DEMOLITION DERBY
Attending the demolition derby is one of our favorite 4th of July traditions! This was the first year that we took Kanyon, so it was the first year that we've all gone together as a family! We enjoyed watching our neighbors, Brian and Zak, as they rammed their cars into others' and qualified for the final round. The boys also loved seeing the balloon bashing contest in between heats!

MALACHI's PYRO SHOW
Lots of fireworks and firecrackers and fountains were purchased for our viewing delight! Malachi set them all off for almost an hour in the front yard of Grandma's house.

In the beginning, we all sat and watched the show.  

One of the many fountains that we beheld:

Toward the end, everytime Malachi lit a fuse, the kids would run around the fireworks screaming!

It was hysterical!

Sunday, July 3:

FAMILY BARBECUE

After church, we had a big family gathering in Edward and Kathy's backyard. Tim and Barb, Frank, the Entrikin family, Gid & Lys, Malachi and his friends, and the Harris clan all came for lunch.

Edward BBQ'd hamburgers for everyone.

The company was wonderful and the food was delicious!

PINATA BASHING

Kathy got a pinata and stuffed it with candy and Edward tied it to a tree in the backyard for the kids. All the kids had a turn to try to break it open, beginning with the youngest. (Except Kanyon, who apparently missed out on the whole thing because he went up to our house to find a bucket to put his candy in, and couldn't find one. We didn't even notice he wasn't there until he came down after, saw it was over and done with, and started crying! Whoops....)

Jonah's turn hitting it with the golf club. It was Ammon who finally broke it open!

 The candy dumped out in one large pile, and it looked like a dog-pile of kids scrambling to get some of it!



BOARD GAMES

Whenever a group of people get together, I love to play board games! I brought down a stack of games we could play... for 3 afternoons, we played a few of them! I get super competitive during board games, but I have such extreme fun playing them, too! On Saturday, we played Blokus (I won!) and Apples to Apples. On Monday, we played Taboo and Oodles at the Harris'. And on Sunday, we played...

Cranium

and Balderdash!

My playing piece was the pink starburst. I got 2nd!!!

Monday, July 4:

FIREWORKS

By Monday night, everyone had gone home except Gideon and Alyssa. We all drove in two vehicles up to the Old Dump Hill, parked in our usual spot, pulled out the camping chairs, and watched the city's firework show. It was awesome! It only lasted about 10 minutes, but it was coordinated with patriot music that was playing on the radio, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Easter Traditions

For Easter every year, our family basically does the same ten traditions to celebrate the holiday. This is how a traditional Easter would go for us...

Easter Tradition #1: Go to Grandma & Grandpa Perkins' house in Tremonton.

Normally we go and stay for two nights, but this year we were only able to spend one night. We drove down on Saturday mid-morning, and came back home on Sunday evening.

E.T. #2: Dye Easter eggs with Grandma on Saturday night.

I have never had to boil the eggs or purchase the dyes and accessories, because my mom has always done this with the boys. And they look forward to it doing it with Grandma and their aunts! 

E.T. #3: Find the dyed Easter Eggs that are hidden in the house along with the Easter Baskets with goodies that the bunny brought!

After all the boys are awake on Easter Sunday morning, they find their Easter baskets and then find all the hidden hard-boiled eggs that they dyed the night before. The Easter bunny brought the boys basketballs, frisbees, bubbles, and chocolates this year!

E.T. #4: Go to church with Grandma and Grandpa.
Depending on what time their church is, we either attend all their meetings with them or just go to Sacrament Meeting. This year, we just went to Sacrament Meeting.

E.T. #5: Eat the traditional Easter meal after church (ham, potatoes au gratin, corn, rolls, salads) with all the family.
My mom makes the most amazing potatoes au gratin: she cooks the potatoes and then shreds them all by hand. And she makes multiple pans of it when we all get together, because they're so good, that we all want to take the leftovers too!

E.T. #6: Read about the Savior's resurrection from the scriptures.
We each pull a plasstic egg out of the jar, and each egg has a scripture in it, and a small token that symbolizes what the scripture is talking about regarding Jesus Christ's death and resurrection.

E.T. #7: Have a family meeting for Grandma to give everyone the rules for the Annual Perkins Family Egg Hunt.

Every year, my mom adds new things to the hunts, or changes the rules a little bit, and we have a meeting before the hunts to discuss the changes.

E.T. #8: The children have an Egg Hunt in the front yard.
There's a starting line so the kids have an equal advantage to begin the hunt. They pick up a pre-determined number of eggs, and find one large candy item each in the front yard. Each egg is worth a money value that is redeemed after the hunt is over.

E.T. #9: The adults have an Egg Hunt in the back yard.

There is one gold and one silver egg that are hidden and are worth big bucks when found. The adults also all get a pre-determined number of eggs to find, and they are all worth money that is redeemed after the hunt has ended. This year, the 3 youngest sisters were allowed a headstart on the hunt because none of them had ever found a gold or silver egg before, and my mom was trying to give them an advantage. I found the silver egg again this year, and Tabbi found the gold!

E.T. #10: Play the Chubby Bunny game

We started playing this game last year. Each person puts one marshmallow in their mouth at a time and says the words "chubby bunny" after each marshmallow. The person with the most marshmallows in their mouth that can still say the phrase wins money. The adults and kids play separately. Last year, Josh won (despite his hatred for marshmallows). This year he got second place to Cody! And Ammon won the kid contest for the 2nd year in a row! (Since I played the game myself, I barely had enough time from cleaning up my mouth and grabbing my camera to capture Josh on film--and by that time, the marshmallows were already on their way out!)

I just love spending Easter with my family, and I enjoy all the traditions that we have that make the holiday special for our family! I am so grateful for my mom and dad for hosting the annual event, and for making it such a wonderful occasion full of happy memories for me and my children! 

and a happy new year!

It's tradition for our family to spend New Year's Eve at Josh's parents home. Every year, the crowd is a little different, because each year different family members and neighbors attend the annual party. This year, it was just Josh's siblings that came, and we had an absolutely wonderful time!

We started the evening with gift-giving. We all opened our Christmas gifts from each other and from Josh's parents. I loved watching everyone take turns opening gifts--we've never done that with Tiffany's family before. It was fun for all the cousins to be together!

Grandma got all the grandsons scooters, and they were so happy! They rode them around and around in our kitchen constantly until just last week, when I discovered that one of them had an "accident" (that nobody fessed up to, of course), putting a large dent in one of my new lower kitchen cabinets. So now they're banned to only riding the scooters outside, which will have to wait until the snow melts!

After the gifts were all opened, the New Year's celebration got underway. There is only one radio station in Salmon, and on New Year's Eve every year, the station has an oldies music contest. They play short clips of twelve songs in a row, and you have to guess the songs and the artists. And to make it more fun, every year there's a different "theme" to the songs, and if you can figure out the theme, it's helpful in figuring out all the songs too. For example, one year the songs all had a woman's name in the title, one year the songs/artists had names of football teams in them, one year the songs/artists had numbers in them, etc. This year, the theme was "names of states in the USA". For most of the years that the Tolman family has competed, we've won the contest! And this year was no exception!!!

To pass the time, I tried to put a 1000 piece puzzle together, the kids played games and looked at photo albums with Uncle Gideon, and Josh participated in the radio trivia game throughout the night with his parents!

It was one of my favorite New Year's Eves yet, mostly because we were with just family, and the whole atmosphere was casual and enjoyable! And for the first time, all my boys stayed up until past midnight--and they rung in the new year just how they know best--noisily!!!