House O' Sullivans

We spent yesterday evening spreading new sand in the horse runs. The littlest kids mostly played and the work was done quickly with all of the helpers.  Lindy and Eisley, playing. A perfect little pair. After a family BBQ dinner, it was irrigation time. The pasture was soon flooded and the kids couldn't help themselves. It was a veritable free-for-all. Luckily Angie had started a fire, so the kids could warm up during Mike's FHE lesson. Live action footage: https://youtu.be/x31L3b9HAC4 https://youtu.be/R-NbeZayjN0 https://youtu.be/0hTxrpNZEi4

Over the past few weeks I've been off-loading lots of stuff, primarily from the basement. Our basement started out cool 11 years ago--a pristine 70's bar--lots of mirrored walls, mood lighting, arcades, black pleather bar,sparkly ceilings, black velvet and gold wall paper and the orange shag carpet that took it all to the next level. Then we had kids and a few young men's sleepovers and subtly, then suddenly it turned into a ghetto 70's bar basement. Dumpy. Beat up. Holes in walls and doors. Casey's been saying for years that it needs a good coat of flame. So the time has finally come to gut the basement and start over. The end of an era. The demise of Wayne's Bar. Which brings me to my story for the day. Like I said, I've been getting rid of lots of stuff from the basement. It's basically like preparing to move, but only with half of the household volume. I've been donating a lot and selling some stuff on ebay or KSL. I decided that the pristi...

Snippets of Sullivan life of late. We just finished up hosting another semester of our homeschooling book club--Liberty Girls. This year we read (or re-read, in our case) the 8 books in Little House series. We've had a great group of 9 girls this year and it's been so much fun. Each time we meet, we review and discuss what we've read. The girls give presentations on the reading and then we do various activities related to the time period and the books that we are studying. At our last meeting we made pie plant pies (aka rhubarb) and they were the best pies I've ever eaten in my life! Seriously.   Hallee and Laine's masterpiece. Charlie and Sophie with their pie plant pie. At one of our Liberty Girl's meeting this month we made molasses popcorn balls. They were so good that we made them again for our Friday Family Movie Night treat. Making molasses popcorn balls Last week marked the end of our school year and we celebrated with homemade piz...

I will tell the truth: I didn't feel like doing home school today. One reason being that Hallee took 2 hours to write 5 sentences yesterday. Seriously. I was feeling a bit of PTSD this morning and it didn't help that it was sunny and in the mid-70s.  To state the obvious: we needed an adventure.  Two weeks ago, Casey and I started a Sunday campaign to teach our kids about early church history in preparation for our upcoming road trip to Nauvoo. With this in mind, I decided to take the kids downtown to the newly renovated Church History Museum. We rode the bus, of course, because riding the bus is what turns ordinary outings into adventures. I asked the ladies at the front desk what they could show us that coincided with our study over the past couple of weeks--we are up to 1830 right now. They smiled and explained that the entire first floor of the museum is about exactly what we are studying for our trip. Exactly. And wow. It is really awesome. They even have a new thea...

For the past couple of months, Sophie's been taking a business class with several homeschooling friends. She's learned all about banks, loans, interest, stocks, investing, saving, credit, resumes, and job interviews. The class culminated with a day at Biztown--a veritable mock city--where each of the kids spent the day working at a job that they'd interviewed and been hired for. Sophie was an illustrious bank teller at Zion's Bank. Sophie's business class  The staff at Zion's Bank on April 8th Sophie, hard at work. She had a blast! April also marked the month of Hallee's baptism. It was supposed to be a stake baptism, but with no other kids getting baptized that month, we got to plan the service. It was short and so sweet. We asked Hallee's cousins, Pieter and Grace, to speak. Cousins Anni and Gretha performed a musical number and cousin Maya said a prayer. Hallee's beloved primary teacher, Annette Meier said the opening praye...