House O' Sullivans

Two weeks ago, H.B. flew out from Florida with daughters Mia and Mae for a few days. H.B. and Newel had big plans involving going to the Utah-Cal game, getting on the ESPN Game Day program with their stellar signs (which they did), and some hardcore tailgating in an RV. He also wanted to spend a day going to classes and football practice at BYU with Harvey Langi, who H.B met while he served his mission in Florida, infiltrating the Provo scene. B with his incredible signage. Because of H.B's aggressive social and sports schedule, we got to have Mia and Mae with us for a couple of days. Sophie and Hallee were in heaven! The first night's "cousining" involved a sleep-over complete with glow sticks and several pounds of candy. If you know H.B., that's the way to do it. At one point, while Hallee was bending a glow stick on the top bunk with Mae, a catastrophic midnight failure left the room covered in glow. Casey said it looked like the Milky Way galaxy in ...

As part of our long term family goal to summit Mount Kilimanjaro together, we are hiking more and progressively harder peaks each year. This summer's list was: Mount Flagstaff, Mount Aire, and Mount Olympus. The first two were ceremoniously completed earlier in the season and only Mount Olympus remained [read: loomed ] for us to tackle. Casey and I both knew that this mountain would push our kids to their limits and approaching limits can be amazing, horrifying, liberating, invigorating, and excruciating all at the same time.  Last week we realized that we had an open Saturday and slated that as our Mount Olympus bid, but as the weekend got closer, we realized that Saturday would likely bring unsettled weather (thunderstorms) and that was one element we weren't willing to add to the already uncertain equation. Mount Olympus is burly. The hike is long (8 miles) and steep (more than 4,000 feet of elevation gain) and rocky and relentless. Once you reach the saddle, there is s...

I downloaded some pictures tonight from my camera and my phone and wanted to post them. The following photos are in no particular order, just a hodgepodge of stuff from the past month or so.  We canned pears last month in Wayne's basement kitchen (aka the Sullivan Sweat Shop). Thanks to our friends that live on a huge chunk of land that just so happens to house an amazing orchard.  Pear sauce!  I captured this sweetness a couple of days ago. Lindy will be one year old next week and I hardly take any pictures of the girl. She's sitting on my unmade bed so it must have been one of those days. Blurry, but too cute not to post. We joke that all we'd need to do is paint Lindy's face orange and she'd make a perfect Jack O' Lantern for Halloween.  Those teeth! Lindy out on the driveway hanging out with the cool kids. She's making her own chalk drawings these days. Hallee was obsessed with drawing cows one day and made several all over...